My object in adverting to the Italian poets, is not so much for their
own sakes, in which point of view Dante and Ariosto alone would have
required separate Lectures, but for the elucidation of the merits of our
countrymen, as to what extent we must consider them as fortunate
imitators of their Italian predecessors, and in what points they have
the higher claims of original genius. Of Dante, I am to speak elsewhere.
Of Boccaccio, who has little interest as a metrical poet in any respect,
and none for my present purpose, except, perhaps, as the reputed
inventor or introducer of the octave stanza in his 'Teseide', it will be
sufficient to say, that we owe to him the subjects of numerous poems
taken from his famous tales, the happy art of narration, and the still
greater merit of a depth and fineness in the workings of the passions,
in which last excellence, as likewise in the wild and imaginative
character of the situations, his almost neglected romances appear to me
greatly to excel his far famed 'Decameron'. To him, too, we owe the more
doubtful merit of having introduced into the Italian prose, and by the
authority of his name and the influence of his example, more or less
throughout Europe, the long interwoven periods, and architectural
structure which arose from the very nature of their language in the
Greek writers, but which already in the Latin orators and historians,
had betrayed a species of effort, a foreign something, which had been
superinduced on the language, instead of growing out of it; and which
was far too alien from that individualizing and confederating, yet not
blending, character of the North, to become permanent, although its
magnificence and stateliness were objects of admiration and occasional
imitation. This style diminished the control of the writer over the
inner feelings of men, and created too great a charm between the body
and the life; and hence especially it was abandoned by Luther.