"Boccaccio" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Chaucer. Contrary to the general taste of his age, he had long felt and often expressed great admiration for the fourteenth-century poet. His work on Ovid had first turned his thought to Chaucer, he tells us, and by association he linked with him Boccaccio. As his life drew near its close he turned to those famous old story-tellers, and in the Fables gave us paraphrases in verse of eight of their most delightful tales, with translations from Homer and Ovid, a verse letter to his kinsman John Driden, his second St. Cedlia's Ode, entitled Alexander's ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... which if complete would fill a volume, any longer. In the middle ages, believe me, Dante would occupy the sacred heights: at the feet of the singer of Paradise all Italy would be spread out like a garden; Boccaccio and Ariosto would there disport themselves, and Tasso would find again the orange groves of Sorrento. Usually a corner would be reserved for each of the various nations, but the authors would take delight in leaving it, and in their travels would recognise, where ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... men withal; the things Turenne says are full of sagacity and geniality, like sayings of Samuel Johnson. The great heart, the clear deep-seeing eye: there it lies; no man whatever, in what province soever, can prosper at all without these. Petrarch and Boccaccio did diplomatic messages, it seems, quite well: one can easily believe it; they had done things a little harder than these! Burns, a gifted song-writer, might have made a still better Mirabeau. Shakspeare,—one knows not what he could not have ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... subtleties of dialectics; they are abuses, things by which our lives can never be amended: take the plain philosophical discourses, learn how rightly to choose, and then rightly to apply them; they are more easy to be understood than one of Boccaccio's novels; a child from nurse is much more capable of them, than of learning to read or to write. Philosophy has discourses proper for childhood, as well as for ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... those annoyances which, in the best regulated families, are certain to be partially 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... specifications are endless, countless, superfinely minute. Even no two of the commonest men does she make alike; her men of genius she diversifies at once grandly and delicately, broadly and subtly. "Petrarch and Boccaccio did diplomatic messages," says Mr. Carlyle. We hope they did, or could have done, in the prosaic field, much better than that. We Americans know with what moderate equipment diplomatic messages ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... written of Dante, like Boccaccio and Rossetti, have shown as rare a creative ability as some claim Dante revealed ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... the collection of his immortal romanzas with a prefatory survey. The clever Boccaccio talks with flattering courtesy to all women, both at the beginning and at the end of his opulent book. The great Cervantes too, an old man in agony, but still genial and full of delicate wit, drapes the motley spectacle of his lifelike writings with the costly tapestry of a preface, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... 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 would hardly ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... time to the reading of novels it must be a crime to professionally pander to and profit by the vice. And if all this is true, what a wonderfully attractive corner that must be in Hades where are old Homer and the ever young Aristophanes, Sophocles and AEschylus, Dante, Virgil and Boccaccio, Shakespeare and Moliere, Goethe and Hugo, Balzac and Thackeray, Scott and Dumas, Dickens and that wonderful child of Bohemia, who lately lay down to rest on Vailima mountain. Think of all these marvelous eons of genius ...
— On the Vice of Novel Reading. - Being a brief in appeal, pointing out errors of the lower tribunal. • Young E. Allison
... History of the English 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. Sebastian as a cause of the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... 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
... was a lover of the arts and of letters, and he did many works to enrich and beautify the city. He established the first printing-office in Mantua, where the first book printed was the "Decamerone" of Boccaccio. He founded a college of advocates, and he dug canals for irrigation; and the prosperity of Mantuan manufacturers in his time may be inferred from the fact that, when the King of Denmark paid him a visit, in 1474, the merchants decked their shops ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... the famous Mirror for Magistrates, or rather that part of it contributed by Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst. The Mirror as a whole has bibliographical and prosodic rather than literary interest. It was certainly planned as early as 1555 by way of a supplement to Lydgate's translation of Boccaccio's Fall of Princes. It was at first edited by a certain William Baldwin, and for nearly half a century it received additions and alterations from various respectable hacks of letters; but the ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... provided by his English friends with 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
... the "Indian Antiquary" of 1873) relates the "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. A.D. 1430) derived ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... throat had 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 Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... because there is an atmosphere round this sort of classical ground, to which that of actual life is gross and vulgar."[55] His knowledge of Italian was no more thorough, though here he was more nearly on a level with his contemporaries. For Boccaccio indeed he showed an intense affection, and he could write intelligently, if not deeply, concerning Dante and Ariosto and Tasso.[56] With French he naturally had a wider acquaintance, but still nothing beyond the reach of the very general reader. The notable point is that he refrains from ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Blondeau, with the air of Fiammetta telling her prettiest story to the Florentines in the garden of Boccaccio. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Summer in my Room here with Boccaccio. What a Mercy that one can return with a Relish to these Books! As Don Quixote can only be read in his Spanish, so I do fancy Boccaccio only in his Italian: and yet one is used to fancy that Poetry is the mainly untranslateable thing. How prettily innocent are the Ladies, who, after ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... Boccaccio and Petrarch were intimate friends, and both of these passionate poets lavished their love on "married flirts," who give promise to the ear and disappointment to ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... Latin, and especially Italian—all with a view of 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
