"Boccaccio" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... satisfied. To see the East; to see India and far Cathay; to see the tropics and to live for a while in a tropical island; to be carried along the Grand Canal of Venice in a gondola; to see the gardens of Boccaccio and the cell of Savonarola; to camp and hunt in the backwoods of Canada, and to walk the streets of New York, all these things have I longed, from youth upwards, to see and to do—yea, as ardently as ever Drake ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... The pine tree.—Ver. 782. By way of corroborating this assertion, Boccaccio tells us, that the body of Polyphemus was found in Sicily, his left hand grasping a walking-stick longer than the ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... regarded as a serious statement of facts, but rather to be taken as an essay in romance by one who wished the facts were as he pictured them. If this be so, the narrative is even less historically reliable than the Fiametta of Boccaccio. ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... "Tale of the Touchstone," a legend of Dinahpur, wherein a woman "sells" her four admirers. In the Persian Tales ascribed to the Dervish "Mokles" (Mukhlis) of Isfahan, the lady Aruya tricks and exposes a Kazi, a doctor and a governor. Boccaccio (viii. 1) has the story of a lady who shut up her gallant in a chest with her husband's sanction; and a similar tale (ix. 1) of Rinuccio and Alexander with the corpse of Scannadeo (Throkh-god). Hence a Lydgate (circ. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... the date of that play," observes Lamb, in his 'Extracts from the Garrick Plays,' "Dryden produced his admirable version of the same story from Boccaccio. The speech here extracted (the scene between the messengers and Gismunda) may be compared with the corresponding passage in the 'Sigismunda and Guiscardo' with no disadvantage to the older performance. It is quite as weighty, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... latino is evidently Italian ("Trovata una antichissima storia ... in latino volgare ... ho ridotta"), and not the Provencal tongue, as Mr. Craik suggests in his Literature and Learning in England, vol. ii. p. 48., where he supposes Boccaccio to have translated from, and not, as is clear, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... literature with which Shakespeare shows most acquaintance is that of the novelle, though there is no proof that he could read the language. The Decameron of Boccaccio contains the love-story of Cymbeline, though there may have been an intermediary; the plot of All's Well came from the same collection, but had been translated by Painter in his Palace of Pleasure; and the story of the caskets in The Merchant of Venice is ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... have added three sonnets of Petrarca, all written after the death of Laura. They are among his noblest, all pertinent to the subject, and giving three aspects of that one mood. The last lines of the last sonnet are a fit motto for Boccaccio's dream. ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... received numerous favors and appointments. He was sent on several diplomatic missions by the king, three of them to Italy, where, in all probability, he made the acquaintance of the new Italian literature, the writings of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. He was appointed at different times Comptroller of the Wool Customs, Comptroller of Petty Customs, and Clerk of the Works. He sat for Kent in Parliament, and he received pensions from three successive kings. He was a man of business as well ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the massive look of a marble fragment stained to one even tone and dug up from Attic earth. And she was reading thus heavily and slowly, by firelight in the midst of this tremendous Northern night, Keats's version of Boccaccio's "Tale of Isabella and the Pot ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... know," said Brantome, crossing over to the Duchesse de Guise, who held the "Decamerone" in her hand. "Some of the women of your house must appear in the book, madame," he said. "It is a pity that the Sieur Boccaccio did not live in our day; he would have known plenty of ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... transformation is noticeable at once in the rapid development of the pornographic tale, whose riches might bring a blush to the cheek of Boccaccio, and provide Poggio and Aretino with a complete review; but these are stories for the barrack, venturing only now and then upon the confines of respectability in the erotic romances of Zamacois and the late enormously popular Felipe Trigo. Few Spaniards who write today ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... drama-intrigue which, however, appears still more elaborate and perfected in other pieces. The richness of this Oriental plot-invention contrasts strongly with all European literatures except the Spaniard's, whose taste for the theatre determined his direction, and the Italian, which in Boccaccio's day had borrowed freely through Sicily from the East. And the remarkable deficiency lasted till the romantic movement dawned in France, when Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas showed their marvellous powers of faultless fancy, boundless imagination ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... Ciacco.] So called from his inordinate appetite: Ciacco, in Italian, signifying a pig. The real name of this glutton has not been transmitted to us. He is introduced in Boccaccio's Decameron, Giorn. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... night. He tells the tale of "The Falcon of Sir Federigo," from the "Decameron." It is an exquisite poem. So charming is the manner, that the "Decameron," so rendered into English, would acquire a new renown, and the public of to-day would understand the fame of Boccaccio. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... scarcely any references to the Latin orators and historians. We must add that it contains little, or rather no information, respecting the history and literature of modern Italy. To the best of our remembrance, Addison does not mention Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Boiardo, Berni, Lorenzo de' Medici, or Machiavelli. He coldly tells us, that at Ferrara he saw the tomb of Ariosto, and that at Venice he heard the gondoliers sing verses of Tasso. But for Tasso ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... visual arts, Italy held out longest, and, when she fell, fell like Lucifer, never to rise again. In Italy there was no literary renaissance; there was just a stirring of the rubbish heap. If ever man was a full-stop, that man was Boccaccio. Dante died at Ravenna in 1321. His death is a landmark in the spiritual history of Europe. Behind him lies that which, taken with the Divina Commedia, has won for Italy an exaggerated literary reputation. In the thirteenth century ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... Testament, with all its stores of the "shocking," really does very little harm. It requires mind for mind in reading, and vice becomes unattractive even to the vicious when they cannot understand it. I did understand Rabelais, and the Moyen de Parvenir, and the Cymbalum Mundi, and Boccaccio (I owned these books), and laughed over them, yet was withal as pure-minded a youth as could well be imagined without being a simpleton. For, with all such reading, I best loved such a book as Bromley's "Sabbath of Rest," or sweet, strange works of ancient ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... neolithic history, long before the Etruscans had ever issued forth from their Rhaetian fastnesses to occupy the blue and silver-grey hills of modern Tuscany. Nor do we know who built the great Cyclopean walls, whose huge rough blocks still overhang the modern carriage road that leads past Boccaccio's Valley of the Ladies and Fra Angelico's earliest convent from the town in the Valley. They are attributed to the Etruscans, of course, on much the same grounds as Stonehenge is attributed to the Druids—because ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... NOBLES HOMMES ET FEMMES: No. 6878. The present seems to be the fit place to notice this very beautiful folio volume of one of the most popular works of Boccaccio. Copies of it, both in ms. and early print—are indeed common in foreign libraries. There is a date of 1409 at the very commencement of the volume: but I take the liberty to question whether that be the date of its actual execution. The illuminations in ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... books that nobody wanted to read. They were Italian, of course, for it was an Italian ship, and it struck me that I'd have some fun rubbing up my knowledge of the language. For let me tell you that colloquial Genoese doesn't take you very far into Dante or Boccaccio! I think that was one reason why Rosa had disliked the idea of living in Italy. Although I didn't notice it much, being a foreigner, her speech was not refined. How could it be, down on the Via Milano ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... wither in such hot-house air. It was rapidly becoming unnatural. They performed in the daylight stray clarified bits from Fletcher or Moliere, drama of an era over-ripe; they sang only from an old book of madrigals; their very reading was fragmentary,—now an emasculated Boccaccio, then a curdling phantasm of Poe's, and after some such scenic horror as the "Red Death" Helen Heath ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... masterly way than Killigrew's clumsily developed episode. In Thomaso it occupies a considerable space, and becomes both tedious and brutally unpleasant. The apt conclusion of the amour in The Rover with Blunt's parlous mishap is originally derived from Boccaccio, Second Day, Novel 5, where a certain Andreuccio finds himself in the same unsavoury predicament as the Essex squireen. However, even this was by no means new to the English stage. In Blurt Master Constable, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... embraces under a false pretence. How a woman could consent to lie in the arms of a man who had cast her off, and who believed when he was enjoying her that she was a mistress whom he preferred is beyond my comprehension. It is so in Boccaccio, but that is no excuse. Devotion to a man who is indifferent or who hates, is tragically possible, but in its greatest intensity ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... shoulders of Hercules, the rounded arm of Juno, the beautiful bust of Hebe, the godlike pose of Apollo or the shapely limb of Aphrodite that painter and sculptor seek to reproduce; it is an "effect" similar to that of Boccaccio or a fragrant French novel. It is not against the true in art that the West is rebelling, but ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the birthplace of important new ideas which give the intellectual life of the sixteenth century its character of brave endeavor after high and distant ends. The enthusiasm for ancient literature already aroused by the native poets, Dante (1300), Petrarch (1341), and Boccaccio (1350), was nourished by the influx of Greek scholars, part of whom came in pursuance of an invitation to the Council of Ferrara and Florence (1438) called in behalf of the union of the Churches ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... finest weather in the world: but I am bound to add my belief that they would have laughed were it the worst. With no money, no weather, and taxes intolerable, Pistoja laughed and looked handsome. Was not Boccaccio a Pistolese? I was reminded of his book at every turn of the road: life is a wanton story there, or, say, a Masque of Green Things, enacted by a splendid fairy rout. They were still the well-favoured race ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... comedy of manners, shooting as it flies the folly rather than the wickedness of vice: not wounding with a red-hot iron, but "just flicking with uplifted lash," Horace stands to Juvenal as Chaucer stands to Langland, as Dante to Boccaccio. His theme is life and conduct, the true path to happiness and goodness. I write sermons in sport, he says; but sermons by a fellow-sinner, not by a dogmatic pulpiteer, not by a censor or a cynic. "Conversations" we may rather call them; the ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... several times or by various witnesses. For by such means extrapolations and combinations of the material are made possible. By way of warning, let me remind you of an ancient and much quoted anecdote, first brought to light by Boccaccio: A young and much loved abb was teased by a bevy of ladies to narrate what had happened in the first confession he had experienced. After long hesitation the young fellow decided that it was no sin to relate the confessed ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... but never a tumble, that we galloped across the stony plain, and reached the camp about seven p.m. Here we found a silk merchant from Nikosia waiting to see us, with a collection of the soft silks of the country, celebrated since the days of Boccaccio. They look rather like poplin, but are really made entirely of silk, three-quarters of a yard in width, and costing about three shillings a yard, the piece being actually reckoned in piastres for price ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... "I have just read Longfellow's introduction to his 'Tales of the Inn'—a splendid piece of painting! Neither Boccaccio nor Chaucer has done better. Who wrote 'A Loyal Woman's No?' Was it Lucy Larcom? I ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... Boccaccio, when he takes his queen into a grassy meadow and seats her in the midst of her ladies, and makes her and them and their admirers tell their stories, seems to have given rise to the ideas which Cicero has used when introducing his Roman ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... to