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Updated: August 29, 2024
If I could, I would visit every spot mentioned in Florentine history visit its towns of old renown, and ramble amid scenes familiar to Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Machiavelli." The descriptions of Ghirlandajo's pictures in Florence are very good. Mary now evidently studies art with great care and intelligence, and makes some very clever remarks appertaining to it.
Dryden's 'Tales from Boccaccio' are no insignificant contribution to our poetry, and his 'Palamon and Arcite, through Chaucer, returns to the same source. But when, at the beginning of this century, the Elizabethan tradition was revived, then the Italian influence reappeared more vigorous than ever.
He produced a poem as pinnacled, deft, and insignificant as Rouen Cathedral. In literature, as in the visual arts, Italy held out longest, and, when she fell, fell like Lucifer, never to rise again. In Italy there was no literary renaissance; there was just a stirring of the rubbish heap. If ever man was a full-stop, that man was Boccaccio. Dante died at Ravenna in 1321.
To Ariosto and Boccaccio he was always faithful; BURNT NJAL was a late favourite; and he found at least a passing entertainment in the ARCADIA and the GRAND CYRUS. George Eliot he outgrew, finding her latterly only sawdust in the mouth; but her influence, while it lasted, was great, and must have gone some way to form his mind.
The shores of the Mediterranean were ravaged and ships were seen on the high seas without sailors. In "The Decameron" Boccaccio gives a most graphic description of the plague and states that in Florence, in four months, 100,000 perished; before the calamity it was hardly supposed to contain so many inhabitants.
II . For the spirit of early humanism see H. C. Hollway-Calthrop, Petrarch: his Life and Times ; J. H. Robinson and H. W. Rolfe, Petrarch, the First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters, 2d ed. , a selection from Petrarch's letters to Boccaccio and other contemporaries, translated into English, with a valuable introduction; Pierre de Nolhac, Petrarque et l'humanisme, 2d ed., 2 vols. in 1 . Of the antecedents of humanism a convenient summary is presented by Louise Loomis, Mediaeval Hellenism . A popular biography of Erasmus is that of Ephraim Emerton, Desiderius Erasmus ; the Latin Letters of Erasmus are now in course of publication by P. S. Allen; F. M. Nichols, The Epistles of Erasmus, 2 vols.
The sole remaining copy of an ancient work upon aqueducts was discovered by him in the old library at Monte Cassino, which had survived the assaults of Lombards and Saracens, but in that later age seemed likely to perish by neglect. We have the record of an earlier visit by Boccaccio, in which the carelessness of its guardians was revealed.
It would hardly be worth recording these medieval clerks, the undistinguished writers, 'de quibus, Boccaccio said, 'nil curandum est, were it not that they show how the memory at least of the classical pastoral survived amid the ruins of ancient learning, and so serve to lead up to one last spasmodic manifestation of the kind in certain poems which else appear to stand in a curiously isolated position.
The Venetian people, the Genoese, and the other speakers of languages that might all have proved right "Italian" had not Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio written in Tuscan, can neither write nor be taught hard things in their dialect, although they can live, whether easy lives or hard, and evidently can die, therein.
There is the famous forest of pines, stretching unbroken twenty miles down the coast to Rimini, in whose cool and breezy glades Dante and Boccaccio walked and meditated, which Dryden has commemorated, and Byron has invested with the fascination of his genius; and under the whispering boughs of which moved the glittering cavalcade which fetched the bride to Rimini, the fair Francesca, whose sinful confession Dante heard in hell.
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