collections furnish a mine of inexhaustible riches to the student of manners.

When checked by legal documents, they frequently reveal carelessness, inaccuracy, or even willful distortion of facts.

The genius of the Novella, so paramount in popular Italian literature of that epoch, presided over their composition, adding _intreccio_ to disconnected facts, heightening sympathy by the suggestion of romantic motives, turning the heroes or the heroines of their adventures into saints, and blackening the faces of the villains.

Yet these stories, pretending to be veracious and aiming at information no less than entertainment, present us with even a more vivid picture of customs than the Novelle.
By their truthful touches of landscape and incident painting, by their unconscious revelation of contemporary sentiment in dialogue and ethical analysis of motives, they enable us to give form and substance to the drier details of the law-courts.

One of these narratives I propose to condense from the transcript made by Henri Beyle, for the sake of the light it throws upon the tragedy of the Caraffa family.[207] It opens with an account of Paul IV.'s ascent to power and a description of his nephews.