nd Boccaccio too wrote poetry of no ignoble type, but probably because
he was part of an age when verse had become the habitual form of
culture, and all who could write caught the habit of versification,--a
habit easier to fall into in Italian than in any other language. But
while the consecration of time has been given to the 'Commedia,' and the
'Convito' passes into the shadow and perspective of lesser things, so
the many verses of Boccaccio are overlooked, and his greatest prose
work, the 'Decameron,' is that with which his fame is mostly bound up.

Born in 1313, at seven years of age he showed signs of a literary
facility, and his father, a merchant of Florence, put him to school
with a reputable grammarian; but afterward, deciding to devote him to
merchandise, sent him to study arithmetic,--restive and profitless in
which, he was sent to study canon law, and finding his level no better
there, went back to traffic and to Naples in his father's business when
he was about twenty. The story runs that the sight of the tomb of Virgil
turned his thoughts to poetry; but this confusion of the _post hoc_ with
the _propter hoc_ is too common in remote and romantic legend to value
much. The presence of Petrarch in the court of Robert, King of Naples,
is far more likely to have been the kindling of his genius to its
subsequent activity: and the passion he acquired while there for the
illegitimate daughter of the King, Maria,--the Fiammetta of his later
life,--furnished the fuel for its burning; his first work, the
'Filocopo,' being written as an offering to her. It is a prose love
story, mixed with mythological allusions,--after the fashion of the day,
which thought more of the classics than of nature; and like all his
earlier works, prolix and pedantic.

The 'Theseide,' a purely classic theme, the war of Theseus with the
Amazons, is in verse; and was followed by the 'Ameto,' or 'Florentine
Nymphs,' a story of the loves of Ameto, a rustic swain, with one of the
nymphs of the valley of the Affrico, a stream which flows into the Arno
not far from where the poet was born, or where at least he passed his
youth; and to which valley he seems always greatly attached, putting
there the scene of most of his work, including the 'Decameron.' 'Ameto'
is a mythological fiction, in which the characters mingle recitations of
verse with the prose narration, and in which the gods of Greece and Rome
masque in the familiar scenes. Following these