affecting story related by you. Every
street, every farm, is peopled by your genius: and this population
cannot change with seasons or with ages, with factions or with
incursions. Ghibellines and Guelphs will have been contested for only
by the worms, long before the _Decameron_ has ceased to be recited on
our banks of blue lilies and under our arching vines. Another plague
may come amidst us; and something of a solace in so terrible a
visitation would be found in your pages, by those to whom letters are
a refuge and relief.

_Boccaccio._ I do indeed think my little bevy from Santa Maria Novella
would be better company on such an occasion, than a devil with three
heads, who diverts the pain his claws inflicted, by sticking his fangs
in another place.

_Petrarca._ This is atrocious, not terrific nor grand. Alighieri is
grand by his lights, not by his shadows; by his human affections, not
by his infernal. As the minutest sands are the labours of some
profound sea, or the spoils of some vast mountain, in like manner his
horrid wastes and wearying minutenesses are the chafings of a
turbulent spirit, grasping the loftiest things and penetrating the
deepest, and moving and moaning on the earth in loneliness and
sadness.

_Boccaccio._ Among men he is what among waters is

The strange, mysterious, solitary Nile.

_Petrarca._ Is that his verse? I do not remember it.

_Boccaccio._ No, it is mine for the present: how long it may continue
mine I cannot tell. I never run after those who steal my apples: it
would only tire me: and they are hardly worth recovering when they are
bruised and bitten, as they are usually. I would not stand upon my
verses: it is a perilous boy's trick, which we ought to leave off when
we put on square shoes. Let our prose show what we are, and our poetry
what we have been.

_Petrarca._ You would never have given this advice to Alighieri.

_Boccaccio._ I would never plough porphyry; there is ground fitter for
grain. Alighieri is the parent of his system, like the sun, about whom
all the worlds are but particles thrown forth from him. We may write
little things well, and accumulate one upon another; but never will
any be justly called a great poet unless he has treated a great
subject worthily. He may be the poet of the lover and of the idler, he
may be the poet of green fields or gay society; but whoever is this
can be no more. A throne is not built of birds'-nests, nor do a
thousand reeds