istrict, the last branch of the house of Medicis, afforded that
protection to the memory of the insulted dead which her best ancestors
had dispensed upon all contemporary merit. The Marchioness Lenzoni
rescued the tombstone of Boccaccio from the neglect in which it had some
time lain, and found for it an honourable elevation in her own mansion.
She has done more: the house in which the poet lived has been as little
respected as his tomb, and is falling to ruin over the head of one
indifferent to the name of its former tenant. It consists of two or
three little chambers, and a low tower, on which Cosmo II. affixed an
inscription. This house she has taken measures to purchase, and
proposes to devote to it that care and consideration which are attached
to the cradle and to the roof of genius.

This is not the place to undertake the defence of Boccaccio; but the man
who exhausted his little patrimony in the acquirement of learning, who
was amongst the first, if not the first, to allure the science and the
poetry of Greece to the bosom of Italy;--who not only invented a new
style, but founded, or certainly fixed, a new language; who, besides the
esteem of every polite court of Europe, was thought worthy of employment
by the predominant republic of his own country, and, what is more, of
the friendship of Petrarch, who lived the life of a philosopher and a
freeman, and who died in the pursuit of knowledge,--such a man might
have found more consideration than he has met with from the priest of
Certaldo, and from a late English traveller, who strikes off his
portrait as an odious, contemptible, licentious writer, whose impure
remains should be suffered to rot without a record.[612] That English
traveller, unfortunately for those who have to deplore the loss of a
very amiable person, is beyond all criticism; but the mortality which
did not protect Boccaccio from Mr. Eustace, must not defend Mr. Eustace
from the impartial judgment of his successors. Death may canonise his
virtues, not his errors; and it may be modestly pronounced that he
transgressed, not only as an author, but as a man, when he evoked the
shade of Boccaccio in company with that of Aretine, amidst the
sepulchres of Santa Croce, merely to dismiss it with indignity. As far
as respects

"Il flagello de' Principi,
Il divin Pietro Aretino,"

it is of little import what censure is passed upon a coxcomb who owes
his present existence to the above burlesque c