Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/108

90 charming company and frank converse, has ever remained one of the green spots on which imagination loves to rest.

Such an ideal of cultivated society afforded no room for the vivacity of delineation so admirable in Chaucer's portraits derived from all classes; yet the prologue and the little introductory passages to each day are, with their feeling for landscape and poetic truth, even more delightful than the stories themselves. If, as seems probable, some of these were composed at Naples before the pestilence, this lovely framework must have been an afterthought. Of Boccaccio's greatness as a master of narrative, nothing need here be said, unless that his progressiveness is even more surprising than his talent. Ten years (1339–49) had sufficed to raise him from the eloquent but confused and hyperbolical style of the Filocopo to the perfection of Italian narrative. He was now the unapproached model of later story-tellers, who can, indeed, produce stronger effects by the employment of stronger means, but have never been able to rival him on his own ground of easy, unaffected simplicity.

Two minor works of Boccaccio, written subsequently to the Decameron, deserve a word of notice—the Corbaccio, a lampoon upon a widow who had jilted him, which does him no credit morally, but evinces much satiric force; and the Urbano, a pretty little romance of the identification of an emperor's abandoned son—the genuineness of which, however, has sometimes been doubted.

It was the constant destiny of Boccaccio to make epochs—producing something absolutely or virtually new, and tracing out the ways in which his successors, far as they might outstrip him, were bound to walk.