The Decameron, vol. 1 | Page 8

him to return to Florence, and assume the
rectorship of the newly founded university; to Ludwig of Brandenburg with overtures for
an alliance against the Visconti in December of the same year; and in the spring of 1354
to Pope Innocent VI. at Avignon in reference to the approaching visit of the Emperor
Charles IV. to Italy. About this time, 1354-5, he threw off, in striking contrast to his
earlier works, an invective against women, entitled Laberinto d'Amore, otherwise
Corbaccio, a coarse performance occasioned by resentment at what he deemed capricious
treatment by a lady to whom he had made advances. To the same period, though the date
cannot be precisely fixed, belongs his Life of Dante, a work of but mediocre merit.
Somewhat later, it would seem, he began the study of Greek under one Leontius Pilatus, a
Calabrian, who possessed some knowledge of that language, and sought to pass himself
off as a Greek by birth.
Leontius was of coarse manners and uncertain temper, but Boccaccio was his host and
pupil for some years, and eventually procured him the chair of Greek in the university of
Florence. How much Greek Boccaccio learned from him, and how far he may have been
beholden to him in the compilation of his elaborate Latin treatise De Genealogia Deorum,
in which he essayed with very curious results to expound the inner meaning of mythology,
it is impossible to say. In 1361 he seems to have had serious thoughts of devoting himself
to religion, being prodigiously impressed by the menaces, monitions and revelations of a
dying Carthusian of Siena. One of the revelations concerned a matter which Boccaccio
had supposed to be known only to Petrarch and himself. He accordingly confided his
anxiety to Petrarch, who persuaded him to amend his life without renouncing the world.
In 1362 he revisited Naples, and in the following year spent three months with Petrarch at
Venice. In 1365 he was sent by the Republic of Florence on a mission of conciliation to
Pope Urban V. at Avignon. He was employed on a like errand on the Pope's return to

Rome in 1367. In 1368 he revisited Venice, and in 1371 Naples; but in May 1372 he
returned to Florence, where on 25th August 1373 he was appointed lecturer on the Divina
Commedia, with a yearly stipend of 100 fiorini d'oro. His lectures, of which the first was
delivered in the church of San Stefano near the Ponte Vecchio, were discontinued owing
to ill health, doubtless aggravated by the distress which the death of Petrarch (20th July
1374) could not but cause him, when he had got no farther than the seventeenth Canto of
the Inferno. His commentary is still occasionally quoted. He died, perhaps in the odour of
sanctity, for in later life he was a diligent collector of relics, at Certaldo on 21st
December 1375, and was buried in the parish church. His tomb was desecrated, and his
remains were dispersed, owing, it is said, to a misunderstanding, towards the close of the
eighteenth century. His library, which by his direction was placed in the Convent of
Santo Spirito at Florence, was destroyed by fire about a century after his death.
Besides the De Genealogia Deorum Boccaccio wrote other treatises in Latin, which need
not here be specified, and sixteen Eclogues in the same language, of which he was by no
means a master. As for his minor works in the vernacular, the earlier of them shew that
he had not as yet wrought himself free from the conventionalism which the polite
literature of Italy inherited from the Sicilians. It is therefore inevitable that the twentieth
century should find the Filocopo, Ameto, and Amorosa Visione tedious reading. The
Teseide determined the form in which Pulci, Boiardo, Bello, Ariosto, Tasso, and, with a
slight modification, our own Spenser were to write, but its readers are now few, and are
not likely ever again to be numerous. Chaucer drew upon it for the Knight's Tale, but it is
at any rate arguable that his retrenchment of its perhaps inordinate length was judicious,
and that what he gave was better than what he borrowed. Still, that it had such a redactor
as Chaucer is no small testimony to its merit; nor was it only in the Knight's Tale that he
was indebted to it: the description of the Temple of Love in the Parlement of Foules is
taken almost word for word from it. Even more considerable and conspicuous is
Chaucer's obligation to Boccaccio in the Troilus and Criseyde, about a third of which is
borrowed from the Filostrato. Nor is it a little remarkable that the same man, that in the
Teseide and Filostrato founded the chivalrous epic, should also and in the same period of
his literary