"Boccaccio" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... elaborately wrote 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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
... but by no means too long to be read many times over, is "Pampinea," an idyl in which the poet's fancy plays lightly and gracefully with the romance of life in Boccaccio's Florentine garden, and returns again to the beauty which inspired his dream of Italy, as he lay musing beside our northern sea. The thread of thought running through the poem is slight as the plot of dreams,—breaks, perhaps, if you take it up too ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... 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, ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... were shot. Above it, behold the Archbishop's most fatherly of rebukes, 45 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 50 ever he preached." Noon strikes—here sweeps ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... 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; ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... almost from end to end; but the literary associations of the various towns were their principal charm. To him, Verona stood for Catullus, Brindisi for Virgil, Sorrento for Tasso, Florence for "the all Etruscan three," [93] Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, Reggio and Ferrara for Ariosto. It was from Ariosto, perhaps through Camoens, who adopted it, that he took his life motto, ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... ventura, Anzi rinnuova come fa la luna:— So thought Boccaccio, whose sweet words might cure a 330 Male prude, like you, from what you now endure, a Low-tide in soul, like ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... 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 drive ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... 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 ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... it, we call 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 could not help acquiring a knowledge of the working world, ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... puede ser guardar una muger, One cannot guard a woman; but this has lately been disproved. It appears, however, that he borrowed the primary idea of his comedy from the Adelphi of Terence; and from a tale, the third of the third day, in the Decameron of Boccaccio, where a young woman uses her father-confessor as a go-between for herself and her lover. In the Adelphi there are two old men of dissimilar character, who give a different education to the children they bring up. One of them is ...
— The School for Husbands • Moliere
... "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
... adequately, it is still a debatable question whether they are entitled to precisely the same consideration as their more venerable sister. It is unnecessary to point out that such great names as Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Alfieri, Leopardi, Carducci, Cervantes, Calderon, Lope de Vega, Benavente, e tutti quanti, are abundant evidence of the value of Italian and Spanish culture. They unquestionably are. Where the emphasis is cultural, it would certainly be unwise to neglect ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... with a circling stair My sweet San Gimignano: nor a word Fell from her flowerlike mouth Not sweet with all the south; As though the dust shrined in Certaldo stirred And spake, as o'er it shone That bright Pentameron, And his own vines again and chestnuts heard Boccaccio: nor swift Elsa's chime Mixed not her ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... fitting 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 was established by Copernicus. America was discovered. ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... Piazza of the Duoma, bringing these works of perdition, which were soon piled up in a huge stack, which the youthful reformers set on fire, singing religious psalms and hymns the while. On this pile were burned many copies of Boccaccio and of Margante Maggiore, and pictures by Fro Bartalommeo, who from that day forward renounced the art of this world to consecrate his brush utterly and entirely to the reproduction ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... 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 ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... had given the best and only meat he had to his guests. Like the Italian gentleman with his falcon, or rather the Arab sheik with his horse, who, my friend Mr. Browning tells me, is the original of Boccaccio's mamby-pamby story, the Kerry mountaineer had fulfilled the rites of hospitality at whatever cost. For long after the date of the grim repast just recorded, in fact, even till to-day, the peasants on the Derryquin estate have been accustomed to refer ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... 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
... hour of 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 ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... 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 as books, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... 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 ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... their real passion. Ah, me! 'tis the jongleurs and troubadours they want then, not us! When Master Slender, sick for sweet Anne Page, would "rather than forty shillings" he had his "book of songs and sonnets" there, what availed it that the Italian Boccaccio had contemporaneously discoursed wisely and sweetly of love in prose? I doubt not that Master Jeff would have mumbled some verse to himself had he known any: knowing none, he lay there and ...
