His passion, indeed, for a literary life was invincible, and he has himself declared that a visit to the tomb of Virgil when in his twentieth year fixed his determination for ever. Thenceforth he prosecuted letters with the unwavering ardour of one who has made it the object of his life. Virgil and Horace were his masters in the Latin, and Dante his guide, and, as he calls him, the torch that lit him on his way in the study of his native tongue. He seems to have made great progress in letters and science; he made acquaintance with the Greek language, then scarcely known in the northern portion of Italy; he formed intimacies with several of the learned men of his day, and acquired a knowledge of mathematics and of astronomy. The court of Robert of Naples was then the most distinguished in Italy. A liberal patron of men of letters, he drew around him all the genius and learning of the land, and thither Boccaccio went, and fixed his abode for some years. There he first made the acquaintance of Petrarch in 1341, who had come to be examined by Robert, himself no mean scholar, previous to his obtaining the laurel crown at Rome. An oration in praise of poetry delivered by Petrarch at once won the admiration of the king and the respect of Boccaccio, who thenceforward set the poet before him as his great exemplar—a guide who, in nine years after, was united to him in the bonds of a friendship so tender and enduring that death alone dissolved it.
It was while in Naples that Boccaccio formed the attachment which occupied a large portion of his life, and seems to have influenced in no small degree his writings. To one of his disposition it would have been no easy thing to live in a city at once the most dissolute and the most seductive, where the corruption of morals was all the greater that it was veiled by the elegancies of the court and the chivalry of the age, without falling. Besides he was now in the full flush of youth, and possessed the attractions both of person and intellect which are sure to make a lover successful. The descriptions as well as the portraits which have come down to us declare that he was a man of fine and commanding person, tall and rather full, with an air and countenance of grace and sprightliness. His face was oval, his lips full—rather too much so—yet rich and well formed, and his chin so shaped that, as Manni says, it gave a peculiar beauty to his smile. Add to this the charm of conversation, in which he excelled, and a gallant devotion to the sex, and we have the portraiture of one fit to shine in the court of Naples. Nearly every Italian lover first sees his mistress in church. It was so with Petrarch in Avignon; it was so with Boccaccio at Naples. Upon Easter eve, in the year 1341, he entered the church of San Lorenzo, and saw a girl of admirable loveliness; and so, indeed, she must have been if the lover's description of her have no more than the amount of exaggeration usual in such cases. He follows her from the church, sees her enter a house, and learns that she is a natural daughter of the king, and the wife of a gentleman of distinction. This is the Fiammetta of his novels, which name has gained a celebrity when her own of Maria is well-nigh forgotten. It has, however, long been gravely questioned whether this amour is not altogether a poetic fiction. Tiraboschi doubts the reality of it, and insists that the narrative is inconsistent in itself; and indeed it must be admitted that the lady Mary, known as the natural daughter of Robert, survived the poet, who states that his Fiammetta died before him. Baldelli, on the other hand, perhaps the best biographer of Boccaccio, combats these doubts with great ability. At this distance of time the clouds are all the denser for the attempts to dissipate them, and we must be content to leave the amour of Boccaccio as apocryphal as that of Petrarch. The truth may be in each case that the poet formed an object of adoration, as a necessary dramatis persona of his intellectual life as Don Quixote did of his hallucinations, and that all beyond this is fiction. Real or simulated, to this passion he ascribes the ardour with which he pursued the course of literature which eventually elevated him to the highest place amongst the authors of Italy. To please the object of his passion, his earliest compositions were written. In prose and in rhyme he celebrates her. To her he dedicated the "Filocopo," a romance, the subject of which is the adventures of Florio and Biancafiore, their early attachment, cruel separation, perils, wanderings, and final happy reunion and marriage. It is little in the taste of our own times, though quite in accordance with the tales of his day, when the crusades and the wars with the Saracens in Spain flooded Europe with marvellous tales of chivalry and love, and it was from one of those which, still unwritten, passed from