their criticism. While he admired the splendour and invention of Ariosto, he could not tolerate his moral tone. Tasso struck him as cold and artificial, in spite of his "delicate moral sensibility." Boccaccio he preferred to both; and his remarks on this prose-poet are extremely characteristic. "How much do I admire Boccaccio! What descriptions of nature are those in his little introductions to every new day! It is the morning of life stripped of that mist of familiarity which makes it ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... Arthurian story, the matter thus presented caught hold of the mediaeval imagination with a remarkable grip, and some of the most interesting literary successions of all history date from it. Among them it is almost enough to mention the chain of names—Benoit de Sainte-More, Guido Colonna, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Henryson—which reaches Shakespeare, and does not cease with him, all successively elaborating the history of Troilus and Cressida. The lively story, first formed, like so many others, by the French genius, and well, if rather impudently, copied by Colonna; ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... that of Paris and London; and in Florence, an English nobility that had come in quest of sunlight and a chance to air its straw hats, show off the fair hair of its ladies, and chatter its own language in gardens where once upon a time the somber Dante dreamed and Boccaccio told his merry tales to ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... have only to read the literature of the time when there was no divorce to realize how little a safeguard it is for the home. Boccaccio gives a social portrait of such a life, and he is almost too indecent to read. Yet the picture he gives is not half so terrible as Saint Catherine of Siena gives. They had to cut that ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... pedestal which trembles as if it were founded on the sands." These sands, your uncounted volumes, are all of gold, and make a foundation more solid than the rock. As well might the singer of Odysseus, or the authors of the "Arabian Nights," or the first inventors of the stories of Boccaccio, believe that their works were perishable (their names, indeed, have perished), as the creator of "Les Trois Mousquetaires" alarm himself with the thought that the world could ever ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... book, the sixth chapter, and in the seventh book, the twenty-third chapter, where his body was buried, and after found and translated into the said monastery. Ye shall see also in the history of Boccaccio, in his book 'De casu principum,' part of his noble acts and also of his fall. Also Galfridus in his British book recounteth his life, and in divers places of England many remembrances be yet of him, and shall remain perpetually, and also of his knights. First in the Abbey of Westminster ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... great symbolists, they are restricted by a sense of some obtaining conception, some weird metaphysical weird or preconception. This is the ground "Ian MacLaren" has for saying that "his kinship is not with Boccaccio and Rabelais, but with Dante and Spenser"—the ground for many remarks by critics to the effect that they still crave from him "less symbol and more individuality"—the ground for the Rev. W. J. Dawson's remark that "he has a powerful and persistent sense ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... name given to ANGELO ALLORI (1502-1572), the Florentine painter. He became the favourite pupil of J. da Pontormo. He painted the portraits of some of the most famous men of his day, such as Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Most of his best works are in Florence, but examples are in the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... of metrical tales of a light and satirical nature in vogue widely in France during the 12th and 13th centuries; many of the stories were of Oriental origin, but were infused with the French spirit of the times; La Fontaine, Boccaccio, and Chaucer drew freely on them; they are marked by all the vivacity and perspicuity, if also lubricity, of their modern successors in the French novel ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... immortal Dante took his country by surprise. The Divina Comedia was written about the year 1300. Its illustrious author, the creator of the national poetry of his country, died in 1321, leaving behind him Petrarch, who was crowned in the Capitol in 1341, and Boccaccio, who—though, as Byron said of Scott, he spoiled his poetry by writing better prose—was nevertheless a poet of no mean merit, and the probable inventor of the ottava rima. Two centuries after the last of these parents ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... Boccaccio In such Italian gentleness of speech As finds no echo in this northern air To counterpart its music—long ago, When Saladin was Soldan of the East, The kings let cry a general crusade; And to the trysting-plains ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... distracted in my choice, and know not which to follow. It is sufficient to say, according to the proverb, that here is God's plenty.' And soon after he goes on to assert (though Heaven knows in terms far below the whole truth), the superiority of Chaucer to Boccaccio. And, in the meantime, who was this eulogist of Chaucer? Why, the man who himself was never equalled upon this earth, unless by Chaucer, in the art of fine narration: it is John Dryden ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... attention to a picture reproduced in this article from a book published in the year 1493. The book was a French translation of Boccaccio's collection of stories called "Noble Women." The picture shows a woolen mill being operated in the grounds of a palace by a queen and her ladies-in-waiting. It summons back the days when even the daughters of kings and nobles ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... courtesans I had read Boccaccio and Bandello; above all, I had read Shakespeare. I had dreamed of those beautiful triflers; of those cherubim of hell. A thousand times I had drawn those heads so poetically foolish, so enterprising in audacity, heads of harebrained mistresses ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... you should do. Your company is a company of improvisers. You supply the dialogue as you proceed, which is rather more than Moliere ever attempted. You may, if you prefer it—though it would seem to me to be yielding to an excess of scruple—go straight to Boccaccio or Sacchetti. But even then you cannot be sure that ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... crime, like that of Philomela and Procne, which were so popular among Greek and Roman poets, and presumably suited their readers. With amusing naivete Eckstein pleads for these "specimens of antique romance" on the ground that there is more lubricity in Bandello and Boccaccio!