... excellence of the age, and if the classic writers held the first place in his estimation—as naturally they would—he assuredly did not neglect the firstfruits of modern literature. Pulci was his favourite poet. He evidently knew Dante and Boccaccio well, and his literary insight was clear enough to perceive that the future belonged to those who should write in the vulgar tongue of ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... match to light his pipe anew, With eyes half shut some musing whiffs he drew And thus began: 'I give you all my word, I think this mock-Decameron absurd; Boccaccio's garden! how bring that to pass In our bleak clime save under double glass? 70 The moral east-wind of New England life Would snip its gay luxuriance like a knife; Mile-deep the glaciers brooded here, they say, Through aeons numb; we feel their chill to-day. These foreign plants are but half-hardy ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Lucetta intrigue in a far more 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, Lazarillo de Tormes, at the house of the courtezan Imperia, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... the companionship of minds in marriage, he seems never to have doubted that its realization must be postponed to some other state of being. Dante, almost immediately after the death of Beatrice, married a lady chosen for him by his friends, and Boccaccio, in describing the miseries that attended, ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Muses and Apollo, with such 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
... became his inseparable companions, although he did not make much use of them for two or three years. However, he now learned to know at least something of the six great luminaries, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Boccaccio, and Machiavelli. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... with the characteristics of the very beautiful and almost classic garments in which he arrayed women, have been brought together by Hortis (Studi sulle opere Latine del Boccaccio, 1879, pp. 70 et seq.). Boccaccio admired fair and abundant wavy hair, dark and delicate eyebrows, and brown or even black eyes. It was not until some centuries later, as Hortis remarks, that Boccaccio's ideal woman was embodied by the painter in the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... for Boccaccio, who was of a more practical turn of mind than Petrarch, to systematize the classical knowledge of antiquity. If Petrarch was an enthusiastic collector, Boccaccio was a practical worker. With the aid of Petrarch, he was the first to introduce a professor ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... library, and render them the favourite study of those who are interested in the romance of real life. These stories, with all the reality of established fact, read with as much spirit as the tales of Boccaccio, and are as full of strange matter for ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... only early edition, as far as I had an opportutunity of ascertaining, which they appear to possess of the Decameron of Boccaccio. Of the Philocolo, there is a folio edition of 1488; and of the Nimphale there is a sound and clean copy of a dateless edition, in 4to., without name of place or printer, which ends thus—and ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... First ye may see his sepulchre in the monastery of Glastonbury; and also in 'Polychronicon,' in the fifth 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
... 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
... Love the classic models are first consulted,—Oenone, Evadne, Medea,—these characters being followed through the delineation of modern dramatists. We know of no more exquisite criticism than the pages devoted to Griseldis. Analyzing the accounts of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Perault, our author concludes with the play of "Munck Bellinghausen." The last chapters, on "Love and Duty," are among the most eloquently written in the volume. For style, M. Saint-Marc Girardin is second to no living author ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... 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 orators lying ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... laughs at his own wit who has to laugh alone. I will not take upon myself to say that Landor was without humour; he has certainly a delicate gracefulness which may be classed with the finer kinds of humour; but if anybody (to take one instance) will read the story which Chaucer tells to Boccaccio and Petrarch and pronounce it to be amusing, I can only say that his notions of humour differ materially from mine. Some of his wrathful satire against kings and priests has a vigour which is amusing; but the tact which enables him to avoid errors of taste of a different kind often ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... 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
... provisions made or means taken (consigli dati). Boccaccio constantly uses consiglio in ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... cheap—and I don't say that anyone ought to enjoy that sort of thing enough to pursue it. But if it comes in my way, why, it is like a dish of sweetmeats! I don't approve of it, but it was like a story out of Boccaccio, full of life and zest, even though the pestilence was at work down in the city. We must not think ill of life too easily! I don't say that these people are living what is called the highest life. But, after all, I only saw them amusing themselves. There ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... promise of high entertainment, the objective delight of abnormal circumstance, the subjective delight of long-cherished revenge. All the rapture of her existing freedom came back on her, while her brain, fertile in forecast of adventure, projected scenes and situations not unworthy of the pen of Boccaccio himself. Fired by such thoughts, she moved from the window, stood before a tall glass at right angles to it and contemplated her own fair reflection long and intimately. An absorbing interest in the general effect, and in the details, of her person possessed her. She moved to and fro observing the ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... which included a dozen Lords of the Supreme Council, Prince Alfonso took his way over the Apennines, along the Bologna road. On 18th June the cavalcade was discerned from the heights of Olivets, wending its way through Boccaccio's country ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... 