United States or Yemen ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I pay silent respect to strapping Mariota and her baby-boy In the country of Boccace.
Boccace his Decameron was first publish'd; and from thence our Englishman has borrow'd many of his Canterbury Tales; yet that of Palamon and Arcite was written in all probability by some Italian wit in a former age, as I shall prove hereafter. The tale of Grizild was the invention of Petrarch; by him sent to Boccace; from whom it came to Chaucer.
I except, of course, Michael Angelo, as I have already said; and I except Boccace and Bojardo. Painting was drawn out of the pit laid privily for her by the sheer necessity of an outlet; and painting, having much to say, became the representative Italian art. Which indeed they did, to their equal detriment and our discouragement that read.
'Chaucer, a new edition of him, from manuscripts and old editions, with various readings, conjectures, remarks on his language, and the changes it had undergone from the earliest times to his age, and from his to the present: with notes explanatory of customs, &c., and references to Boccace, and other authours from whom he has borrowed, with an account of the liberties he has taken in telling the stories; his life, and an exact etymological glossary.
But the greatest resemblance of our two modern authors being in their familiar style, and pleasing way of relating comical adventures, I may pass it over, because I have translated nothing from Boccace of that nature.
Chaucer makes another manner of apology for his broad speaking, and Boccace makes the like; but I will follow neither of them.
Yet I cannot blame him for inveighing so sharply against the vices of the clergy in his age; their pride, their ambition, their pomp, their avarice, their worldly interest, deserv'd the lashes which he gave them, both in that and in most of his Canterbury Tales: neither has his contemporary Boccace spar'd them.
When I had closed Chaucer I returned to Ovid, and translated some more of his fables; and by this time had so far forgotten the Wife of Bath's tale that, when I took up Boccace unawares, I fell on the same argument of preferring virtue to nobility of blood, and titles, in the story of Sigismunda, which I had certainly avoided for the resemblance of the two discourses, if my memory had not failed me.
He is very eloquent upon the Shepherd of Hermas, Theagenes and Chariclea, and the Ethiopics of Heliodorus. Turpin, Scudery, Cotterel, Sidney, the countess D'Anois, and "all such writers as were never read," next pass in review. Boccace and Cervantes occupy a very principal place. The modern French writers of fictitious history from Fenelon to Voltaire, close the first epistle.
For these reasons of time, and resemblance of genius in Chaucer and Boccace, I resolved to join them in my present work, to which I have added some original papers of my own, which, whether they are equal or inferior to my other poems, an author is the most improper judge, and therefore I leave them wholly to the mercy of the reader.
Word Of The Day