In his own country he is the fountainhead of a wide stream of literary influences that has ever broadened as it flowed. Between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries the Italian presses poured forth some four thousand _novelle_, all avowedly tracing from Boccaccio.[6] Many of these, it is true, were imitations of the gayer strains of Boccaccio’s genius. But a considerable proportion of them have a sterner tone, and deal with the weightier matters of life, and in this they had none but the master for their model. The gloom of the Black Death settles down over the greater part of all this literature. Every memorable outburst of the fiercer passions of men that occurred in Italy, the land of passion, for all these years, found record in a _novella_ of Boccaccio’s followers. The _Novelle_ answered in some respects to our newspaper reports of trials and the earlier _Last Speech and Confession_. But the example of Boccaccio raised these gruesome topics into the region of art. Often these tragedies are reported of the true actors; still more often under the disguise of fictitious names, that enabled the narrator to have more of the artist’s freedom in dealing with such topics. [Footnote 6: Specimens of these in somewhat wooden English were given by Roscoe in his _Italian Novelists_.] The other _Novellieri_ from whom Painter drew inspiration may be dismissed very shortly. Of Ser Giovanne Fiorentino, who wrote the fifty novels of his _Pecorone_ about 1378, little is known nor need be known; his merits of style or matter do not raise him above mediocrity. Straparola’s _Piacevole Notti_ were composed in Venice in the earlier half of the sixteenth century, and are chiefly interesting for the fact that some dozen or so of his seventy-four stories are folk-tales taken from the mouth of the people, and were the first thus collected: Straparola was the earliest Grimm. His contemporary Giraldi, known as Cinthio (or Cinzio), intended his _Ecatomithi_ to include one hundred _novelle_, but they never reached beyond seventy; he has the grace to cause the ladies to retire when the men relate their smoking-room anecdotes of _feminine impudiche_. Owing to Dryden’s statement “Shakespeare’s plots are in the one hundred novels of Cinthio” (Preface to _Astrologer_), his name has been generally fixed upon as the representative Italian novelist from whom the Elizabethans drew their plots. As a matter of fact only “Othello” (_Ecat._ iii. 7), and “Measure for Measure” (_ib._ viii. 5), can be clearly traced to him, though “Twelfth Night” has some similarity with Cinthio’s “Gravina” (v. 8): both come from a common source, Bandello.