— Jeff Briggs's Love Story • Bret Harte
... 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 ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... 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 he was burned ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... shunned. What was bad 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
... are stories that their married life was unhappy. But these stories have not the weight of even contemporary gossip. Possibly they arose from the fact of the long separation between Dante and his wife during his exile. Boccaccio insinuates more than he asserts, and he concludes a vague declamation about the miseries of married life with the words, "Truly I do not affirm that these things happened to Dante, for I do not know." Dante keeps utter silence in his works,—certainly giving no reason to suppose that domestic ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... 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 here in 1786 from the corner of the old Rues aux Fers (now the widened Rue Berger) and ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... you 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 ladies to swell ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... absence and finds his study has been tidied, which in the feminine mind means putting things in order, and to the bookman general anarchy (it was the real reason Eve was put out of Eden), when he comes home, I say, and finds that happy but indecorous rascal Boccaccio, holding his very sides for laughter, between Lecky's History of European Morals and Law's Serious Call, both admirable books, then the bookman is much exhilarated. Because of the mischief that is in him he will not relieve those two excellent men of that disgraceful ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... 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; ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... 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 grace, and ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... discovered that he preferred to stroke her full, firm cheeks when they were guiltless of powder. She dropped her former freedom of speech, gave up the telling of highly-spiced anecdotes, and checked her roving glances and the frolicsome imps—somewhat too deeply versed in Boccaccio—that haunted her lively brain, when she saw that he took umbrage at anything the least risky. Her cigarettes horrified him, so she threw them out of the window, and never smoked again. She even quelled the sensuality of her self-surrender, ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... 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 ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... the thralls of Pride is in imitation of a similar one in Chaucer's Monk's Tale, which was based on Boccaccio's De ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... 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 roamed in desultory existence amid the ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... 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, and Novgorod. ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... great prose passages in Thackeray's "Esmond"; of Landor's "Dream of Boccaccio" ... and so on: and I am sure that, in prose or in verse, the best that man can utter flows from him either in moments of high mental excitement or in the hush of that Altitudo to ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... form a valuable contribution 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 ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... published in 1737. A catalogue of his entire library was 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 by Smith ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... 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 ...
— Briefless Ballads and Legal Lyrics - Second Series • James Williams
... 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 ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... said Spence, with a smile. "First love is fool's paradise. But console yourself out of Boccaccio. 'Bocca baciata non perde ventura; anzi rinnuova, come fa ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... 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 mast ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... meaning of the name, 'she who confers blessing,' we learn from Boccaccio that this first meeting took place at a May Feast, given in the year 1274, by Folco Portinari, father of Beatrice ... to which feast Dante accompanied his father, Alighiero Alighieri."—Note by D. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... 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. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... 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 ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... novella became as distinctly 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 ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 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 be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... critics would make upon his hardy 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 ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... Bandello wrote a number of poems, but his fame rests entirely upon his extensive collection of Novelle, or tales (1554, 1573), which have been extremely popular. They belong to that species of literature of which Boccaccio's Decameron and the queen of Navarre's Heptameron are, perhaps, the best known examples. The common origin of them all is to be found in the old French fabliaux, though some well-known tales are evidently Eastern, and others classical. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... 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 ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... 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 road ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... maxims which are to be found in his fables. Returning from this study of the ancients, he read the moderns with more discrimination. His favourites, besides Malherbe, were Corneille, Rabelais, and Marot. In Italian, he read Ariosto, Boccaccio, and Machiavel. In 1654 he published his first work, a translation of the Eunuch of Terence. It met with no success. But this does not seem at all to have disturbed its author. He cultivated verse-making with ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... predecessors were Emanuel Washington, Emanuel Newton, and Emanuel Galileo. He is to collect nations into one family. He knows the transmigrations of the whole human race. Thus Descartes became William III of England: Roger Bacon became Boccaccio. But Charles IX,[190] in retribution for the massacre of St. Bartholomew, was hanged in London under the name of Barthelemy for the murder of Collard: and many of the Protestants whom he killed as King of France were shouting at his death ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... his ideas like Christ, in parables. Hajjee Hannah told me two excellent fairy tales, which I will write for Rainie with some Bowdlerizing, and several laughable stories, which I will leave unrecorded, as savouring too much of Boccaccio's manner, or that of the Queen of Navarre. I told Achmet to sweep the floor after dinner just now. He hesitated, and I called again: 'What manner is this, not to sweep when I bid thee?' 