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We would fain go through her different biographies, tracing her feelings, her appreciation, and poetic enthusiasm throughout, but that is impossible. She takes us through Boccaccio's life, and, as by the reflection of a sunset from a mirror, we are warmed with the glow and mirth from distant and long-past times in Italy. One feels through her works the innate delicacy of her mind.
One of his diversions was to ride in the Pineta, which, beginning a couple of miles from the city, extends some twenty-five miles along the sands of the Adriatic. I drove out to it for Byron's sake, and Dante's, and Boccaccio's, all of whom have interwoven it with their fictions, and for that of a possible whiff of coolness from the sea.
The water supplies the whole neighbourhood; and that accounts for the position of the town on the low col just below the acropolis. Nor do we know who built the great Cyclopean walls, whose huge rough blocks still overhang the modern carriage road that leads past Boccaccio's Valley of the Ladies and Fra Angelico's earliest convent from the town in the Valley.
The former, as is well known, owned and kept with religious care a Greek Homer, which he was unable to read. A complete Latin translation of the Iliad and Odyssey, though a very bad one, vas made at Petrarch's suggestion, and with Boccaccio's help, by a Calabrian Greek, Leonzio Pilato.
And yet, after all, these men are too strongly bound by the affections of this world to be able wholly to sacrifice themselves to the joys of the ideal. Fiammetta must have her place in Boccaccio's strange apotheosis of love; the foreboding of Carmosina's death has power to draw her lover from his newly discovered kingdom along the untrodden paths of the waters of the earth.
This tale of Boccaccio's gives so admirable an answer to the charge of irreligion which some might make against us if they mistook our intentions, that as we shall not offer any other reply, we have not hesitated to present it entire as it stands to the eyes of our readers.
As might be expected, his writings are characterised by the prevailing indelicacy of the time. Poet and statesman, was b. at Buckhurst, Sussex, the only s. of Sir Richard S., and ed. at Oxf. and Camb. A little later he planned The Mirror for Magistrates, which was to have been a series of narratives of distinguished Englishmen, somewhat on the model of Boccaccio's Falls of Princes.
The novel, then, had to wait for the drama's decline, but there was literary story-telling long before that. There were mediaeval romances in prose and verse; Renaissance pastoral tales, and stories of adventure; collections, plenty of them, of short stories like Boccaccio's, and those in Painter's Palace of Pleasure.
The street by which I entered led me to the Carraja Bridge; crossing which, I kept straight onward till I came to the Church of Santa Maria Novella. Doubtless, it looks just the same as when Boccaccio's party stood in a cluster on its broad steps arranging their excursion to the villa. Thence I went to the Church of St.
Their loves are only half real, a vain effort to prolong the imaginative loves of the middle age beyond their natural lifetime. They write love-poems for hire. Like that party of people who tell the tales in Boccaccio's Decameron, they form a circle which in an age of great troubles, losses, anxieties, amuses itself with art, poetry, intrigue.
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