fixed the kaleidoscopic picture of Italian society, and set it in the
richest frame of romance.

While he had the _Decameron_ still in hand, he paused in that great
work, with heart full of passionate longing for the lady of his love,
far away in Naples, to pour out his very soul in _La Fiammetta_, the
name by which he always called the Lady Maria. Of the real character of
this lady, so famous in literature, and her true relations with
Boccaccio, little that is certain is known. In several of his poems and
in the _Decameron_ he alludes to her as being cold as a marble statue,
which no fire can ever warm; and there is no proof, notwithstanding the
ardor of Fiammetta as portrayed by her lover--who no doubt wished her to
become the reality of his glowing picture--that he ever really received
from the charmer whose name was always on his lips anything more than
the friendship that was apparent to all the world. But she certainly
inspired him in the writing of his best works.

The best critics agree in pronouncing _La Fiammetta_ a marvelous
performance. John Addington Symonds says: "It is the first attempt in
any literature to portray subjective emotion exterior to the writer;
since the days of Virgil and Ovid, nothing had been essayed in this
region of mental analysis. The author of this extraordinary work proved
himself a profound anatomist of feeling by the subtlety with which he
dissected a woman's heart." The story is full of exquisite passages, and
it exercised a widespread and lasting influence over all the narrative
literature that followed it. It is so rich in material that it furnished
the motives of many tales, and the novelists of the sixteenth century
availed themselves freely of its suggestions.

After Boccaccio had taken up a permanent residence in Florence, he