Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/109

Rh We have seen that the heroic, the pastoral, the familiar romance owed, if not their actual birth, at least their first considerable beginnings to him; and his activity was no less important in the domain of narrative poetry. He may not have been the inventor of the octave stanza, but undoubtedly he was the first to show its supreme fitness for narrative, and thus mark out the channel in which the epic genius of Italy has flowed ever since. The peculiar grace of her language, and its affluence of rhymes, adapt it especially to this singularly elegant, if not massive or sublime, form of versification, superior for narrative purposes to the sinuous and digressive terza rima, or to Italian counterfeits of the majestic blank verse of England. It could not be expected that Boccaccio's attempts should at first display all the perfection his metre is capable of receiving, he is undoubtedly lax and diffuse. Yet all the main recommendations of the octave are discoverable in his Teseide and Filostrato, poems especially interesting to English readers from the imitation—frequently translation—of them in Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Troilus. The Teseide is the earlier, having been composed shortly after Boccaccio's return to Florence in 1340 for the gratification of his Neapolitan mistress; while the Filostrato, apparently composed upon his second visit to Naples about 1347, disguised satire upon her inconstancy.

Both from the acuteness of feeling thus engendered, and from the rapid progress Boccaccio had in the interim made in the poetic art, the Filostrato is the more powerful and poetical composition; the prosperity of Troilus's love while returned, for example, is described in the liveliest colours and with the truest feeling. The Teseide, on the other hand, has the advantage of a more