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Professor Baldwin, after a careful examination of the hundred tales in Boccaccio's "Decameron," concluded that only two of them were short-stories in the modern critical sense, and that only three others approached the totality of impression that depends on conscious unity of form.
Let the reader, after he has finished the poem of Keats, turn to the same story in the Decameron: he will then feel how pregnant and interesting the same action has become in the hands of a great artist, who above all things delineates his object; who subordinates expression to that which it is designed to express.
Languishing in obscurity, he saw and seized his opportunity, and rushed into print in defense of the Judge and in commendation of the President for upholding such judicial action. It is of record that this lawyer, in the society of some men of letters, declared Dante to be the author of the Decameron; but one may be ignorant of the Italian poets and thoroughly read in French memoirs.
A grand avenue leads to the court of a temple, and from the court a flight of steps fully fifty feet wide massy, mossed, and magnificently balustraded leads to a walled terrace. The scene makes one think of the approach to some Italian pleasure-garden of Decameron days. But, reaching the terrace, you find only a gate, opening into a cemetery!
The principal work of this lady was "L'Heptameron," or the History of the Fortunate Lovers, written on the plan and in the spirit of the Decameron of Boccaccio, a work which a lady of our times would be unwilling to own acquaintance with, much more to adopt as a model; but the apology for Marguerite must be found in the manners of the times.
It's like carrying the Holy Grail to some of these way-back farmhouses. And I wish there were a thousand Parnassuses instead of this one. I'd never give it up if it weren't for my book: but I want to write about my ideas in the hope of stirring other folk up, too. I don't suppose there's a publisher in the country will take it!" "Try Mr. Decameron," I said. "He's always been very nice to Andrew."
The son of Sor Temistocle has just cut off a finger to avoid the conscription, because he is mad about his cousin and afraid of being taken for a soldier; and it is a fact that some of the shirts which were made for him at the Stigmata had been sewn by Dionea;" ... and thus a perfect string of love misfortunes, enough to make a little "Decameron," I assure you, and all laid to Dionea's account.
And that spiritual police which was permanently entrusted to the Dominicans certainly never excited any other feeling than secret hatred and contempt. After reading the 'Decameron' and the novels of Franco Sacchetti, we might imagine that the vocabulary of abuse directed at the monks and nuns was exhausted. But towards the time of the Reformation this abuse became still fiercer.
In the Bibliographical Decameron is a brief history, by Sir Alexander himself, of the rise and progress of his press. He tells us how he had resolved to print Knox's Disputation: "For this purpose I was constrained to purchase two small fonts of black-letter, and to have punches cut for eighteen or twenty double letters and contractions.
It is, however, just in this artistic purpose of the setting that one of the chief interests of the Ameto lies; for if in the mingling of verse and prose it is the forerunner of the Arcadia, in the linking together of a series of isolated stories it anticipates Boccaccio's own Decameron.
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