aithful to the austere devoir," is immaterial and unimportant. Another
man would have abandoned her completely or carried her violently away.
Petrarch, too sincere for treason and too poetic for vulgarity, unfit in
consequence for either enterprise, became obsessed with a love that
developed into a delicate malady, a disease that sent him from his
studies, tormenting him into an incessant struggle with the most terrible
of all combatants--one's self. The malady had its compensations. It made
him the source of modern lyricism and the most conspicuous figure of his
day. In Milan when he appeared every head was uncovered. On the Po, a
battle was interrupted that he might pass. At Venice his seat was at the
right of the doge. Rome's ghost revived in beauty for him and put a laurel
on his brow. It was his verse that induced these tributes. The verse was
inspired by love.

To Dante, love was what it had been to Plato, a mysterious initiation into
the secrets of the material world. To Petrarch it was a rebellion against
those very things. In Dante it was sublimated, in Petrarch it was
distilled. Laura stood at the parting of the roads, midway between the
symbolism of the _Divina Commedia_ and the freedom of the _Decamerone_.

The _Decamerone_ is the chronicle of a society in extremis of which the
Divine Comedy is the Last Judgment. One is the dirge of the past, the
other the dawn of the future. Between the gravity of the one and the
unconcern of the other is the distance of the poles. Separated but by
half a century the cantos are the antipodes of the novellas. In the former
is gloom, palpable and thick. In the latter is light, frivolous and clear.
One is mediaeval, the other, modern. But one was constructed for all time,
the other for a day. If the _Decamerone_ still survive, it is through one
of Time's caprices.

Boccaccio wrote endlessly. He produced treatises theological, historical,
mystical. With his pen he built a vast monument. Time passed and in
passing loosed from the edifice a single stone. The rest it reduced to
dust. But that stone it sent rolling into posterity, regarding it, wrongly
or rightly as a masterpiece. A masterpiece is a thing that seems easy to
make and which no one can duplicate. The Queen of Navarre tried and failed
augustly. Indolent reviewers have summarized both efforts as gossip.
Boccaccio's work was at once that and something else. It was a viaticum
for the Middle Ages and a signal for the Rena