—which is like declaring that a man who assassinates another by simply hitting him on the head is virtuous because there are others who make murder a fine art. I commend the stories of Parthenius to the special attention of ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... a good Christian. I believe, with all my heart, in the Christian religion, like the fellow in Boccaccio,—because I think it must be from God, or else the Popes and Cardinals would have had it out of the world long ago. Nothing but the Lord Himself could have kept it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... his position by so often contradicting himself. Besides Ruskin, Watts was beginning to make other friends, and was a member of the Cosmopolitan Club, which counted among its members Sir Robert Morier, Sir Henry Layard, FitzGerald, Palgrave, and Spedding. The large painting of the 'Story from Boccaccio', which now hangs in the Watts room of the Tate Gallery, hung for many years on the walls of this club and was presented to the nation in 1902. How frequently Watts attended the club or other social ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... episode of Francesca da Rimini, of which Landor's Boccaccio says: "Such a depth of intuitive judgment, such a delicacy of perception, exists not in any other work of human genius; and from an author who, on almost all occasions, in this part of the work, betrays ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... reconciliation of Isabella, so that she pleads successfully for his life. It was from Whetstone, a contemporary English writer, that Shakespeare derived the outline of Cinthio's "rare history" of Promos and Cassandra, one of that numerous class of Italian stories, like Boccaccio's Tancred of Salerno, in which the mere energy of southern passion has everything its own way, and which, though they may repel many a northern reader by a certain crudity in their colouring, seem to have been full of fascination for the Elizabethan ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... were distributed among his friends, when, on the eve of publication, he decided to omit it. Again, in 1869, it was sent to press with a new third part added, and was again withdrawn, the third part only—'The Golden Supper,' founded on a story in Boccaccio's Decameron—being published in the volume, 'The Holy Grail.' In 1866, 1870 and 1875, attempts had been made by Mr Herne Shepherd to publish editions of 'The Lover's Tale,' reprinted from stray proof copies of the 1833 printing. Each of these attempts was repressed by Tennyson, and at last in ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... painted a Madonna. In the house of the Carducci, now belonging to the Pandolfini, the same man depicted certain famous men, some from imagination and some portrayed from life, among whom are Filippo Spano degli Scolari, Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio, and others. At Scarperia in Mugello, over the door of the Vicar's Palace, he painted a very beautiful nude figure of Charity, which has since been ruined. In the year 1478, when Giuliano de' Medici was killed and his ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... past the towers Aslant toward heaven, and listen to the hours Chimed by the bells of choirs where Dante prayed. They cease; then lo! the foot of time seems stayed Five hundred years and more, I find me bowers Where sweet and noble ladies weave them flowers For one who reads Boccaccio in the shade. The cowled students halt by two and threes To hear the voice come thrilling through the trees, Then tear themselves away to themes more trite. Anon I mark the diligent hands that turn Unlovely parchment scrolls whereby to learn The beauty ...
— Briefless Ballads and Legal Lyrics - Second Series • James Williams
... were purely popular songs. The people of Venice, however, are passionate for operas. Therefore we had duets and solos from 'Ernani,' the 'Ballo in Maschera,' and the 'Forza del Destino,' and one comic chorus from 'Boccaccio,' which seemed to make them wild with pleasure. To my mind, the best of these more formal pieces was a duet between Attila and Italia from some opera unknown to me, which Antonio and Piero performed with incomparable spirit. It was noticeable how, descending ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... took a carriage thither, winding our way up the hillsides, and passing many a picturesque-looking villa. One of them, Villa Mozzi, is the property of an English artist, Mr. William Spence; another, the Villa dei Tre Visi—celebrated in one of Boccaccio's tales—belongs to the Earl of Balcarres. This site is much esteemed for the views it commands of the beautiful plains and valleys by which fair Florence is environed. Many of Italy's men of genius have retired to these ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... heads; and he finds them in the trampled marketplaces of two noisy, turbulent, unreasonable, pestilent little democratic cities,—Athens and Florence. Extinguish the architecture and the sculpture, the poetry and the philosophy of Attica; obliterate from the sum of civilization the names of Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machiavelli,—of Cimabue, Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Brunelleschi, Michel Angelo,—of Brunetto, Ficino, Politian; and how much diminished will ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... and one of them being Christopher Hatton, afterwards known as Elizabeth's "dancing Chancellor." Except in the article of blank-verse, the writers seem to have taken Gorboduc as their model; each Act beginning with a dumb-show, and ending with a chorus. The play was founded on one of Boccaccio's tales, an English version of which had recently appeared in ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... limited, as exact, and as unimaginative as the machines of his own village. Peter has no romance in him; hence he will never find it, nor increase it in this world. This very case only proves my point; that to meet romance one must have it. Boccaccio said he did not write novels, but lived them. Try to imagine Peter living a romance! He could be concerned in a dozen and never dream it. They would not interest him even if he did notice them. And I'll prove it to you." Mr. Pierce raised his ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... David in the Bible, the "Odyssey," Sophocles, AEschylus, Shakespeare, Scott; old Dumas in his chivalrous note; Dickens rather than Thackeray, and the "Tale of Two Cities" out of Dickens: such were some of his preferences. To Ariosto and Boccaccio he was always faithful; "Burnt Njal" was a late favourite; and he found at least a passing entertainment in the "Arcadia" and the "Grand Cyrus." George Eliot he outgrew, finding her latterly only sawdust in the mouth; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was nothing else on foot, it is said that the company amused themselves by telling stories, each in turn, and out of their tales grew the collection of the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles[11], named in imitation of Boccaccio's Cento Novelle. ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... us that all the liberties, reforms and political achievements of society have been gained by nations thrilling and throbbing to one great enthusiasm. The Renaissance does not mean a single Dante, nor Boccaccio, but a national enthusiasm and a "god within all minds." The Reformation is not a single Savonarola, nor Luther, but a universal enthusiasm and "a god within," all heart and conscience. If we study these movements of society as typified by their ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... Boccaccio, is not happy. The figures are not Italian; nor is the costume of the age of the book. His "Girl and Cupid" is a little gem, reminding us of Schidoni. We presume these lines are ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... de Hausee has his veiled lady. Each is a pious fraud to the other. Imagine the double current of their thoughts, the deceit, the hypocrisy, the colossal lie behind them both which makes the inspiring truth a fact! It is an anecdote to be told in the Boccaccio manner—gracefully, with humour, with much indulgence ... otherwise, it might be the sort of story they ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... the rocks, and the quiet village sequestered beneath, glassing its roofs and solitary tower upon the wave, it had been with a gay summer troop of light friends, who had paused on the opposite shore during the heats of noon, and, over wine and fruits, had mimicked the groups of Boccaccio, and intermingled the lute, the jest, the momentary love, and ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... experienced by the masculine progenitor. O, bachelors! be warned in time; let not love link you to his flowery traces and draw you into the temple of Hymen! Be not deluded by the glowing fallacies of Anacreon and Boccaccio, but remember that they were bachelors. There is nothing exhilarating in caudle, nor enchanting in Kensington-gardens, when you are converted into a light porter of children. We have been married, and are now seventy-one, and wear a "brown George;" consequently, we have experience and cool blood ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... Bibliotheque/Bibliotheque Boccaccio/Bocaccio/Boccacio De Foe/Defoe Francais/Francois Lomenie/Lomenie Montfaucon/Montfaucon Roxburgh/Roxburghe Shakspeare/Shakespeare Spenser/Spencer ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... friar, without the booklets and sermons that split our sides with laughter, without the amusing contrast between grand pretensions and small brains, without the actual, daily representations of the tales of Boccaccio and La Fontaine! Without the girdles and scapularies, what would you have our women do in the future—save that money and perhaps become miserly and covetous? Without the masses, novenaries, and processions, where will you find games of panguingui to entertain them in their hours of leisure? ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... And, though it be filthy, it yet hath a splendor of mere animalism of good spirits... I would say it is scatalogical rather than erotic, save for one touch toward the end. Indeed, it seems more of Rabelais than of Boccaccio or Masuccio or Aretino—is brutally British rather than lasciviously latinate, as to the subjects, but sumptuous as ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... migliori loici che avesse il mondo, et ottimo filosofo naturale.... E percio che egli alquanto tenea della opinione degli Epicuri, si diceva tra la gente volgare che queste sue speculazioni eran solo in cercare se trovar si potesse che Iddio non fosse.[1] (The Decameron of Messer Giovanni Boccaccio, Sixth Day, Novella IX.) ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... printed at Venice in 1755, and in 1767 an account of his antique gems in two volumes folio, written by Antonio Francesco Gori, was published in the same city under the title of Dactyliotheca Smithiana. An edition of Boccaccio's Decamerone was brought out ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... became worse in his versions. What was innocent contracted a taint from passing through his mind. He made the grossest satires of Juvenal more gross, interpolated loose descriptions in the tales of Boccaccio, and polluted the sweet and limpid poetry of the Georgics with filth which would have moved the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... singer who has invested this wood with poetical associations. It is well known that Boccaccio laid his story of 'Honoria' in the pine-forest, and every student of English literature must be familiar with the noble tale in verse which Dryden has founded on this part of the 'Decameron.' We ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... seasoning for sermons, and very strong seasoning they must have been found. The stories were translated into French, and thus gave rise to the Fabliau, which allowed full expression to the esprit Gaulois. From France the Fabliau passed to Italy, and came ultimately into the hands of Boccaccio, under whose influence it became transformed ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... I experienced," he says, "in Italy was living in the same neighborhood, and thinking, as I went about, of Boccaccio. Boccaccio's father had a house at Maiano, supposed to have been situated at the Fiesolan extremity of the hamlet. That merry-hearted writer was so fond of the place that he has not only laid the two scenes of the 'Decameron' on ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... in the quainter squares of the more primitive island villages—in Burano or Chioggia—before the Duomo, some reader lies at full length in the brilliant moonlight under the banner of San Marco, his "Boccaccio" open before him, repeating in a half-chant, monotonous and droning, some favorite tale from the well-worn pages to listeners who pause in groups in their evening stroll and linger until another story is begun; this time it is some strophe from the "Gerusalemme," ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... words Walter Theodore Watts into “Gualtiero Teodoro Gualtieri”—a name, I may add in passing, which appears as an inscription on one at least of the valuable Christmas presents he made me, a rare old Venetian Boccaccio. My portion of the book was already in existence, but that which was to have been the main feature of the volume, a ballad of Rossetti’s to be called ‘Michael Scott’s Wooing’ (which had no relation to early designs of his bearing that name), hung fire for ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... no longer believe it is possible to be certain of the place. At any rate, all the guide-books, Baedeker, Murray, and Hare, are wrong, though not so far out as that gentleman who, having assured us that Boccaccio was a "little priest," and that Petrarch, Poliziano, Lorenzo, and Pulci were of no account as poets, remarks that Shelley's