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, ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... "groaning-chair" of Poor Robin's Almanac (1676) and we find it alluded to in Boccaccio, the classical sedile which according to scoffers has formed the papal chair (a curule seat) ever since the days of Pope Joan, when it has been held advisable for one of the Cardinals to ascertain that His Holiness possesses all the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... many hints for a Tartuffe; but they may be found in Boccaccio, as well as in Machiavelli's Mandragola. The Frate Timoteo of this piece is only a very oily friar, compliantly assisting an intrigue with ecclesiastical sophisms (to use the mildest word) for payment. Frate Timoteo has a fine Italian ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... everything and follow you to the end of the world when the moment comes for running away. They always make a fuss at the last and say it is too dangerous, and you may be caught. That is the way of them. You will be quite ready with a ladder of ropes, like one of Boccaccio's men, and a roll of banknotes for the journey, and smelling-salts, and a cushion for the puppy dog, and a separate conveyance for the maid, just according to the directions she has given you; then, ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... Boccaccio was then writing his Filostrato, which was to be Chaucer's model in the Troilus and Creseide, and his Decameron, which suggested the plan of the Canterbury Tales. His Teseide is also said to be the original of the Knight's Tale. Petrarch, "the worthy clerke" from whom Chaucer is said to ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... it is given simply because Chaucer translated (using the term in its best and highest sense) into his pure, simple and strong English tongue with all its linguistic peculiarities, the thoughts and fancies of his foreign models, the very letter and spirit of Petrarch and Boccaccio." ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... the same as when this poetry and passion were new; there is the same sunlight, the same blue water and green grass; yonder pleasure-boat might bear, for aught we know, the friends and lovers of five centuries ago; Petrarch and Laura might be there, with Boccaccio and Fiammetta as comrades, and with Chaucer as their stranger guest. It bears, at any rate, if I know its voyagers, eyes as lustrous, voices as sweet. With the world thus young, beauty eternal, fancy free, why ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... 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 ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... dawn of 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 in the minds of the people who made ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... "The Readers," from 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
... is in very good courses; for here are trusty hands waiting for him. The cardinal facts of European history are soon learned. There is Dante's poem, to open the Italian Republics of the Middle Age; Dante's "Vita Nuova," to explain Dante and Beatrice; and Boccaccio's "Life of Dante,"—a great man to describe a greater. To help us, perhaps a volume or two of M. Sismondi's "Italian Republics" will be as good as the entire sixteen. When we come to Michel Angelo, his Sonnets and Letters must be read, with his Life by Vasari, or, in our day, by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... well as to the material prosperity of the passive elements of the community and stung the poilus to the quick. "But what justice," these asked, "can the living hope for, when the glorious dead are so soon forgotten?" For one ghastly detail remains to complete a picture to which Boccaccio could hardly have done justice. "While all this wild dissipation was going on among the moneyed class in the capital the corpses of many gallant soldiers lay unburied and uncovered on the shell-plowed fields of battle near Rheims, on the ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... Bandello, whose {110} Tales, 1554-1573, translated into French by Belleforest, furnished the sources of Much Ado About Nothing, and perhaps Twelfth Night. The greatest of these collections was the Decameron, c. 1353, by Giovanni Boccaccio, one of whose stories, translated by William Painter in his Palace of Pleasure, 1564, furnished the source of All's Well That Ends Well. Another story of the Decameron was probably the source of the romantic part of ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... 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 ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... borrowed the form of his famous tales from a book called The Decameron, written by an Italian poet named Boccaccio. Decameron comes from two Greek words deka, ten, and hemera, a day, the book being so called because the stories in it were supposed to be told in ten days. During a time of plague in Florence seven ladies ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... his generous sister Christina, I forget which) italianized the 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 this reason: the story upon which ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... the moment when the perfumed air brings fragrance to the 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
... mawkish and the rancid. The tale of 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 ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wife of Wautier, marquis of Saluc[^e]s. Boccaccio says she was a poor country lass, who became the wife of Gualtiere, marquis of Saluzzo. She was robbed of her children by her husband, reduced to abject poverty, divorced, and commanded to assist in the marriage of her husband with another woman; ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... years ago—so tells 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
... his 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 ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... 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 ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... widow at all, but a modest wife with a yea for no man but her lord." Head to head they took counsel, cudgelled their wits for some proper vantage. Of a sudden, Geoffrey clapped hand to thigh. Student of Boccaccio, Heveletius, and other sages, he had the clue in his palm. A whisper from him, a nod from Angelica, and the twain withdrew from the ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... virtue, which forms the subject of many romances, not a few folk-tales, and at least one folk-song. The Romance of the Violet, by Gerbert de Montruil, circa 1225, derives its name from the mother's mark of the heroine, which causes her husband to lose his bet. This was probably the source of Boccaccio's novel (ii. 9), from which Shakespeare's more immediately grew. The Gaelic version of this incident, collected by Campbell (The Chest, No. ii.), is clearly not of folk origin, but derived directly or indirectly ...
