haracter given to him by
the poet, whose amber has preserved many other grubs and worms: but to
classify Boccaccio with such a person, and to excommunicate his very
ashes, must of itself make us doubt of the qualification of the
classical tourist for writing upon Italian, or, indeed, upon any other
literature; for ignorance on one point may incapacitate an author merely
for that particular topic, but subjection to a professional prejudice
must render him an unsafe director on all occasions. Any perversion and
injustice may be made what is vulgarly called a "case of conscience,"
and this poor excuse is all that can be offered for the priest of
Certaldo, or the author of the _Classical Tour_. It would have answered
the purpose to confine the censure to the novels of Boccaccio; and
gratitude to that source which supplied the muse of Dryden with her last
and most harmonious numbers might, perhaps, have restricted that censure
to the objectionable qualities of the hundred tales. At any rate the
repentance of Boccaccio might have arrested his exhumation, and it
should have been recollected and told, that in his old age he wrote a
letter entreating his friend to discourage the reading of the
_Decameron_, for the sake of modesty, and for the sake of the author,
who would not have an apologist always at hand to state in his excuse
that he wrote it when young, and at the command of his superiors.[613]
It is neither the licentiousness of the writer, nor the evil
propensities of the reader, which have given to the _Decameron_ alone,
of all the works of Boccaccio, a perpetual popularity. The establishment
of a new and delightful dialect conferred an immortality on the works in
which it was first fixed. The sonnets of Petrarch were, for the same
reason, fated to survive his self-admired _Africa_, "the favourite of
kings." The invariable traits of nature and feeling with which the
novels, as well as the verses, abound, have doubtless been the chief
source of the foreign celebrity of both authors; but Boccaccio, as a
man, is no more to be estimated by that work, than Petrarch is to be
regarded in no other light than as the lover of Laura. Even, however,
had the father of the Tuscan prose been known only as the author of the
_Decameron_, a considerate writer would have been cautious to pronounce
a sentence irreconcilable with the unerring voice of many ages and
nations. An irrevocable value has never been stamped upon any work
solely rec