a certain class of modern newspapers is interesting, because it tells
scandal about distinguished personages, and has for its interlocutors
other distinguished personages, who can be identified without much
difficulty, and the identification of whom adds zest to the reading. All
these three seem to me to be mistakes of fact and of judgment. In
the first place, the _Heptameron_ borrows from its original literally
nothing but plan. Its stories are quite independent; the similarity of
name is only a bookseller's invention, though a rather happy one; and
the personal setting, which is in Boccaccio a mere framework, has here
considerable substance and interest. In the second place, the accusation
of looseness is wildly exaggerated. There is one very coarse but not
in the least immoral story in the _Heptameron_; there are several broad
jests on the obnoxious cloister and its vices, there are many tales
which are not intended _virginibus puerisque_, and there is a pervading
flavour of that half-French, half-Italian courtship of married women
which was at the time usual everywhere out of England. The manners are
not our manners, and what may be called the moral tone is distinguished
by a singular cast, of which more presently. But if not entirely a book
for boys and girls, the _Heptameron_ is certainly not one which Southey
need have excepted from his admirable answer in the character of author
of "The Doctor," to the person who wondered whether he (Southey) could
have daughters, and if so, whether they liked reading. "He has
daughters: they love reading: and he is not the man I take him for if
they are not 'allowed to open' any book in his library." The last error,
if not so entirely inconsistent with intelligent reading of the book as
the first and second, is scarcely less strange to me. For, in the first
place, the identification of the personages in the framework of the
_Heptameron_ depends upon the merest and, as it seems to me, the idlest
conjecture; and, in the second, the interest of the actual
tittle-tattle, whether it could be fathered on A or B or not, is the