In the preface (1570) to his _Regra Geral_, written in 1565, GONÇALO FERNANDEZ TRANCOSO[536] (_c._ 1515-_c._ 1590) professed not to have sufficient literary skill even for this simple calendar of movable feasts. Yet in the previous year (1569), in which at Lisbon he lost both wife and children in the great plague (a beloved daughter of twenty-four, a student son, and a choir-boy grandson), in order to distract his mind from these sorrows,[537] he wrote a remarkable work, unique of its kind in Portuguese literature; or at least he wrote then the first two books, which appeared under the title _Contos e historias de proveito e exemplo_ (1575).[538] A third part was published posthumously in 1596. The number and kind of the editions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries testify to its popularity, but since the eighteenth century no new edition has been printed and the book has fallen into a strange neglect.[539] Trancoso did not claim originality: he merely collected stories from what he had heard or read.[540] The stories, only thirty-eight in number, are very various. The subjects of many of them resemble those of Franco Sacchetti’s _Novelle_ or Giovanni Francesco Straparola’s _Le xiii Piacevoli Notti_, and some are directly imitated from Boccaccio’s _Il Decamerone_ or Giovanni Battista Giraldi’s _Gli Ecatommiti_ or from Matteo Bandello (†1565).[541] But often they are traditions so widespread that they occur in many authors and languages, as that (ii. 7) which corresponds to Straparola’s third _Notte_ and of which Dr. F. A. Coelho recorded twenty-one other foreign versions, besides four popular variants in Portuguese; or i. 17, in which the cunning answers to difficult questions are similar to those in Sacchetti, No. 4 (_Mestre Bernabò signor di Milano_), and Dr. Braga’s _Contos tradicionaes do povo portuguez_, No. 71 (_Frei Joam Sem Cuidados_). Others are apparently of oriental origin, as the judge’s verdict, worthy of Sancho Panza (i. 15), or the king and the barber (iii. 3). But the subject and place (Lisbon, Oporto, Evora, Coimbra, &c.) of most, although not of the longest, of these tales are Portuguese.[542] Some are trifling anecdotes which acquire a charm and vividness through their popular character and the author’s simple details of description, as the picture of the peasant family near Oporto sitting round the fire after their supper of maize-bread and chestnuts (i. 10). The author is not content that we should draw our own moral, but this scarcely spoils the reader’s pleasure in these malicious and ingenious tales.