ight. Why do we
never hear of our faults until everybody knows them, and until they
stand in record against us?

_Petrarca._ Because our ears are closed to truth and friendship for
some time after the triumphal course of composition. We are too
sensitive for the gentlest touch; and when we really have the most
infirmity, we are angry to be told that we have any.

_Boccaccio._ Ah, Francesco! thou art poet from scalp to heel: but what
other would open his breast as thou hast done! They show
ostentatiously far worse weaknesses; but the most honest of the tribe
would forswear himself on this. Again, I acknowledge it, you have
reason to complain of Lisabetta and Gismonda.

* * * * *

_Petrarca._ In my delight to listen to you after so long an absence, I
have been too unwary; and you have been speaking too much for one
infirm. Greatly am I to blame, not to have moderated my pleasure and
your vivacity. You must rest now: to-morrow we will renew our
conversation.

_Boccaccio._ God bless thee, Francesco! I shall be talking with thee
all night in my slumbers. Never have I seen thee with such pleasure as
to-day, excepting when I was deemed worthy by our fellow-citizens of
bearing to thee, and of placing within this dear hand of thine, the
sentence of recall from banishment, and when my tears streamed over
the ordinance as I read it, whereby thy paternal lands were redeemed
from the public treasury.

Again God bless thee! Those tears were not quite exhausted: take the
last of them.

FOOTNOTE:

[14] It may puzzle an Englishman to read the lines beginning with
'Modicum', so as to give the metre. The secret is, to draw out _et_
into a disyllable, et-te, as the Italians do, who pronounce Latin
verse, if possible, worse than we, adding a syllable to such as end
with a consonant.

THIRD DAY'S INTERVIEW

It being now the Lord's day, Messer Francesco thought it meet that he
should rise early in the morning and bestir himself, to hear mass in
the parish church at Certaldo. Whereupon he went on tiptoe, if so
weighty a man could indeed go in such a fashion, and lifted softly the
latch of Ser Giovanni's chamber door, that he might salute him ere he
departed, and occasion no wonder at the step he was about to take. He
found Ser Giovanni fast asleep, with the missal wide open across his
nose, and a pleasant smile on his genial, joyous mouth. Ser Francesco
leaned over the couch, closed his hands tog