mouth to mouth, that Boccaccio took the incidents of his romance. It is a long story, consisting of nine books, full of episodes that weary, and possessing little sustained interest. In style it is inflated and declamatory, and there is a perpetual mingling of the common place and the marvellous, the ancient and the modern, christianity and paganism, which, despite of the bursts of natural feeling, and the fine descriptive passages to be found through it, make it, as a whole, heavy reading. The "Teseide" was his next production, a poem written, as appears by its dedication to Fiammetta, in 1341, a subject which Chaucer has made known to English readers as the Knight's Tale, and which Dryden has reproduced in his Palamon and Arcite. It has the merit of being the first modern poem that abandoned the prevalent poetic machinery of visions and dreams, and, following the example of Homer and Virgil, constructed a fable complete in its action, following it out through all its adventures, and bringing it to a suitable close. It has the higher honour of being the first poem written in that measure, which afterwards became so universal in Italy, the ottava rima. Boccaccio is hence commonly considered the inventor of the eight-lined stanza; but he was in truth not so, for it existed in France before the time of Boccaccio, and perhaps also in Sicily, though in a different form; but he was assuredly the first to see its vast capabilities, to make it thoroughly available, to shape it into the peculiar conformation of rhymes known as the ottava rima, and to confer upon it an enduring popularity.
But he was now forced to abandon the pleasures and the society of Naples. His father, who had lost all his other children, recalled Boccaccio to his home. Florence was then in a state of political agitation, and Boccaccio took refuge from these troubles in the occupation of literature, and composed several of his less important pieces, and no doubt improved himself in the Tuscan dialect. A second marriage contracted by his father soon released him from a house but little agreeable to him; and after an absence of two years he returned to Naples, to enjoy, under the patronage of Queen Joanna, the same pleasures, both of society and literary companionship, that distinguished that city during the reign of her father. It was at this period that he composed the "Filestrato," a poem in ottava rima, which both Zeno and Salvini praised highly; the "Amorosa Fiammetta," and the "Amorosa Visione." The latter of them is composed in terza rima, and adopts the Provencal conceit of being throughout acrostic; the first letters of all the tercets forming the names—Madonna Maria and Giovanni di Boccaccio da Certaldo. A trifling only pardonable in a young man and a lover.
But this was not to last: family troubles, and the death of his father, once more compelled his return to Florence, where he settled, to fulfil the duties of a citizen, and to take a part in the public affairs, as well as to assume his place amongst the distinguished men which then rendered that republic glorious. Amongst these he was fortunate enough again to meet with Petrarch, who passed through Florence on his way to the jubilee at Rome; whence may be dated their more intimate friendship. Boccaccio addressed him in a Latin poem, and received him in his own house; and to this intercourse may be traced much of the progress visible in the compositions of Boccaccio henceforward. The high position which Boccaccio at once took in the republic, caused him to be sent on many honourable embassies; but none of these was so congenial to him as that mission on which his country sent him to Padua, in 1351, to convey to Petrarch the decree which restored to him his rights and his property, and invited him to honour with his presence and lectures the university then recently established. The friendship of Petrarch and Boccaccio was productive of one advantage to the latter, to which is mainly owing his subsequent pre-eminence in literature. Heretofore he had believed that the true bent of his genius was poetry, and he thought that as a poet in his native tongue he would stand next Dante. A perusal of the writings of his friend at once convinced him that the true successor of Dante was Petrarch; and so great was his dissatisfaction with what he had done himself, that he committed to the flames the greater part of what he had written in Italian verse. Copies of the principal ones must, however, have been preserved, as we do not hear of any considerable composition which is not still extant. And now he turned the whole energy of his mind to the composition of that in which he was destined to take the highest place—Italian prose. This he studied laboriously and critically. He saw what his own tongue, heretofore so inadequately cultivated, was capable of being wrought to; he sought to give it a
