Page:The Story of Rimini - Hunt (1816, 1st ed).djvu/15

 The commentators differ in their accounts of the rest of the story; but all agree that the lady was in some measure beguiled into the match with the elder Malatesta,—Boccaccio says, by being shewn the younger brother once, as he passed over a square, and told that that was her intended husband. I have accordingly turned this artifice to account, though in a different manner. I have also omitted the lameness attributed to the husband; and of two different names by which he is called, Giovanni and Launcelot, have chosen the former, as not interfering with the hero's appellation, whose story the lovers were reading.

The Italians have been very fond of this little piece of private history, and I used to wonder that I could meet with it in none of the books of novels, for which they have been so famous; till I reflected, that it was perhaps owing to the nature of the books themselves, which such a story