of which palaces are erected
is the nursery of nettle and bramble.

_Boccaccio._ It is better to keep always in view such writers as
Cicero, than to run after those idlers who throw stones that can never
reach us.

_Petrarca._ If you copied him to perfection, and on no occasion lost
sight of him, you would be an indifferent, not to say a bad writer.

_Boccaccio._ I begin to think you are in the right. Well then,
retrenching some of my licentious tales, I must endeavour to fill up
the vacancy with some serious and some pathetic.

_Petrarca._ I am heartily glad to hear of this decision; for,
admirable as you are in the jocose, you descend from your natural
position when you come to the convivial and the festive. You were
placed among the Affections, to move and master them, and gifted with
the rod that sweetens the fount of tears. My nature leads me also to
the pathetic; in which, however, an imbecile writer may obtain
celebrity. Even the hard-hearted are fond of such reading, when they
are fond of any; and nothing is easier in the world than to find and
accumulate its sufferings. Yet this very profusion and luxuriance of
misery is the reason why few have excelled in describing it. The eye
wanders over the mass without noticing the peculiarities. To mark them
distinctly is the work of genius; a work so rarely performed, that, if
time and space may be compared, specimens of it stand at wider
distances than the trophies of Sesostris. Here we return again to the
_Inferno_ of Dante, who overcame the difficulty. In this vast desert
are its greater and its less oasis; Ugolino and Francesca di Rimini.
The peopled region is peopled chiefly with monsters and moschitoes:
the rest for the most part is sand and suffocation.

_Boccaccio._ Ah! had Dante remained through life the pure solitary
lover of Bice, his soul had been gentler, tranquiller, and more
generous. He scarcely hath described half the curses he went through,
nor the roads he took on the journey: theology, politics, and that
barbican of the _Inferno_, marriage, surrounded with its

Selva selvaggia ed aspra e forte.

Admirable is indeed the description of Ugolino, to whoever can endure
the sight of an old soldier gnawing at the scalp of an old archbishop.

_Petrarca._ The thirty lines from

Ed io sentii,

are unequalled by any other continuous thirty in the whole dominions
of poetry.

_Boccaccio._ Give me rather the six on Francesca: for if in th