— Old French Romances • William Morris
... bringing forth, or when sick. A little of every kind of food is thrown on to the burning log. If there are three logs (as in some places), the right-hand one must be the biggest—the Father, the Son to the left, and the Spirit in the middle, the aspersion being made in this order. Boccaccio, in the "Genealogy of the Gods," refers to a similar custom in his day in Florence, evidently the survival, or transmutation, of some heathen rite. After supper the hymn "Es wurde geboren der Himmels Koenig von der unbefleckten Jungfrau Maria" is sung, and then ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... Augustin, Dionysius Areopagiticus, Hilary, &c. &c.[42] The Golden-mouthed is adduced as especially hostile in his judgment of the sex; and his 'Homily on Herodias' takes its proper place with the satires of Aristophanes and Juvenal, of Boccaccio and Boileau.[43] ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... records of the family are destroyed. "Golforden," says Mr Heywood, in his interesting Notes to a Journal of the Siege of Lathom, "along whose banks knights and ladies have a thousand times made resort, hearkening to stories as varied as those of Boccaccio;—the maudlin well, where the pilgrim and the lazar devoutly cooled their parched lips;—the mewing-house,—the training round,—every appendage to antique baronial state,—all now are changed, and a modern mansion and a new ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... History of a Fortunate Idea, and the Catholic Priest. Meanwhile, he did add considerably to his Droll Tales, the first series of which appeared in the same twelve months as Eugenie Grandet. These stories —in the style of Boccaccio, and of some of Chaucer's writing—broad, racy, and somewhat licentious, albeit containing nothing radically obscene, were meant to illustrate the history of the French language and French manners from olden to modern days. Only part of the project was realized. They are told with ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... there are eleven subdivisions; (2) lying on her side, right or left, with three varieties; (3) sitting, which has ten, (4) standing, with three subdivisions, and (5) lying prone, with two. This total of twenty- nine, with three forms of "Purushayit," when the man lies supine (see the Abbot in Boccaccio i. 4), becomes thirty-two, approaching the French quarante faons. The Upavishta, majlis, or sitting postures, when one or both "sit at squat" somewhat like birds, appear utterly impossible to Europeans who lack ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... company. Gemma forbade any mention of politics in her drawing-room, and it was natural that Faustina should be glad to escape from the solemn conclaves of the palazzo Siviano to a house where life went as gaily as in that villa above Florence where Boccaccio's careless story-tellers took refuge from the plague. But meanwhile the political distemper was rapidly spreading, and in spite of Gemma's Austrian affiliations it was no longer possible for her to receive ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... writer extolled the study of real life, and announced the publication of the new work. It was picturesque and charming. In the quiet of evening, on an island in the Seine, beneath poplars instead of the Neapolitan cypresses dear to the friends of Boccaccio, amid the continuous murmur of the valley, and no longer to the sound of the Pyrennean streams that murmured a faint accompaniment to the tales of Marguerite's cavaliers, the master and his disciples took turns in narrating some striking or pathetic episode of the war. ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... more interested in hearing that it was: "after he had come under the spell of Petrarch and Boccaccio that Chaucer produced his wondrous Tales," but it appeared their interest was due to some slight misapprehension. Daphne felt the fearful joy of suppressed mirth combined with the danger of detection ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... 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
... with the love of republican institutions, and especially distinguished himself for an adoration of Homer. Dante, a more sublime and original genius than Petrarch, was his contemporary. About the same time Boccaccio in his Decamerone gave at once to Italian prose that purity and grace, which none of his successors in the career of literature have ever been able to excel. And in our own island Chaucer with a daring hand redeemed his ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... 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
... our neighbour Mr. C——'s plantation, it is necessary to consult the tide in order to land conveniently. Driving home to-day by Jones' Creek, we saw an immovable row of white cranes, all standing with imperturbable gravity upon one leg. I thought of Boccaccio's cook, and had a mind to say, Ha! at them to try if they had two. I have been over to Mr. C——, and was very much pleased with my visit, but will tell you ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... the short story as it has become in the hands of Miss Wilkins. But it was not till our time that its great merit as a form was felt, for until our time so great work was never done with it. I remind myself of Boccaccio, and of the Arabian Nights, without the wish to hedge from my bold stand. They are all elemental; compared with some finer modern work which deepens inward immeasurably, they are all of their superficial limits. They amuse, but they do not hold, the mind ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 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 ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... of Homer and Virgil. Petrarch followed in his steps, and, if not as profound or original as Dante, yet is unequalled as an "enthusiastic songster of ideal love." He also gave a great impulse to civilization by his labors in collecting and collating manuscripts. Boccaccio also lent his aid in the revival of literature, and wrote a series of witty, though objectionable stories, from which the English Chaucer borrowed the notion of his "Canterbury Tales." Chaucer is the father of English ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... "De Tribus Impostoribus" commence in the thirteenth century. About the sixteenth, more definite but still unsatisfactory statements appear respecting its existence. Its authorship has been attributed to above twenty distinguished persons; such as Frederick II, Boccaccio, Pomponatius, Bruno, Vanini, &c.; the reasons for which in each case are explained in Marchand. De La Monnaie however wrote, questioning the existence of the book. A reply to his letter respecting it was published ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... "Palace of Pleasure," Whetstone's "Heptameron," the "Histories" of Goulard and Grimstone. One of the best of these collections is "Westward for Smelts," by Kinde Kit of Kingstone, circa 1603, reprinted by the Percy Society. It is on the same plan as Boccaccio's "Decamerone," except that the story-tellers are fish-wives going up the Thames in a boat. Imitations of the Italian tales may be found in Hazlitt's "Shakespeare's Library," notably "Romeo and Julietta." Most ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... 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
