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Thus before the revival of learning had made Greek a possible source of literary inspiration, the Vergilian tradition, through the instrumentality of Petrarch and Boccaccio, had already made itself supreme in pastoral . During the middle ages the stream of pastoral production, though it nowhere actually disappears, is reduced to the merest trickle.
He went back, and broke his heart. Boccaccio says, that he would get into such passions with the very boys and girls in the street, who plagued him with party-words, as to throw stones at them a thing that would be incredible, if persons acquainted with his great but ultra-sensitive nation did not know what Italians could do in all ages, from Dante's own age down to the times of Alfieri and Foscolo.
In the hitherto free republic of Florence, which had given birth to Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, literature found support in a family which, at no distant period, employed it to augment their power, and to rule the city with an almost despotic sway.
For one ghastly detail remains to complete a picture to which Boccaccio could hardly have done justice.
Boccaccio writes Guardastagno, but the troubadour, Cabestaing, or Cabestany, is the hero of the story. The wife of a leech, deeming her lover, who has taken an opiate, to be dead, puts him in a chest, which, with him therein, two usurers carry off to their house.
In her longing to glide over the waters that were getting golden with the level sun-rays, she thought of a story which had been one of the things she had loved to dwell on in Boccaccio, when her father fell asleep and she glided from her stool to sit on the floor and read the `Decamerone. It was the story of that fair Gostanza who in her lovelorn-ness desired to live no longer, but not having the courage to attack her young life, had put herself into a boat and pushed off to sea; then, lying down in the boat, had wrapt her mantle round her head, hoping to be wrecked, so that her fear would be helpless to flee from death.
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Italian literature acquired its national character and rose to its highest splendor, through the writings of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, whose influence has been more or less felt in succeeding centuries. The literary history of Italy may be divided into three periods, each of which presents two distinct phases, one of progress and one of decline.
This debt of England to Italy in the matter of our literature began with Chaucer. Truly original and national as was the framework of the 'Canterbury Tales, we can hardly doubt but that Chaucer was determined in the form adopted for his poem by the example of Boccaccio. The subject-matter, also, of many of his tales was taken from Boccaccio's prose or verse.
The liberty accorded art has degenerated into license. The beautiful is no longer sought, but the bizarre. It is not the massy shoulders of Hercules, the rounded arm of Juno, the beautiful bust of Hebe, the godlike pose of Apollo or the shapely limb of Aphrodite that painter and sculptor seek to reproduce; it is an "effect" similar to that of Boccaccio or a fragrant French novel.
Not only was he himself a profound student of it, but he suggested to Boccaccio that line of study which governed the entire intellectual life of the author of the "Decameron." With the application of Boccaccio to the translation of Homer into Latin we perceive a singular illustration of the trend of the classic devotion of the time.
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