In the “Palace of Pleasure” Painter has given only one of the fables, the second Fable[6] of the second Night; and in Roscoe’s “Italian Novelists” another one appears, the fourth Fable of the tenth Night. At the end of the last century the first Fable of the first Night was printed separately in London under the title, “Novella cioe copia d’un Caso notabile intervenuto a un gran gentiluomo Genovese.”[7] A translation of twenty-four of the fables, prefaced by a lengthy and verbose disquisition on the author, reputed to be from the pen of Mazzuchelli, appeared at Vienna in 1791;[8] but Brackelmann, in his “Inaugural Dissertation” (Gottingen, 1867), has an examination of the introduction above named, which goes far to prove that Mazzuchelli had little or nothing to do with it. In 1817 Dr. F. W. V. Schmidt published at Berlin a translation into German of eighteen fables selected from the “Notti,” to which he gave the title “Die Märchen des Straparola.” To his work Dr. Schmidt affixed copious notes, compiled with the greatest care and learning, thus opening to his successors a rich and valuable storehouse both of suggestion and of accumulated facts. It is almost certain that he must have worked from one of the many mutilated or expurgated editions of the book, for in the complete work there are several stories unnoticed by him which he would assuredly have included in his volume had he been aware of their existence. One of the chief claims of the “Notti” on the consideration of later times lies in the fact that Straparola was the first writer who gathered together into one collection the stray fairy tales, for the most part brought from the East, which had been made known in the Italian cities—and in Venice more especially—by the mouth of the itinerant story-teller. These tales, incorporated in the “Notti” with others of a widely different character, were without doubt the principal source of the numerous French “Contes des Fées” published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Perrault, Madame D’Aulnoy, and Gueulette took from them many of their best fables; and these, having spread in various forms through Northern and Western Europe, helped to tinge with a hue of Orientalism the popular tales of all countries—tales which had hitherto been largely the evolution of local myths and traditions.