... Phrygius.' Mr. Smith cites this nonsense; so do Mr. Donnelly and Mr. Holmes. Now the so-called Dares Phrygius is not a Greek author. No Greek version of his early mediaeval romance, 'De Bello Trojano,' exists. The matter of the book found its way into Chaucer, Boccaccio, Lydgate, Guido de Colonna, and other authors accessible to one who had no Greek at all, while no Greek version of Dares was accessible to anybody.* Some recent authors, English and American, have gone on, with the credulity of 'the less than half educated,' taking a Greek Dares ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... 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 ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... choice. Probably to Boileau's urgency is due the first original publication of La Fontaine, a little volume of Nouvelles en Vers (1664-1665), containing the Joconde, a tale from Ariosto, and a comic story versified from Boccaccio. Almost immediately there followed a collection of ten Contes, with the author's name upon the title-page, and at various later dates were published added tales, until five parts completed the series. The success was ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... 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
... he is as 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 voice. "We are ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... money, as well as possessed the munificent spirit to build at his own expense, and present to the Convent of the Holy Spirit in Florence an edifice in which to deposit the books bequeathed to the Brothers by Boccaccio; and, at his death, he left to the public in the same City his own manuscripts, which he had accumulated at great cost and with much pains. He was one of the few laymen, not to be found out of Italy, who had learning and a knowledge of Latin, which he ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... longer sought, but the bizarre. It is not the massy 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 against ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... 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, ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... 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
... last time, but 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 not, ET ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... WELL THAT ENDS WELL, and of several others of Shakespeare's plays, is taken from Boccaccio. The poet has dramatized the original novel with great skill and comic spirit, and has preserved all the beauty of character and sentiment without improving upon it, which was impossible. There is indeed in Boccaccio's serious pieces a truth, a pathos, and an exquisite refinement ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... John Boccaccio, love's own squire, deep sworn In service to all beauty, joy, and rest,— When first the love-earned royal Mary press'd, To her smooth cheek, his pale brows, passion-worn,— 'Tis said, he, by her grace nigh frenzied, torn By longings unattainable, address'd ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... forth, while the poet was thus announcing the quality of his wares. "And," he continued, "I have tried to excel everything that Boccaccio, Aretin, and other masters of their craft have written ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... prompt in closing Parnassus at ten o'clock. At that hour he and Bock (the mustard-coloured terrier, named for Boccaccio) would make the round of the shop, see that everything was shipshape, empty the ash trays provided for customers, lock the front door, and turn off the lights. Then they would retire to the den, where Mrs. Mifflin was generally knitting or reading. ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... and the other speakers of languages that might all have proved right "Italian" had not Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio written in Tuscan, can neither write nor be taught hard things in their dialect, although they can live, whether easy lives or hard, and evidently can die, therein. The hands and feet that have served the villager ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... huge borrower. Chaucer, it seems, drew continually, through Lydgate and Caxton, from Guido di Colonna, whose Latin romance of the Trojan war was in turn a compilation from Dares Phrygius, Ovid, and Statius. Then Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the Provencal poets, are his benefactors: the Romaunt of the Rose is only judicious translation from William of Lorris and John of Meun: Troilus and Creseide, from Lollius of Urbino: The Cock and the Fox, from the Lais of Marie: ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... very fine unexpurgated translation of Boccaccio's "Decameron," Mr. Haywood illustrated. I should say you would get more than the amount ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... your loss. 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
... this fatal tree, wasting their energies on such men as Bruno, who said the earth was round, and Galileo, whom they forced to say he was mistaken when he said the earth moves. A pretty set of difficulties they have involved us in with their accursed astronomy. Boccaccio and the Troubadours should have been burned instead, and if this had been done all the abominable modern literature which would persuade the faithful that this world is not all sackcloth and ashes would never have been written. Away with him who says that ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... of acknowledging. Blot out from England's history the names of Chaucer, Shakspere, Spenser, and Milton only, and how much of her glory would you blot out with them! Take from Italy such names as Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Michel Angelo, and Raphael, and how much would still be wanting to the completeness of her glory! How would the history of Spain look if the leaves were torn out, on which are written the names of Cervantes, ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... 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
... Chatelet Station of the Metropolitain we strike northwards along the Rue St. Denis, passing R. and L. the Rue des Lombards, the Italian business quarter of old Paris, where Boccaccio, son of Boccassin, the money-changer, was born. We continue past the ill-omened Rue de la Ferronnerie and soon reach the Square and Fontaine des Innocents. This charming renaissance fountain was transferred ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... you 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 chapter out of ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... tried to exceed everything that Boccaccio, Aretin, and other masters of their craft, have ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... as the basil of the enamoured Florentine. [Footnote 1: See Keats' poem taken from Boccaccio.] Thy blossoms, thy leaves,—green, fresh, and fragrant,—draw their nurture, receive their every colouring, from what was dearest to us on earth. And are they ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... Madonnas and the pleasant pages of the recovered literature of pagan Greece. When Sidney stepped for the first time into his gondola at Venice, the famous Italian cathedrals and stately palaces were already built, and the great architects were gone. Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, who had created Italian literature, lived about as long before Sidney as we live after him. Cimabue and Giotto had begun; Raphael and Michel Angelo had perfected that art in which they have had no rivals—and they were gone. ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... peculiar in his talent, and are full of that rich eloquence and of those pleasing descriptions of natural scenery which always flow so easily from his pen. They have little in common with the graceful story-telling spirit of Boccaccio and his followers, and still less with the strictly practical tone of Don Juan Manuel's tales; nor, on the other hand, do they approach, except in the case of the 'Impertinent Curiosity,' the class of short novels which have been frequent in other countries within the last century. The more, therefore, ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... anguish 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 ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... also possess a general knowledge of the lives and relations of the two principal personages concerned in it. What we know, to most purpose, of the early life and love of Dante, we learn from the autobiography which he entitled La Vita Nuova. Boccaccio, however, writing fifty years after the death of the great Florentine, affords a more detailed statement than is furnished by Dante himself of the circumstances of the poets first meeting with the lady he called Beatrice. He says that it was the custom of citizens ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... reader is their unliterary character. He only will value them who cares to overhear the impetuous outpourings of the heart and mind of an unlettered daughter of the people, who was also, as it happened, a genius and a saint. Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, the other great writers of the Trecento, are all in one way or another intent on choice expression; Catherine is intent solely on driving home what she has to say. Her letters were talked rather than written. She learned to write only three years before her death, and even ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... of Urbino reserved for himself of the spoil at the capture of Volterra in 1472, and for which the Jews in Venice offered its weight in gold; a sketch of the first three cantos of the Gerusalemme Liberata in the handwriting of Tasso; a copy of Dante in the handwriting of Boccaccio; and several of Petrarch's autograph sonnets. In the other cabinet is the great gem and glory of the Library—the Codex Vaticanus, in strange association with a number of the love-letters of Henry VIII. ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... 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 ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... o'er and o'er, And most of all the Immortal Four Of Italy; and next to those, The story-telling bard of prose, Who wrote the joyous Tuscan tales Of the Decameron, that make Fiesole's green hills and vales Remembered for Boccaccio's sake. Much too of music was his thought; The melodies and measures fraught With sunshine and the open air, Of vineyards and the singing sea Of his beloved Sicily; And much it pleased him to peruse The songs of the Sicilian muse,— Bucolic ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... 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
... first rank of Literature, is, I suppose, rightly arraigned by the author I have above quoted, of "coarse sensuality." Pulci, "by his sceptical insinuations, seems clearly to display an intention of exposing religion to contempt." Boccaccio, the first of Italian prose-writers, had in his old age touchingly to lament the corrupting tendency of his popular compositions; and Bellarmine has to vindicate him, Dante, and Petrarch, from the charge of virulent abuse of the Holy See. ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... twilight!—in the solitude Of the pine forest, and the silent shore Which bounds Ravenna's immemorial wood, Rooted where once the Adrian wave flow'd o'er, To where the last Caesarean fortress stood, Evergreen forest! which Boccaccio's lore And Dryden's lay made haunted ground to me, How have I loved the twilight ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... whether there is much in these inimitable romances half so objectionable as many of the chapters in Rabelais and Boccaccio. Nor do the most archaic of the passages which Captain Burton declines to "veil in the decent obscurity of a learned language" leave much room for the admirers of Shakespeare, or Greene, or Nash, or Wycherley, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... Few—few escape where many meet to worship at my frisky feet, and this I say without conceit is due to my mustachios. Tangled in those like web-tied flies, imprisoned hearts complain in sighs—in fact, the situation vies with moments in Boccaccio." ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... ugly, swampy, fog-infected country. The only "Indolence" we see has been devoted to the execution, for it is slovenly to a degree. We find the same fault, though not to the same extent, with his "Scene from Boccaccio." It sadly wants repose, and affects colouring which is neither good for itself, nor suitable to the subject. His "Subject from Chaucer" has the same defects. Mr Woolmer is decidedly a man of ability; but we think he has strange misconceptions ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... of goose; and bystanders noted with amusement that his love of success led him to play tricks and cheat in order not to "fall into the pit." At other times, if the conversation languished, he proposed that each person should tell a story; and when no Boccaccio-like facility inspired the company, he sometimes launched out into one of those eerie and thrilling recitals, such as he must often have heard from the improvisatori of his native island. Bourrienne states that Bonaparte's realism required darkness and daggers for the full display ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... 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 ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... 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 to ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... 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 in ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... DES 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. ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... 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 ...
— Briefless Ballads and Legal Lyrics - Second Series • James Williams
... this instance. Madame has her Castrillon, M. 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 tell ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... and grassy undulations of the Green Park. Perhaps he was thinking of the pretty, fantastic little comedy that had just been performed up in that garden at Campden Hill—like some dream-picture out of Boccaccio. And if he chanced to recall the fact that the actor who originally played the part of Damon, at Drury Lane, some hundred and forty years ago, married in real life an earl's daughter, that was but a passing fancy. Of Lord Fareborough's three daughters, ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... ears, as bright, Fresh and sweet as the voice of a mountain brook, And still I hear her telling us tales that night, Out of Boccaccio's book. ...
