GIOVANNI BATTISTA GIRALDI CINTHIO of Ferrara (1504-73) is better known by name to English readers than most of his fellow-novelists, since from him Shakespeare derived the plots of _Othello_ and _Measure for Measure_. The story on which the former drama is founded is not a bad specimen of Cinthio’s usual work. His subjects are frequently tragical, sometimes shocking, but the treatment is generally powerful, the narrative direct and forcible, and he is in great measure exempt from the grossness of his contemporaries. The tales, a hundred in number, whence their title of _Ecatomithi_, are supposed to be narrated on board a ship bound for Marseilles, and conveying a party of Romans escaping from the sack of the Eternal City. They are divided like Boccaccio’s into ten classes, each considered to illustrate some particular point of morals or manners. They are highly respectable performances; but by so much as they surpass Grazzini’s in matter they fall below them in style, which, though not incorrect, is devoid of colour and individuality. STRAPAROLA, already briefly alluded to, was a native of Caravaggio, and published his _Notti Piacevoli_ in 1554. He is a good story-teller, although a bad stylist; but what gives him an epoch-making rank among Italian novelists is not his merit or demerit in either capacity, but his having been the first to avail himself of popular folk-lore as a groundwork for fiction. Nothing is more annoying than the almost complete neglect of popular mythology by men of culture in antiquity. Apuleius tells one inimitable tale, without saying where he got it. Synesius spends his evenings listening to the stories of the Libyan peasants, and is not at the trouble to preserve a single one. It is nevertheless clear that such tales must have been as rife in ancient times as in our own. Straparola was perhaps the first man who systematically turned them to literary account: it would have been well if he had gone much further, and proportionately reduced his debt to Hieronymo Morlini, the chief recommendation of whose generally indecent and always ungrammatical Latin stories (Naples, 1520) is their exceeding rarity. Nearly a hundred years afterwards Straparola was completely eclipsed both as concerned the quantity and the quality of his folk-lore fictions, by the _Pentamerone_ of GIOVANNI BASILE, Count of Morone, a collection whose relation to the popular mythology of other nations has occasioned endless discussion. Puss in Boots, and Cinderella, and Rapunzel, and many another favourite owe to Basile their first appearance in literary costume. In narrative he is the breathless, loquacious, exuberant Neapolitan, too much in a hurry to trouble himself about style or art, but carrying all before him by his vigour and vehemence, and betraying, as his German translator has pointed out, strong traces of the influence of Rabelais.