'By the most high God,' said the boy, 'my hand shall not ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... 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 but have ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... AEsop's Fables and Reynard the Fox, romances such as Sir Bevis of Hampton are scattered freely amongst works of a more learned character. On the whole he deserves a much higher place than De Worde. It is rare, indeed, to find a carelessly printed book of Pynson's, whilst such books as the Boccaccio of 1494, the Missal printed in 1500 at the expense of Cardinal Morton, and known as the Morton Missal, and the Intrationum excellentissimus liber of 1510 are certainly the finest specimens of typographical art which had ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... is a very fine unexpurgated translation of Boccaccio's "Decameron," Mr. Haywood illustrated. I should say you would get more than the amount of your bill ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and became an important factor 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 in less than a century the Arabian power and religion, as well as ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... 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. ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... Clam!" How strange it sounds and sweet, The Dago's cry along the New York street! "Dago" we call him, like the thoughtless crowd; And yet this humble man may well be proud To hail from Petrarch's land, Boccaccio's home,— Firenze, Gubbio, Venezia, Rome,— From fair Italia, whose enchanted soil Transforms ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... research, and relate the ghost-story anew to the whole literature of wonder and imagination. Such sagas as that which Dr Douglas Hyde has translated with consummate art from the Irish, "Teig O'Kane and the Corpse," which Mr W.B. Yeats called a little masterpiece; or Boccaccio's story of the spectre-hounds that pulled down the daughter of Anastasio, or Scott's "Wandering Willie's Tale," or Hawker's "Cruel Coppinger," or Edgar Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher," are of their kind not to be beaten. And in their own way some of the ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... 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 ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... icing-cake on a sooty plate. At the other end of the room were two rickety card-tables and a stand of bookshelves where were displayed under dust four or five small volumes of M. Guy de Maupassant's stories, "Robinson Crusoe," "Sappho," "Mr. Barnes of New York," a work by Giovanni Boccaccio, a Bible, "The Arabian Nights' Entertainment," "Studies of the Human Form Divine," "The Little Minister," and a clutter of monthly magazines and illustrated weeklies of about that crispness one finds ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... Petrarch opens 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 ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... had been again resumed. The monk did not understand where he was, but thought he was in the hell of the heathen; but it was still worse when a priest disguised as Bacchus, his face smeared with dregs of wine, entered the pulpit, and, taking a text from Boccaccio's Decameron, preached an indecent discourse, presently, with a skilful turn, going on to narrate a legend about St. Peter. It began in a poetical way, like other legends, but then made Peter come to an alehouse and cheat the ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... then, 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 in Italian. This is not impossible; indeed, the germ and presage of it may be ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Philippines was printed at Manilla in 1712.[2] The episodes and apologues with which the story abounds have furnished materials to poets and story-tellers in various ages and of very diverse characters; e.g. to Giovanni Boccaccio, John Gower, and to the compiler of the Gesta Romanorum, to Shakspere, and to the late W. Adams, author of the Kings Messengers. The basis of this romance is ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... what thou hast done might pass in a novel of thy countryman, Signor Boccaccio; but ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... as well as others capable of making the time pass agreeably. When there 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
... 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, as pointed, and ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... women. I cannot agree. She secures her husband's 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 would hardly permit ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... place. That place was occupied by Italian. It was Italy which had touched the spring that let loose the poetry of Surrey and Wyatt; Italy was the chief resort of travelled Englishmen in the susceptible time of youth; Italy provided in Petrarch (Dante was much less read) and Boccaccio, in Ariosto and Tasso, an inexhaustible supply of models, both in prose and verse. Spain was only less influential because Spanish literature was in a much less finished condition than Italian, and perhaps also because political ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... 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 (among these were Pletho and his pupil Bessarion; Nicolas Cusanus was one ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... 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 (Studi ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... caught that eye before? Who was he? Why did I connect him, all at once, with the Vicar of Wakefield, Alfred the Great, Gil Blas, Charles the Second, Joseph and his Brethren, the Fairy Queen, Tom Jones, the Decameron of Boccaccio, Tam O'Shanter, the Marriage of the Doge of Venice with the Adriatic, and the Great Plague of London? Why, when he bent one leg, and placed one hand upon the back of the seat near him, did my mind associate him wildly with the words, 'Number one hundred ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... 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 ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... 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
