came the 'Amorosa
Visione,' and 'Filostrato,' in verse; 'Fiammetta' in prose, being the
imaginary complaint of his beloved at their separation; 'Nimfale
Fiesolano,' in verse, the scene also laid on the Affrico; and then the
'Decameron,' begun in 1348 and finished in 1353, after which he seems to
have gradually acquired a disgust for the world he had lived in as he
had known it, and turned to more serious studies. He wrote a life of
Dante, 'II Corbaccio,' a piece of satirical savagery, the 'Genealogy of
the Gods,' and various minor works; and spent much of his time in
intercourse with Petrarch, whose conversation and influence were of a
different character from that of his earlier life.

[Illustration: G. BOCCACCIO.]

Boccaccio died at Certaldo in the Val d'Elsa, December 2d, 1375. Of the
numerous works he left, that by which his fame as a writer is
established is beyond any question the 'Decameron,' or Ten Days'
Entertainment; in which a merry company of gentlemen and ladies,
appalled by the plague raging in their Florence, take refuge in the
villas near the city, and pass their time in story-telling and rambles
in the beautiful country around, only returning when the plague has
to a great extent abated. The superiority of the 'Decameron' is not only
in the polish and grace of its style, the first complete departure from
the stilted classicism of contemporary narrative, the happy naturalness
of good story-telling,--but in the conception of the work as a whole,
and the marvelous imagination of the filling-in between the framework of
the story of the plague by the hundred tales from all lands and times,
with the fine thread of the narrative of the day-by-day doings of the
merry and gracious company, their wanderings, the exquisite painting of
the Tuscan landscape (in which one recognizes the Val d'Arno even
to-day), and the delicate drawing of their various characters. It is
only when all these elements have been taken into consideration, and the
unity wrought through such a maze of interest and mass of material
without ever becoming dull or being driven to repetition, that we
understand the power of Boccaccio as an artist.

We must take the ten days' holiday as it is painted: a gay and
entrancing record of a fortunate and brilliant summer vacation, every
one of its hundred pictures united with the rest by a delicate tracery
of flowers and landscape, with bird-songs and laughter, bits of tender
and chaste by-play--for