. He
never tires in his praise of the sublime Dante, whose works he copied
with his own hand. He conjures his friend Petrarch to study the great
Florentine, and to defend himself against the charges of wilful
ignorance and envy brought against him. A life of Dante, and the
commentaries on the first sixteen cantos of the _Inferno_, bear witness
to Boccaccio's learning and enthusiasm.

In the chronological enumeration of our author's writings we now come to
his most important work, the _Decameron_, a collection of one hundred
stories, published in their combined form in 1353, although mostly
written at an earlier date. This work marks in a certain sense the rise
of Italian prose. It is true that Dante's _Vita Nuova_ was written
before, but its involved sentences, founded essentially on Latin
constructions, cannot be compared with the infinite suppleness and
precision of Boccaccio's prose. The _Cento Novelle Antiche_, on the
other hand, which also precedes the _Decameron_ in date, can hardly be
said to be written in artistic language according to definite rules of
grammar and style. Boccaccio for the first time speaks a new idiom,
flexible and tender, like the character of the nation, and capable of
rendering all the shades of feeling, from the coarse laugh of cynicism
to the sigh of hopeless love. It is by the name of "Father of Italian
Prose" that Boccaccio ought to be chiefly remembered.

Like most progressive movements in art and literature, Boccaccio's
remoulding of Italian prose may be described as a "return to nature." It
is indeed the nature of the Italian people itself which has become
articulate in the _Decameron_; here we find southern grace and elegance,
together with that unveiled _naivete_ of impulse which is so striking
and so amiable a quality of the Italian character. The undesirable
complement of the last-mentioned feature, a coarseness and indecency of
conception and expression hardly comprehensible to the northern mind,
also appears in the _Decameron_, particularly where the life and
conversation of the lower classes are the subject of the story. At the
same time, these descriptions of low life are so admirable, and the
character of popular parlance rendered with such humour, as often to
make the frown of moral disgust give way to a smile.

It is not surprising that a style so concise and yet so pliable so
typical and yet so individual, as that of Boccaccio was of enormous
influence on the further pr