body was found at Lerici, and that ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... is regarded by the Africans as a kind of theft. It is a vice, therefore, and so common that one might write a Decameron of native tales like those of Boccaccio. And what in Boccaccio is more poignant and more vicious than this song of the Benga, which I have often heard them sing, young men and women together, when ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... contemporaneous with the mediaeval revival was the resuscitation of antiquity; in proportion as the new civilization developed, the old civilization was exhumed; real Latin began to be studied only when real Italian began to be written; Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio were at once the founders of modern literature and the exponents of the literature of antiquity; the strong young present was to profit by the experience ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... read Boccaccio, perhaps; and that's as well, as to the hint he gives, which may be borrowed from one of that author's stories. But Miss Clarissa Harlowe is above all artifice. She must have some ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... school, seldom containing a fresh or personal note. Another is the stilted allegory with erotic or historical page xvi content, for whose many sins Dante was chiefly responsible, though Petrarch, he of the Triunfi, and Boccaccio cannot escape some blame. Third is a vein of highly moral reflections upon the vanity of life and certainty of death, sometimes running to political satire. Its roots may be found in the Book of Job, ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... "at Padua of a worthy clerk...now dead," who was called "Francis Petrarch, the laureate poet," may of course merely imply that Chaucer borrowed the "Clerk's Tale" from Petrarch's Latin version of the original by Boccaccio. But the meeting which the expression suggests may have actually taken place, and may have been accompanied by the most suitable conversation which the imagination can supply; while, on the other hand, it is a conjecture unsupported by any evidence whatever, that a previous ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... we must point to the Essay in which Montaigne lays down his ideas about woman and love. French ladies, he says, study Boccaccio and such-like writers, in order to become skilful (habiles). 'But there is no word, no example, no single step in that matter which they do not know better than our books do. That is a knowledge bred in their ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... introduced by the Moors, or brought back by the crusaders; from ancient classical literature; from traditions of the church and the lives of the saints; from the old mythologies; from common life and experience. Among many mediaeval collections of them, the most famous are the "Decameron" of Boccaccio, and the "Geste Romanorum", a collection made and used by the priests ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... executed as those of Giotto. Among other portraits which he made, the chapel of the Podesta palace at Florence still contains that of Dante Aligheri, his close companion and friend, no less famous as a poet than Giotto then was as a painter. This poet has been warmly praised by M. Giovanni Boccaccio in the introduction to the story of M. Forese da Rabatta. In this same chapel Giotto has also painted his own portrait as well as those of Ser Brunetto Latini, Dante's master, and M. Corso Donati, a famous citizen of the time. Giotto's first paintings were in the chapel of the high altar ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... Italian garden are countless. It is not like any other garden in the world. It is at once more formal and more wild, at once greener with more abundant youth and venerable with more antique age. It has all Boccaccio between its walls, all Petrarca in its leaves, all Raffaelle in its skies. And then the sunshine that beggars words and laughs at painters!—the boundless, intense, delicious, heavenly light! What do other gardens know of that, save in orange-groves of Granada and ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... Boccaccio's ideal of feminine beauty, a voluptuous ideal as compared with the ascetic mediaeval ideal which had previously prevailed, together with the characteristics of the very beautiful and almost classic garments ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... saw titled courtesans I read Boccaccio and Andallo; tasting of everything, I read Shakespeare. I had dreamed of those beautiful triflers; of those cherubim of hell. A thousand times I had drawn those heads so poetically foolish, so enterprising in audacity, heads ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... or squires who contributed the other stories, mention will be made in the notes. Of the stories, I may here mention that 14 or 15 were taken from Boccaccio, and as many more from Poggio or other Italian writers, or French fabliaux, but about 70 of them appear ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... of July, and all the world were at a breakfast given, at a fanciful cottage situate in beautiful gardens on the banks of the Thames, by Lady Everingham. The weather was as bright as the romances of Boccaccio; there were pyramids of strawberries, in bowls colossal enough to hold orange-trees; and the choicest band filled the air with enchanting strains, while a brilliant multitude sauntered on turf like velvet, or ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... fine unexpurgated translation of Boccaccio's "Decameron," Mr. Haywood illustrated. I should say you would get more than the amount of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... lungs and to our day-dreams; when voluptuousness, made visible and ambient as the air, holds you in your easy-chair; when, a spoon in your hand, you sip an ice or a sorbet, the town at your feet and fair woman opposite—such Boccaccio hours can be known only in Italy and on ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... piping hot! And a notice how, only this morning, three liberal thieves were shot. Above it, behold the Archbishop's most fatherly of rebukes, And beneath, with his crown and his lion, some little new law of the Duke's! Or a sonnet with flowery marge, to the Reverend Don So-and-so Who is Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca, Saint Jerome and Cicero, "And moreover," (the sonnet goes rhyming,) "the skirts of Saint Paul has reached, Having preached us those six Lent-lectures more unctuous than ever he preached," Noon strikes,—here sweeps the procession! ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... His allegory itself is but one part allegory and nine parts beauty and enjoyment; sometimes an excess of flesh and blood. His wholesale poetical belief, mixing up all creeds and mythologies, but with less violence, resembles that of Dante and Boccaccio. His versification is ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... beauty in their aspect, and such divinity in the figures, that they breathe out a spirit of grace and life. There, also, are the learned Sappho, the most divine Dante, the gracious Petrarca, and the amorous Boccaccio, who are wholly alive, with Tibaldeo, and an endless number of other moderns; and this scene is composed with much ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... {269f} Boccaccio's Decameron is in my library in many forms—in 3 volumes of the Villon Society's publications, translated by John Payne; in 2 handsome volumes issued by Laurence & Bullen; and in the Extra Volumes of Bohn's Library. There is a pretty edition available ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... prayer and thanksgiving. ["Bismillah" (in full, Bismillahi 'rrahmani 'rrahiem, i.e. "In the name of Allah the God of Mercy, the Merciful") is often used as a deprecatory formula. Sir R. Burton (Arabian Nights, i. 40) cites as an equivalent the "remembering Iddio e' Santi," of Boccaccio's Decameron, viii. 9. ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... to waist was the opposite of that common to sculptured figures, and his hand-shake was particularly soft and snaky. He quickly took charge of the conversation and led it into anecdotes very few of which could be set down by the writers of modern days, denied the catholic privileges of old Boccaccio ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... the collection, taken from Boccaccio, were to have been associated with tales from the same source, intended to have been written by a friend; but illness on his part and distracting engagements on mine, prevented us from accomplishing our plan ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... People, chap. v. For the mortality in the Paris hospitals, see Desmazes, Supplices, Prisons et Graces en France, Paris 1866. For striking descriptions of plague-stricken cities, see the well-known passages in Thucydides, Boccaccio, De Foe, and, above all, Manzoni's Promessi Sposi. For examples of averting the plagues by processions, see Leopold Delisle, Etudes sur la Condition de la Classe Agricole, etc., en Normandie au Moyen Age, p. 630; also Fort, chap. xxiii. For the anger of St. ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... I'll have Boccaccio—he's quite the proper one; He certainly is gamey, and a trifle underdone; And for the salad, Addison, so fresh and crisp is he, With just a touch of Pope to give a tang to him, ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... opinion was asked replied, 'Eloquence is truth spoken with fervour.' I am going on with it, though slowly, and fill up the rest of my leisure time with Dante and Machiavelli (with which last author I am delighted) in the morning, and with Boccaccio and our English poets in the evening. Sight-seeing does not occupy much ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... book-loving poet, and he is said to have met the book-loving ecclesiastic Richard de Bury at Rome. He gave his library to the Church of St. Mark at Venice in 1362; but the guardians allowed the books to decay, and few were rescued. Boccaccio bequeathed his library to the Augustinians at Florence, but one cannot imagine the books of the accomplished author of the Decameron as very well suited for the needs of a religious society, and it was probably weeded before Boccaccio's death. The ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... exemplified in the works appearing from the thirteenth century on. When Lydgate, as late as the fifteenth century, describes one of the processes by which literature is produced, we are reminded of Anglo-Saxon comment. "Laurence,"[17] the poet's predecessor in translating Boccaccio's Falls of Princes, is ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... word at all, I should mean educated, evolved. Is this evolved? Is it even educated? It is not always grammatical. It has no style. In motive, it ante-dates Boccaccio." ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... fountains and the sonorous undertone of the organ, like the distant roar of surf upon the beach? Ah, me! ah, me! how materialistic you are, my children. Your old uncle hears in these myriad-voiced fountains the musical instruments which Boccaccio gave to the Satyrs; 'cymbals, pipes, and whistling reeds,' and the song of the nymphs. Did you note that startled cry? It is the Oread Arethusa flying from the river-god Alpheus. He is imprisoned in the organ, where he is mightily bellowing, and whence he will ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... charming work in the room is a Boccaccio Boccaccini, No. 600, full of sweetness and pretty thoughts. The Madonna is surrounded by saints, the figure in the centre having the true Boccaccini face. The whole picture is a delight, whether as a group of nice holy people, a landscape, or a fantasy of embroidery. The condition of the ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... Genoa and the brilliant court of the Visconti at Milan; at Florence, where the memory of Dante, the "great master" whom he commemorates so reverently in his verse, was still living, he may have met Boccaccio; at Padua, like his own clerk of Oxenford, he possibly caught the story of Griseldis ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... is an innocent. In spite of his forty and some years clearly sounded, and his romantic experiences, his love for good eating and other nice things, the highest point of extravagance of all sorts for him were Boccaccio, Paul de Kock, ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... which has resemblances to it in Boccaccio and Chaucer, is told to Rinaldo while riding through a wood in Asia, with a damsel behind him on the same horse. He has engaged to combat in her behalf with a band of knights; and the lady relates it to beguile ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... in the literature of Europe. From it, and the Scandinavian mythology spring all the fairy tales of modern nations. And these romances of the Koran form the groundwork of the fabliaux of the Trouveres, and of the romantic epics of Boccaccio, Tasso, Ariosto, Spenser and Shakespeare. Mohammed's teaching unified the different tribes of Arabia, and fostered a feeling of national pride, and a desire for learning. So rapidly did this develop that ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... furthering his poetic ability: though no great reader, he has soaked himself in the atmosphere of old Italian tales, and the very spirit of mediaeval Florence breathes from the story, borrowed from Boccaccio, "an echo in the north-wind sung," which narrates how the hapless Isabelle bid away the head of her ...
— A Day with Keats • May (Clarissa Gillington) Byron
