there were recognized lovers in the company; and
when this is conceived in its entirety, we must set it in the massive
frame of terrible gloom of the great plague, through which Boccaccio
makes us look at his picture. And then the frame itself becomes a
picture; and its ghastly horror--the apparent fidelity of the
descriptions, which makes one feel as if he had before him the evidence
of an eye-witness--gives a measure of the power of the artist and the
range of his imagination, from an earthly inferno to an earthly
paradise, such as even the 'Commedia' does not give us. In this
stupendous ensemble, the individual tales become mere details, filling
in of the space or time; and, taken out of it, the whole falls into a
mere story-book, in which the only charm is the polish of the parts, the
shine of the fragments that made the mosaic. The tales came from all
quarters, and only needed to be amusing or interesting enough to make
one suppose that they had been listened to with pleasure: stories from
the 'Gesta Romanorum,' the mediaeval chronicles, or any gossip of the
past or present, just to make a whole; the criticism one might pass on
them, I imagine, never gave Boccaccio a thought, only the way they were
placed being important. The elaborate preparation for the story-telling;
the grouping of them as a whole, in contrast with the greater story he
put as their contrast and foil; the solemn gloom, the deep chiaroscuro
of this framing, painted like a miniature; the artful way in which he
prepares for his _lieta brigata_ the way out of the charnel-house: these
are the real 'Decameron.' The author presents it in a prelude which has
for its scope only to give the air of reality to the whole, as if not
only the plague, but the 'Decameron,' had been history; and the proof of
his perfect success is in the fact that for centuries the world has been
trying to identify the villas where the merry men and maidens met, as if
they really had met.

"Whenever, most gracious ladies, I reflect how pitiful you
all are by nature, I recognize that this work will in your
opinion have a sad and repulsive beginning, as the painful
memory of the pestilence gone by, fraught with loss to all
who saw or knew of it, and which memory the work will bear on
its front. But I would not that for this you read no further,
through fear that your reading should be always through sighs
and tears. This frightful beginning