[76] I am obliged to pass over this part of the subject very rapidly. For the history of that remarkable book, the "Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles," I would refer the reader to the preface to my own edition, "Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, publiées d'après le seul manuscrit connu, avec Introduction et Notes, par M. Thomas Wright." 2 vols, 12mo., Paris, 1858.
But there arose partly out of these stories a class of books which became greatly multiplied, and were, during a long period, extremely popular. With the household fool, or jester, instead of the old jougleur, the stories had been shorn of their detail, and sank into the shape of mere witty anecdotes, and at the same time a taste arose for what we now class under the general term of jests, clever sayings, what the French call _bons mots_, and what the English of the sixteenth century termed "quick answers." The word _jest_ itself arose from the circumstance that the things designated by it arose out of the older stories, for it is a mere corruption of gestes, the Latin _gesta_, in the sense of narratives of acts or deeds, or tales. The Latin writers, who first began to collect them into books, included them under the general name of _facetiæ_. The earlier of these collections of facetiæ were written in Latin, and of the origin of the first with which we are acquainted, that by the celebrated scholar Poggio of Florence, a curious anecdote is told. Some wits of the court of pope Martin V., elected to the papacy in 1417, among whom were the pope's two secretaries, Poggio and Antonio Lusco, Cincio of Rome, and Ruzello of Bologna, appropriated to themselves a private corner in the Vatican, where they assembled to chat freely among themselves. They called it their _buggiale_, a word which signifies in Italian, a place of recreation, where they tell stories, make jests, and amuse themselves with discussing satirically the doings and characters of everybody. This was the way in which Poggio and his friends entertained themselves in their buggiale, and we are assured that in their talk they neither spared the church nor the pope himself or his government. The facetiæ of Poggio, in fact, which are said to be a selection of the good things said in these meetings, show neither reverence for the church of Rome nor respect for decency, but they are mostly stories which had been told over and over again, long before Poggio came into the world. It was perhaps this satire upon the church and upon the ecclesiastics which gave much of their popularity to these facetiæ at a time when a universal agitation of men's minds on religious affairs prevailed, which was the great harbinger of the Reformation; and the next Latin books of facetiæ came from men such as Henry Bebelius, who were zealous reformers themselves.