Page:The Way of a Virgin.djvu/92

Rh of the offences he denounces. Putting aside occasional lapses into licentiousness of expression as accidents inseparable from the age in which he wrote, it is almost impossible to doubt his sincerity as a would-be reformer of manners

"……Masuccio's canvas is a limited one. Few of his stories are in the vein of genuine buffo, a few more are tragedies pure and simple, but the majority of the residue will be found to treat of one or other of his two particular themes, the castigation of profligate clerics and unchaste women. He devotes one part of the work to each of these specially; but in the other parts he never lets a friar or a woman escape the lash if he finds the chance of a laying it on.

"The most scathing passages……are those which occur here and there in the 'Masuccio' at the end of his stories……As an instance may be quoted the conclusion to Novel XXIII, in which, after screaming himself hoarse over the crimes of women, he finishes with these words:—

"'Would that it had been God's pleasure and Nature's to have suffered us to be brought forth from the oak-trees, or indeed to have been engendered from water and mire like the frogs in the humid rains of summer, rather than to have taken our origin from so base, so corrupt, and so vilely fashioned a sex as womankind.'"

As a further example of Masuccio's hatred of women, Mr. Waters cites "the frightful indictment