of which he was by no means a master. As for his minor works in the
vernacular, the earlier of them shew that he had not as yet wrought himself
free from the conventionalism which the polite literature of Italy inherited
from the Sicilians. It is therefore inevitable that the twentieth century
should find the Filocopo, Ameto, and Amorosa Visione tedious reading. The
Teseide determined the form in which Pulci, Boiardo, Bello, Ariosto, Tasso,
and, with a slight modification, our own Spenser were to write, but its
readers are now few, and are not likely ever again to be numerous. Chaucer
drew upon it for the Knight's Tale, but it is at any rate arguable that his
retrenchment of its perhaps inordinate length was judicious, and that what
he gave was better than what he borrowed. Still, that it had such a redactor
as Chaucer is no small testimony to its merit; nor was it only in the
Knight's Tale that he was indebted to it: the description of the Temple of
Love in the Parlement of Foules is taken almost word for word from it. Even
more considerable and conspicuous is Chaucer's obligation to Boccaccio in
the Troilus and Criseyde, about a third of which is borrowed from the
Filostrato. Nor is it a little remarkable that the same man, that in the
Teseide and Filostrato founded the chivalrous epic, should also and in the
same period of his literary activity, have written the first and not the
least powerful and artistic of psychologic romances, for even such is
L'Amorosa Fiammetta.

But whatever may be the final verdict of criticism upon these minor works of
Boccaccio, it is impossible to imagine an age in which the Decameron will
fail of general recognition as, in point alike of invention as of style, one
of the most notable creations of human genius. Of few books are the sources
so recondite, insomuch that it seems to be certain that in the main they
must have be merely oral tradition, and few have exercised so wide and
mighty an influence. The profound, many-sided and intimate knowledge of
human nature which it evinces, its vast variety of incident, its wealth