... adulterous abominations and gluttonous feasts, and the lust of the eye, and the pride of the flesh. Down with the foul-blooded Cardinal, who gossips at the altar, and borrows money of the despised Jews for his secret sins! Down with the monk whose missal is Boccaccio! Down with God's Vicegerent who traffics in Cardinals' hats, who dare not take the Eucharist without a Pretaster, who is all absorbed in profane Greek texts, in cunning jewel-work, in political manoeuvres and domestic intrigues, who comes caracoling in crimson and ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... celebrated author. Indeed, I had already received sufficient proof of the general propensity of the common people to read—whether good or bad books ... but let us hope and believe the former. I left the bibliomaniacal postboy to his Boccaccio, and prepared to visit the CASTLE... the once proud and yet commanding residence of ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... of the loving heart—of harrowing shrieks and silence dire—of the variety of disease, desertion, famine, despair, and death? There are many books which can feed the appetite craving for these things; let them turn to the accounts of Boccaccio, De Foe, and Browne. The vast annihilation that has swallowed all things—the voiceless solitude of the once busy earth—the lonely state of singleness which hems me in, has deprived even such details of their stinging reality, and mellowing the lurid tints of past anguish with ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... 15,000l., and the King's timid party of men with much to lose won a temporary triumph. He sent 21,000 livres to his Avignon household, adding, 'I received yours with a list of my bookes: I find sumne missing of them. Particularly Fra Paulo [Sarpi] and Boccaccio, which are both rare. If you find any let ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... remarked and reprehended in England; and, if the second-named vice exists, at any rate, it adopts the decency of secrecy and is not made patent and notorious to all the world. A French gentleman thinks no more of proclaiming that he has a mistress than that he has a tailor; and one lives the time of Boccaccio over again, in the thousand and one French novels which depict society ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... father of the revival of ancient literature. Not only was he himself a profound student of it, but he suggested to Boccaccio that line of study which governed the entire intellectual life of the author of the "Decameron." With the application of Boccaccio to the translation of Homer into Latin we perceive a singular illustration of the trend of the classic devotion ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... the comparison of Christianity with other creeds reappears in a tale of Boccaccio,(293) in which the three great religions are represented under the allegory of three rings which a father gave to his children, so exactly alike that the judges could not decide which was the genuine ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... still Davie is not done; I am grinding singly at The Ebb Tide, as we now call the Farallone; the most of it will go this mail. About the following, let there be no mistake: I will not write the abstract of Kidnapped; write it who will, I will not. Boccaccio must have been a clever fellow to write both argument and story; I am ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Every other book becomes clean, once one has read the New Testament: for example, immediately after reading Paul I took up with delight that most charming and wanton of scoffers, Petronius, of whom one may say what Domenico Boccaccio wrote of Caesar Borgia to the Duke of Parma: "e tutto festo"—immortally healthy, immortally cheerful and sound.... These petty bigots make a capital miscalculation. They attack, but everything they attack is thereby distinguished. ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... Italy began to produce the inspired artists who broke the bonds of Byzantine traditions and turned back to the inspiration of all art, which is Nature. Giotto, tending his sheep, began to draw pictures of things as he saw them, Savonarola awoke the conscience, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio—a string of names to conjure with—all roused the intellect. The dawn of the Renaissance flushed Europe with the life of civilisation. But before the wonderful development of art through the reversion ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... quietly, so cheerfully, and so contentedly. Therefore my Bed-Book is almost entirely an English Bed-Book, for I liked not the biting acid of Voltaire's epigrams any more than the rollicking and disgustful coarseness of Boccaccio or Rabelais. It is an interesting reflection, if it be true, that English literature is par excellence ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... especially, with the fall of the Palaeologi, the Greek classics burst upon Western Europe, there was no literature with which to compare them. The Jewish Scriptures were not regarded as literature by readers of the Vulgate. Dante, it is true, had given to the world his immortal vision, and Boccaccio, its first expounder, had shown the capabilities of Italian prose. But the light of Florentine culture was even for Italy a partial illumination. On the whole, we may say that modern literature did not exist, and the Oriental had not yet come to light. What wonder that the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... Mary Shelley's faults as a writer: verbosity, loose plotting, somewhat stereotyped and extravagant characterization. The reader must be tolerant of its heroine's overwhelming lamentations. But she is, after all, in the great tradition of romantic heroines: she compares her own weeping to that of Boccaccio's Ghismonda over the heart of Guiscardo. If the reader can accept Mathilda on her own terms, he will find not only biographical interest in her story but also intrinsic merits: a feeling for character and situation and phrasing that is ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... who had learned the art of silence as well as of speech, was sent abroad on a series of diplomatic missions. In Italy he probably met the poet Petrarch (as we infer from the Prologue to the Clerk's Tale) and became familiar with the works of Dante and Boccaccio. His subsequent poetry shows a decided advance in range and originality, partly because of his own growth, no doubt, and partly because of his better models. This second period, of about fifteen years, is called the time ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... o'er my own vacancy! And as I watch'd the dull continuous ache, Which, all else slum'bring, seem'd alone to wake; O Friend! long wont to notice yet conceal, And soothe by silence what words cannot heal, I but half saw that quiet hand of thine Place on my desk this exquisite design. Boccaccio's Garden and its faery, The love, the joyaunce, and the gallantry! An Idyll, with Boccaccio's spirit warm, Framed in the silent poesy of form. Like flocks adown a newly-bathed steep Emerging from a mist: or like a stream Of music soft that not dispels ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons |
