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Updated: June 3, 2025
It was the same with Boccaccio. For two centuries, when but little was known of the 'Decameron' north of the Alps, he was famous all over Europe simply on account of his Latin compilations on mythology, geography and biography.
The story-tellers of the sixteenth century are numerous. Sometimes they appear as followers of Boccaccio; sometimes they attempt to open new paths for themselves. The class of productions, of which the "Decameron" was the earliest example in the fourteenth century, is called by the Italians "Novelle."
'My sister always says that this is the very dell Boccaccio had in his mind's eye when he wrote the "Decameron." There really is something almost classic in those pines. And I'd sometimes swear with my eyes just out of the water I've seen Dryads half in hiding peeping between those beeches. Good Lord, Lawford, what a world we wretched moderns have made, and missed! The water was violently cold.
If Corneille has undoubtedly brought nearer to us the still somewhat barbaric heroes of Guillem de Castro, La Fontaine, when imitating the author of the Decameron, has made him more indecent than he is in his own language; and if the Italians have no right to assail Molière for borrowing somewhat from them, the English may well complain that Voltaire failed to understand Shakespeare.
Endeth here the second day of the Decameron, beginneth the third, in which, under the rule of Neifile, discourse is had of the fortune of such as have painfully acquired some much-coveted thing, or, having lost, have recovered it. The dawn of Sunday was already changing from vermilion to orange, as the sun hasted to the horizon, when the queen rose and roused all the company.
More than once, in a spirit of mischievous malice, she was tempted to bid the good ladies lay aside their Baedekers and Murrays, and increase their knowledge of the Italian character and language by study of the Novelle of Bandello, or of certain merry tales to be found in the pages of the Decameron. She had copies of both works in her traveling-bag.
In the garden-plot on whose wicket is inscribed All's Well that Ends Well, we are hardly distant from Eden itself About a young dove's flutter from a wood. The ninth story of the third day of the Decameron is one of the few subjects chosen by Shakespeare as so many were taken by Fletcher which are less fit, we may venture to think, for dramatic than for narrative treatment.
An interesting example remains to us in Boccaccio's "Decameron," whose stories were told by a group of pleasure-lovers who had fled from plague-stricken Florence. In many localities the hatred of the Jews by the people led to frightful excesses of persecution against them, they being accused by their enemies of poisoning the wells.
As every one does not possess a copy of the three costly volumes of which the Bibliographical Decameron consists and, further, as many a one so fortunate as to possess them has not had patience and perseverance enough to penetrate to the middle of the third volume, where the most readable part is to be found a characteristic extract, describing the heat of the contest, may not be unwelcome:
The prospect outside ought to be very dark, and rife with peril, to induce a man to resign himself deliberately to another decameron here. I am bound to state that he gives rather a different account of the escapade, and intimates that the Maryland youth's "tightness" was rather real than shamed; that it was, in fact, the cause of his being left behind.
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