... idea of 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 one of the three, and which the copies. It is also illustrated by the tradition of ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... foliage at the foot of 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 ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... us say, from the peasants of Thomas Hardy, outside of Hardy's books. 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 ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... indeed, questionable 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
... attach the darkest meanings to the words they translate. In this regard, and still apropos the Borgias, I draw once again on Rafael Sabatini for an example of what I mean. Touching the festivities celebrating Lucretia's wedding in the Vatican, the one eyewitness whose writing remains, Gianandrea Boccaccio, Ferrarese ambassador, in a letter to his master says that amid singing and dancing, as an interlude, a "worthy'' comedy was performed. The diarist Infessura, who was not there, takes it upon himself to ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... sketched Its plan and outlines, laughingly assigning To each his part, and barring our excuses With absolute will. So, like the cavaliers Whose voices still are heard in the Romance Of silver-tongued Boccaccio, on the banks Of Arno, with soft tales of love beguiling The ear of languid beauty, plague-exiled From stately Florence, we rehearsed our rhymes To their fair auditor, and shared by turns Her kind approval and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... them into a shape which will preserve them in the 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 ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... 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 to classic ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... hearty, and legitimate joy. I do not wish to make this description, 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 we should least expect ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... 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 each side of it, with the valley which his company ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... 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! our Lady borne smiling and smart With ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... p. 302).—The verse for which your correspondent G. N. inquires, is taken from Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, an exquisitely beautiful poem by Keats, founded on one of Boccaccio's tales. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various
... 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
... 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 a powerful and persistent sense of the spiritual forces which ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... of Theodore and Honoria, which Dryden has so admirably transplanted from Boccaccio, (Giornata iii. novell. viii.,) was acted in the wood of Chiassi, a corrupt word from Classis, the naval station which, with the intermediate road, or suburb the Via Caesaris, constituted the triple ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... an asylum at Nerac, there were various noted men of letters, foremost among whom we may class the Queen's two secretaries, Clement Marot, the poet, and Peter Le Macon, the translator of Boccaccio's Decameron. This translation was undertaken at the Queen's request, as Le Macon states in his dedication to her, and it has always been considered one of the most able literary works of the period. With Marot and Le Macon, but in the more humble capacity of ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... Gerboduc (1561-2), the first regular English tragedy. A little later he planned The Mirror for Magistrates, which was to have been a series of narratives of distinguished Englishmen, somewhat on the model of Boccaccio's Falls of Princes. Finding the plan too large, he handed it over to others—seven poets in all being engaged upon it—and himself contributed two poems only, one on Buckingham, the confederate, and afterwards the victim, of Richard III., and an Induction or introduction, which constitute nearly ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... avenues of the Pineta. There we still seem to see Dante wandering, framing his lay of the "selva oscura", through which lay his path to the unseen world, and ever looking in vain for the arrival of the messenger who should summon him back to ungrateful Florence. There, in Boccaccio's story, a maiden's hapless ghost is for ever pursued through the woods by "the spectre-huntsman", Guido Cavalcanti, whom her cruelty had driven to suicide. And there, in our fathers' days, rode Byron, like Dante, ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... 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 ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... 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 ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... 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, St. Jerome, and Cicero, "And moreover" (the sonnet goes rhyming), "the skirts of St. Paul has reached, Having preached us those six Lent-lectures more unctuous than ever he preached." Noon strikes,—here sweeps the procession! our Lady borne smiling and smart, With a pink gauze ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... may be regarded 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 ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... married men and women frequently become interested in others than their partners in matrimony. I may also just allude to the fact that the large body of the literature of intrigue, represented by the tales of Boccaccio and Margaret of Navarre, is based on ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... BOCCACCIO, GIOVANNI, the celebrated Italian raconteur, born near Florence; showed early a passion for literature; sent by his father to Naples to pursue a mercantile career; gave himself up to story-telling in prose and verse; fell in love with ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... 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 ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... cliffs and miles of sand, Ragged reefs and salty caves, And the sparkling emerald waves Faded; and I seemed to stand, Myself a languid Florentine, In the heart of that fair land. And in a garden cool and green, Boccaccio's own enchanted place, I met Pampenea face to face,— A maid so lovely that to see Her smile ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... shown; but most of them contain touches of what is 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 ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... 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 ...
