ated the custom of
mixing tragic with the comic tales. Nearly all the _novelle_ of the
Fourth Day, for example, deal with tragic topics. And the example he set
in this way was followed by the whole school of _Novellieri_. As
Painter's book is so largely due to them, a few words on the
_Novellieri_ used by him seem desirable, reserving for the present the
question of his treatment of their text.

Of Giovanne Boccaccio himself it is difficult for any one with a
love of letters to speak in few or measured words. He may have been a
Philistine, as Mr. Symonds calls him, but he was surely a Philistine of
genius. He has the supreme virtue of style. In fact, it may be roughly
said that in Europe for nearly two centuries there is no such thing
as a prose style but Boccaccio's. Even when dealing with his grosser
topics--and these he derived from others--he half disarms disgust by
the lightness of his touch. And he could tell a tale, one of the most
difficult of literary tasks. When he deals with graver actions, if he
does not always rise to the occasion, he never fails to give the due
impression of seriousness and dignity. It is not for nothing that the
_Decamerone_ has been the storehouse of poetic inspiration for nearly
five centuries. In this country alone, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dryden,
Keats, Tennyson, have each in turn gone to Boccaccio for material.

In his own country he is the fountainhead of a wide stream of literary
influences that has ever broadened as it flowed. Between the fifteenth
and the eighteenth centuries the Italian presses poured forth some four
thousand _novelle_, all avowedly tracing from Boccaccio.[6] Many of
these, it is true, were imitations of the gayer strains of Boccaccio's
genius. But a considerable proportion of them have a sterner tone, and
deal with the weightier matters of life, and in this they had none but
the master for their model. The gloom of the Black Death settles down
over the greater part of all this literature. Every memorable outburst
of the fiercer passions of men that occurred in Italy, the land of
passion, for all these years, found record in a _novella_ of Boccaccio's
followers. The _Novelle_ answered in some respects to our newspaper
reports of trials and the earlier _Last Speech and Confession_. But the
example of Boccaccio raised these gruesome topics into the region of
art. Often these tragedies are reported of the true actors; still more
often under the disguise of fictitiou