oco Snello eats lettuce
and chicory up yonder at Laverna. He has mendicant friars for his
society every day; and snails, as pure as water can wash and boil
them, for his repast on festivals. Under this discipline, if they keep
it up, surely one devil out of legion will depart from him.'

FOOTNOTES:

[15] Literally, _due fave_, the expression on such occasions to
signify a small quantity.

[16] Contraction of _signor_, customary in Tuscany.

FOURTH DAY'S INTERVIEW

_Petrarca._ Giovanni, you are unsuspicious, and would scarcely see a
monster in a minotaur. It is well, however, to draw good out of evil,
and it is the peculiar gift of an elevated mind. Nevertheless, you
must have observed, although with greater curiosity than concern, the
slipperiness and tortuousness of your detractors.

_Boccaccio._ Whatever they detract from me, they leave more than they
can carry away. Beside, they always are detected.

_Petrarca._ When they are detected, they raise themselves up fiercely,
as if their nature were erect and they could reach your height.

_Boccaccio._ Envy would conceal herself under the shadow and shelter
of contemptuousness, but she swells too huge for the den she creeps
into. Let her lie there and crack, and think no more about her. The
people you have been talking of can find no greater and no other
faults in my writings than I myself am willing to show them, and still
more willing to correct. There are many things, as you have just now
told me, very unworthy of their company.

_Petrarca._ He who has much gold is none the poorer for having much
silver too. When a king of old displayed his wealth and magnificence
before a philosopher, the philosopher's exclamation was:

'How many things are here which I do not want!'

Does not the same reflection come upon us, when we have laid aside our
compositions for a time, and look into them again more leisurely? Do
we not wonder at our own profusion, and say like the philosopher:

'How many things are here which I do not want!'

It may happen that we pull up flowers with weeds; but better this than
rankness. We must bear to see our first-born dispatched before our
eyes, and give them up quietly.

_Boccaccio._ The younger will be the most reluctant. There are poets
among us who mistake in themselves the freckles of the hay-fever for
beauty-spots. In another half-century their volumes will be inquired
after; but only for the sake of cutting out an illuminated le