— A Day with Keats • May (Clarissa Gillington) Byron
... happiness which sounds through English letters so 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 literature ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... Machiavelli, Caesar Borgia, or the Iago of Shakespeare. Who can help admiring their strength of will, although their activity is only economic, and is opposed to what we hold moral? Who can help admiring the ser Ciappelletto of Boccaccio, who, even on his death-bed, pursues and realizes his ideal of the perfect rascal, making the small and timid little thieves who are present at his burlesque confession exclaim: "What manner of man is this, whose perversity, neither age, nor infirmity, nor the fear of death, which he sees ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... master of Leonardo da Vinci. The tomb of P.A. Micheli, and the mausoleum of Leop. Nobili, by Leop. Veneziani. Turning to the right by the monument to Neri Corsini (died in London, 1859), and a slab on the ground, with an inscription by Boccaccio, in honour of the poet Berberino (14th cent.), we enter the Chapel of the Castellani, with frescoes by Starnini (the ablest pupil of Giotto), and reredos by Vasari. Over the altar is a crucifix, by Giotto; at each side sarcophagi of the ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... Boccaccio's 'Fiammetta,' it is the very soul of spring; and it is so inalienably of Boccaccio's own time and tongue and sun and air that there is no turning it into the language of another period or climate. What would you find to ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... insignificant as Rouen Cathedral. In literature, as in the 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 there was plenty of poetry ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... The poets read he 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 ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... choice romance!—almost worthy the pages of our matchless Boccaccio!" cried the Italian. "A thousand pities but that the whole batch of Orangeists had been carried down the Dyle!—However, the enemy's lines lie between them. They will meet no more. The Calvinist colonel has doubtless his daughter under ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... the circumstances under which Boccaccio represents the stories of his famous "Decameron." ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... silence—Rabelais and Boccaccio debate the immaculate conception. Eros, patron saint of ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... one of Boccaccio's stories which differs so much from the others in closeness of statement and fulness of detail that it is judged to have been an experience of his own. As the critics say, he knew too much about ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... 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, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... preserve them. That is to say, they knew the difference between a live heretic and a roasted one by actual inspection, but had no idea of the difference between a Lutheran and a Calvinist. The countrymen of Boccaccio would have smiled at the idea which the German scholar entertained of them. They said Bruno was burnt for Lutheranism, a name under which they classed all Protestants: and they are better witnesses than Schopp, or Scioppius. He then proceeds to describe to his Protestant friend ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... 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, ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... the same story is repeated 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 sin ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... There is no wish to fathom what seems a happy mystery. There lies a content in secret obeisance. Sometimes it shames you, as your mind glows with its fancied dignity; but the heart thrusts in its voice; and, yielding to it, you dream dreams like fond old Boccaccio's upon the olive-shaded slopes of Italy. The tongue even is not trusted with the thoughts that are seething within: they begin and end in the ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... degli Alighieri was born at Florence in 1265, probably during the month of May.[5] This is the date given by Boccaccio, who is generally followed, though he makes a blunder in saying, sedendo Urbano quarto nella cattedra di San Pietro, for Urban died in October, 1264. Some, misled by an error in a few of the early manuscript copies of the Divina ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... the pleasures of imagination,' Trombin observed, following his own train of thought. 'In me a great romancer has been lost to our age, another Bandello, perhaps a second Boccaccio! An English gentleman of taste once told me that my features resemble those of a dramatist of his country, whose first name was William—I forget the second, which I could not learn to pronounce—but ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... of the Rose," his imitations of Machault, and his early work in general he used the mediaeval machinery of allegory and dreams. In "Troilus and Cresseide" and the tale of "Palamon and Arcite," he carries romantic love and knightly honor to a higher pitch than his model, Boccaccio. But the shrewdly practical Pandarus of the former poem—a character almost wholly of Chaucer's creation—is the very embodiment of the anti-romantic attitude, and a remarkable anticipation of Sancho Panza; while the "Rime of Sir Thopas" is a distinct burlesque of the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... 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 ...
— 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 ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... 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 no old men ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... 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 and pies for measurement. The prettiest, I think, ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... 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, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... true name, or whether, because of its significance of blessing, it was assigned to her as appropriate to her nature, is left in doubt. Who her parents were, and what were the events of her life, are also uncertain; though Boccaccio, who, some thirty years after Dante's death, wrote a biography of the poet in which fact and fancy are inextricably intermingled, reports that he had it upon good authority that she was the daughter of Folco Portinari, and became ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... 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
... and there were some indeed who deemed, as they wandered through the arbour-walks of this enchanting wilderness, that its beauty had been enhanced even by this very neglect. It seemed like a forest in a beautiful romance; a green and bowery wilderness where Boccaccio would have loved to woo, and Watteau to paint. So artfully had the walks been planned, that they seemed interminable, nor was there a single point in the whole pleasaunce where the keenest eye could have detected ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... the musical plash of the 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 ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... every myth | it relates according to a multitude of | authorities. It provides a list of | authorities, an excellent index and | synopses of the interpretations | divided into ethical and physical. | Despite all these new books, which | largely superseded Boccaccio's famous | "DE GENEALOGIIS DEORUM", they were far | from causing it to be forgotten. | | For that reason it is to presume that | Bacon draws on Natalis Comes (Conti) | "MYTHOLOGIAE SIVE EXPLICATIONEM ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... 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 ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... time in necessary instruction. Away with the thorny 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 decrepit age ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... 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 the attribution Etruscans and Druids were each ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... sleeping? This was evidently Wolf Larsen's quest—to find the men who appeared to be asleep and who were not asleep or who had not been asleep very recently. And he went about it in a way that reminded me of a story out of Boccaccio. ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London |