— Silhouettes • Arthur Symons
... languages entered into the inheritance of Latin and Greek, verse held to its ancestral privileges, and the brief tale took the form of the ballad, and the longer narrative called itself a chanson de geste. Boccaccio and Rabelais and Cervantes might win immediate popularity and invite a host of imitators; but it was long after their time before a tale in prose, whether short or long, achieved recognition as worthy of serious critical consideration. In his study ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... 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 ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... Persia, and Cuchulain with his child in Ireland. Such stories are common property. The writer takes his own where he finds it. Marie is none the less admirable because her stories were narrated by the first man in Eden; neither are Boccaccio and the Countess D'Aulnoy blameworthy since they told again what she already had related so well. Marie, indeed, was an admirable narrator. That was one of her shining virtues. As a piece of artful tale telling, a specimen of the craft of keeping a situation ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France
... army.] POPE Arrest that man and woman! [Re-enter Guelfs and Ghibellines fighting. SAV. and LUC. are arrested by Papal officers. Enter MICHAEL ANGELO. ANDREA DEL SARTO appears for a moment at a window. PIPPA passes. Brothers of the Misericordia go by, singing a Requiem for Francesca da Rimini. Enter BOCCACCIO, BENVENUTO CELLINI, and many others, making remarks highly characteristic of themselves but scarcely audible through the terrific thunderstorm which now bursts over Florence and is at its loudest and darkest crisis as ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... her mouth.[18] But these were not the only plants supposed to confer invisibility, for German folk-lore tells us how the far-famed luck-flower was endowed with the same wonderful property; and by the ancients the heliotrope was credited with a similar virtue, but which Boccaccio, in his humorous tale of Calandrino in the "Decameron," applies to the so-called stone. "Heliotrope is a stone of such extraordinary virtue that the bearer of it is effectually concealed from the ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... giving them all the money in his pocket. With Messer Aldovrandi he remained more than a year, much honoured by his new patron, who took great delight in his genius; "and every evening he made Michelangelo read aloud to him out of Dante or Petrarch, and sometimes Boccaccio, until he went to sleep." He also worked upon the tomb of San Domenico during this first residence at Bologna. Originally designed and carried forward by Niccolo Pisano, this elaborate specimen of mediaeval sculpture remained in some points imperfect. There ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... traits of 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 in which he arrayed women, have been brought together by Hortis ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... like the works of our 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 ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... novel of Petronius. One of them is related as a well-known tale by the poet Eumolpus, and the other is told by him as a personal experience. More than a dozen of them are imbedded in the novel of Apuleius, the Metamorphoses, and modern specimens of them are to be seen in Boccaccio and in Chaucer. In fact they are popular from the twelfth century down to the eighteenth. Long before the time of Petronius they occur sporadically in literature. A good specimen, for instance, is found in a letter commonly attributed ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... scholarship, and communicated to his countrymen that enthusiasm for the literature, the history, and the antiquities of Rome, which divided his own heart with a frigid mistress and a more frigid Muse. Boccaccio turned their attention to the more sublime and graceful ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a merchant, Boccaccio di Chellino di Buonaiuto, of Certaldo in Val d'Elsa, a little town about midway between Empoli and Siena, but within the Florentine "contado," Giovanni Boccaccio was born, most probably at Paris, in the year 1313. His mother, at any rate, was a Frenchwoman, whom his father seduced during ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... 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; Boccaccio's vivid Italian ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... titled 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 who wreck a romance with a glance, and who ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... that Italy should take the initiative in inaugurating this vita nuova. Italy had a language and literature and art. Dante had delivered his solemn message and Petrarca his impassioned song. Boccaccio had taught the gospel of gladness. Who shall analyze the secret springs of their inspiration and reveal to what degree Ovid and Horace and Virgil influenced the later literature? A new solar system ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... vessels. Inland Florence had no part in maritime enterprise, but was the manufacturing, literary, and art centre of mediaeval Europe. Her silk looms made her famous throughout the world, her banks were the purse of Europe, and among her famous sons were Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Macchiavelli, Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Amerigo Vespucci. For the development of their commerce, the cities of the North had grouped themselves into the great Hanseatic League, with branches in Bruges, London, Bergen, ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... relation of the chivalry of Europe to the earlier chivalry of Arabia and of the East is a large one, and one which must be left to scholars. It is certain that Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney owe far more to Saladin than we commonly suppose. The tales of Boccaccio (1350) show that the Italians of that day still held the Arabs to be their teachers in chivalry, and at least their equals in art, science, and civilization; and the Italy of 1300 was a century in advance of the rest of Europe. