It is no doubt to the credit of Italian novelists as artists that they did not overload their stories with didactic purpose; but this was an error which, writing mainly to amuse, they lay under little temptation to commit. None of them were endowed with creative imagination; none transcended the sphere of ordinary experience, or showed the least inclination to effect for prose fiction what Boiardo and Ariosto had accomplished for narrative poetry. Their _notti piacevoli_ were not Arabian Nights. Their object of amusing could consequently only be achieved by keeping close to actual manners, and we may depend upon receiving from them a tolerably accurate picture of Italian society in so far as it suited them to present it; although the portion that best lent itself to their objects was the most licentious and corrupt, and the loose women and salacious priests who recur in their tales from generation to generation, though by no means creatures of imagination, are still far from typical of the entire society of Italy. Like the masks of the Greek comedy, like the rakes and topers of the English comedy of the Restoration and Revolution, they are in a certain degree traditional and conventional. Modern fiction is encyclopædic: no class of the community is outside its scope. Italian fiction was eclectic, restricted by a tacit convention to what was deemed its appropriate sphere. The history of pictorial and plastic art has been reproduced in modern fiction; the property of the connoisseur has become the possession of the nation. Hence, whatever the literary merits of the Italian novelists of this period, whatever the fidelity with which they reproduce the social atmosphere of the time, their works all taken together count for less in the history of the human mind than those of a single first-class modern novelist such as Dickens or Balzac.