No other of the Italian novelists used a style as bad as Straparola’s. Errors in grammar abound, and his bald meagre periods often fail to express adequately the sense of the idea he manifestly wishes to portray. His faulty prose did not escape the censure of his contemporaries, for Messer Orfeo dalla Carta, in his introduction to the first part of the “Notti” (edition 1554), makes allusion to it, begging the reader at the same time not to be repelled by what he calls “il basso et rimesso stilo dello autore;” and La Monnoie, in the preface to the French translation (edition 1726) writes in a similar strain. Dalla Carta, probably by way of banter, advances an apology for Straparola’s slovenly work in terms taken from that introduction to the second part which has already been cited, explaining that the author did not write his fables as he would have done, but as they had been told to him by the ten damsels who were the narrators. Straparola’s Italian is much more like the Italian of the present day than the English of Sidney or the German of Hans Sachs is like modern English or German, but this is not remarkable, considering how much earlier prose writing as an art came to perfection in Italy than in the rest of Europe. The impression gained by reading his prose is that he cared vastly more for subject than for treatment. He laid hold of whatever themes promised to suit his purpose best as a story-teller, careless as to whether other craftsmen had used them before or not, and these he set forth in the simplest manner possible, taking little heed of his style or even of his grammar. He hardly ever indulges in a metaphor. One never feels that he has gone searching about fastidiously for some particular turn of phrase or neatly-fitting adjective; on the other hand, one is often obliged to pause in the middle of some long sentence and search for his meaning in the strange mixture of phrases strung together. Perhaps this spontaneity, this absence of studied design, may have helped to win for him the wide popularity he enjoyed. His aim was to lead his readers into some enchanted garden of fairyland; to thrill them with the woes and perils of his heroes and heroines; to shake their sides with laughter over the misadventures of some too amorous monk or lovesick cavalier, rather than to send them into ecstasy over the measured elegance of his phrases. In many of the later editions of the “Notti,” the meaning has been further obscured, and the style rendered more rugged than ever, owing to the frequent and clumsy excisions made by the censors of morals. The early exclusion of the fourth Fable of the ninth Night shows that the eye of authority was soon attracted towards the popular novelist of the age. The motive for this activity was nominally the care of public morals, and one of the few extant references to Straparola is with regard to the expurgation of his works. In “Cremona Illustrata,” by Franciscus Arisius (Cremona, 1741),