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... to this cycle for several well-known works of fiction, such as the tale of patient Griseldis, the gentle and meek-spirited heroine who has become the personification of long-suffering and charity. After the mediaeval writers had made much use of this tale, it was taken up in turn by Boccaccio and Chaucer, who ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... Padua he busied himself in the education of an adopted son, the young John of Ravenna, who lived to be a celebrated professor, and was nicknamed 'the Trojan Horse,' because he turned out so many excellent Grecians. In a cottage near Milan the poet received a visit from Boccaccio, who was at that time inclined to renounce the world. He offered to give his whole library to Petrarch: he did afterwards send to his host a Dante of his own copying, which is now preserved in the Vatican. The approach ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... the characteristic of these poems; they form a 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 ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... experiment. He claimed for his book the protection of all those to whom literature was dear, because it was a work of art—and a work of art, in the highest sense of the word, it undoubtedly is. Like Boccaccio, Rabelais, the Queen of Navarre, Ariosto, and Verville, the great author of The Human Comedy has painted an epoch. In the fresh and wonderful language of the Merry Vicar Of Meudon, he has given us a marvellous picture of French life and manners in the sixteenth century. The gallant knights ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... printed in red and sometimes in black. Joannes and Gregorius de Gregoriis, 1480-1516, and Gregorius alone, 1516-28, make a very good show in the way of printed books, one of the most notable being the first quarto edition of Boccaccio, 1516, and another the "Deutsch Rmisch Brevier," 1518, which is printed in black and red Gothic letter with numerous full-page woodcuts and borders. Contemporary with these two brothers and also famous as a prolific printer comes Ottaviano Scotto, "Civis Modoeti{e}sis," ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... to the court and 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 ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... of Allah into an indecent tale is essentially Egyptian and Cairene. But see Boccaccio ii. 6, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... as the last dying spasm. I shall attempt to convince you that Chaucer did not inherit any secret from Caedmon or Cynewulf, but deserves his old title, 'Father of English Poetry,' because through Dante, through Boccaccio, through the lays and songs of Provence, he explored back to the Mediterranean, and opened for Englishmen a commerce in the true intellectual mart of Europe. I shall attempt to heap proof on you that whatever the agency—whether through Wyat or Spenser, Marlowe or Shakespeare, or Donne, ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... story-tellers and stories appeared everywhere. The more ignorant of these story-tellers produced the fable, and the educated monks produced the simple, crude and disjointed tales. The Gesta Romanorum is a wonderful storehouse of these mediaeval stories. In the Decameron Boccaccio deals with traditional and contemporary materials. He is a born story-teller and presents many interesting and well-told narratives, but as Professor Baldwin[1] has said, more than half are merely anecdotes, and the remaining ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... of disappointment and exile the Divina Commedia was the labor and fruit. A story in Boccaccio's life of Dante, told with some detail, implies, indeed, that it was begun, and some progress made in it, while Dante was yet in Florence—begun in Latin, and he quotes three lines of it—continued afterward ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... pilgrimages are not peculiar to the religious enthusiast. Silius Italicus performed annual ceremonies on the mountain of Posilippo; and it was there that Boccaccio, quasi da un divino estro inspirato, re-solved to dedicate ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... priests nor monks were permitted to marry, the epithet "virgins" cannot be justly applied to all priests and all monks without exception. Nor shall I repeat here the naughty pleasantries of Erasmus, of Boccaccio, and all the others, against the monks; without doubt maliciousness has developed more "satyrical" traits that they have brought out; beyond that, ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... 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 ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... 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, in Seneca and, nearer at hand, in the Proverbios morales of ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... their lives. It is natural that we should know most about the men who were most different from their companions, such as Michelangelo on the one hand, and Benvenuto Cellini on the other, or Beato Angelico and Lippo Lippi, or the clever Buffalmacco—whose practical jokes were told by Boccaccio and Sacchetti, and have even brought him into modern literature—and Lionardo da Vinci. Then, as now, there were two types of artists, considered as men; there were Bohemians and scholars. Lionardo and Michelangelo were grave and learned students; so was Beato Angelico in a sense ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... silence—Rabelais and Boccaccio debate the immaculate conception. Eros, patron saint of the ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... Boccaccio offers in support of religion, might be adduced in behalf of a republic: "It exists in ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... In art, detail was industriously cultivated; but its naturalism, especially as to undraped figures, was due to a sensuous refinement of gallantry and erotic feeling. The sensuous flourished no less in Greek times than in those of Boccaccio; but the most characteristic peculiarity of Hellenism was its intentional revelling in feeling—its sentimentality. There was a trace of melancholy upon many faces of the time, and unhappy love in endless variations was the poet's main theme. Petrarch's lyre was tuned to the same key; a melancholy ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... business man, courtier, sharing in all the stirring life of his times, and reflecting it in literature as no other but Shakespeare has ever done. Outside of England the greatest literary influence of the age was that of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, whose works, then at the summit of their influence in Italy, profoundly affected the literature of ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... and Honorio, Fuseli used to say, "Look at it—it is connected with the first patron I ever had." He then proceeded to relate how Cipriani had undertaken to paint for Horace Walpole a scene from Boccaccio's Theodore and Honorio, familiar to all in the splendid translation of Dryden, and, after several attempts, finding the subject too heavy for his handling, he said to Walpole, "I cannot please myself with a sketch from this most imaginative of Gothic fictions; but I know one who can do ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner |
