haps symptomatic of a certain morbid
sensibility in Keats to select this subject from so cheerful a writer as
Boccaccio. This intensity of love surviving in face of leprosy, torment,
decay, and material horrors of all kinds; this passionate clinging of
spirit to body, is a mediaeval note, and is repeated in the neo-romantic
school which derives from Keats; in Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris,
O'Shaughnessy, Marzials, and Paine. Think of the unshrinking gaze which
Dante fixes upon the tortures of the souls in pain; of the wasted body of
Christ upon the cross; of the fasts, flagellations, mortifications of
penitents; the unwashed friars, the sufferings of martyrs. Keats
apologises for his endeavour "to make old prose in modern rime more
sweet," and for his departure from the even, unexcited narrative of his
original:

"O eloquent and famed Boccaccio,
Of thee we now should ask forgiving boon. . . .
For venturing syllables that ill beseem
The quiet glooms of such a piteous theme. . . .

"Ah! wherefore all this wormy circumstance?
Why linger at the yawning tomb so long?
O for the gentleness of old Romance,
The simple plaining of the minstrel's song."

But it is just this wormy circumstance that rivets the poet's attention;
his imagination lingers over Isabella kissing the dead face, pointing
each eyelash, and washing away the loam that disfigures it with her
tears; over the basil tufts growing rankly from the mouldering head,

"The thing was vile with green and livid spot,"

but Keats' tenderness pierces the grave.

It is instructive to compare "Isabella" with Dryden's "Sigismonda and
Guiscardo," also from the "Decameron" and surcharged with the physically
horrible. In this tale Tancred sends his daughter her lover's heart in a
golden goblet. She kisses the heart, fills the cup with poison, drinks,
and dies. The two poems are typical examples of romantic and classical
handling, though neither is quite a masterpiece in its kind. The
treatment in Dryden is cool, unimpassioned, objective--like Boccaccio's,
in fact. The story is firmly told, with a masculine energy of verse and
language. Sigismonda and Tancred are characters, confronted wills, as in
drama, and their speeches are like _tirades_ from a tragedy of Racine.
But here Dryden's rhetorical habit and his fondness for reasoning in rime
run away with him, and make his art inferior to Boccaccio's. Sigismonda
argues her case like counsel for the