o secret to their world. For the
entertainment of this youthful beauty he wrote his _Filicopo_, and the
fair Maria is undoubtedly the heroine of several of his stories and
poems. His father insisted upon his return to Florence in 1340, and
after he had settled in that city he occupied himself seriously with
literary work, producing, between the years 1343 and 1355, the _Teseide_
(familiar to English readers as "The Knight's Tale" in Chaucer,
modernized by Dryden as "Palamon and Arcite"), _Ameto, Amorosa Visione,
La Fiammetta, Ninfale Fiesolona_, and his most famous work, the
_Decameron_, a collection of stories written, it is said, to amuse Queen
Joanna of Naples and her court, during the period when one of the
world's greatest plagues swept over Europe in 1348. In these years he
rose from the vivid but confused and exaggerated manner of _Filocopo_ to
the perfection of polished literary style. The _Decameron_ fully
revealed his genius, his ability to weave the tales of all lands and all
ages into one harmonious whole; from the confused mass of legends of the
Middle Ages, he evolved a world of human interest and dazzling beauty,
fixed the kaleidoscopic picture of Italian society, and set it in the
richest frame of romance.

While he had the _Decameron_ still in hand, he paused in that great
work, with heart full of passionate longing for the lady of his love,
far away in Naples, to pour out his very soul in _La Fiammetta_, the
name by which he always called the Lady Maria. Of the real character of
this lady, so famous in literature, and her true relations with
Boccaccio, little that is certain is known. In several of his poems and
in the _Decameron_ he alludes to her as being cold as a marble statue,
which no fire can ever warm; and there is no proof, notwithstanding the
ardor of Fiammetta as portrayed by her lover--who no doubt wished her to
become the reality of his glowing picture--that he ever really received
from the charmer whose name was always on his lips anything more than
the friendship that was apparent to all the world. But she certainly
inspired him in the writing of his best works.

The best critics agree in pronouncing _La Fiammetta_ a marvelous
performance. John Addington Symonds says: "It is the first attempt in
any literature to portray subjective emotion exterior to the writer;
since the days of Virgil and Ovid, nothing had been essayed in this
region of mental analysis. The author of this extraordina