amain for mercy. Flanking her are two large, fierce mastiffs, who ofttimes bite her cruelly, and behind on a black courser follows a dark rider, wrathful in face, with a rapier in his hand, threatening her.

Nastagio breaks off a bough to serve as weapon, and prepares to go to her aid. But the knight, dismounting, tells him that he was called Messer Guido degli Anastagi, when Nastagio was a little boy-the similarity of their names is, and was probably intended to be, suggestive-and that what Nastagio witnesses is a punishment of slighted love rehearsed every Friday on that very spot. More horrors ensue, of which the young hermit is a passive beholder, and then Nastagio reflects. If this was an event of weekly occurrence, then he might make capital out of the affair by ordering a feast in the pine-wood, and inviting his friends, the haughty damsel included, to share in it. With some difficulty the notion is carried into effect, and just when the conviviality is at its height, everything is brought to a standstill by the uncanny spectacle of disembowelling. The lady is profoundly impressed, and as she is now fully apprised of her fate, should she persist in her contumacy, she contrives to let Nastagio know that she no longer opposes his wishes, and accordingly they wed.

It is in every way probable that Boccaccio borrowed this story either from the Speculum Historiale of Vincent of Beauvais, or from Passavanti's Italian version in the Specchio della Vera Penitenza. According to Passavanti's account, the ghostly cavalier

Whence?

is the Count of Nevers, and the persecuted female a lady who, for love of him, has murdered her husband; and, of course, the story, as told there, is intended to have an edifying influence. Boccaccio, however, has quite other intentions, and points the moral after this fashion: "E non fu questa paura cagione solamente di questo bene, anzi sì tutte le ravignane donne paurose ne divennero, che sempre poi troppo più arrendevoli a' piaceri degli uomini furono, che prima state non erano."

This, then, appears to have been the source of the narrative, but as Boccaccio was certainly familiar with Dante's Dante's portrayal of the Hell of Suicides, adaptation. the following passage may be cited for the sake of comparison. Quite possibly it was adapted from Vincent:—

"And two behold! upon our left-hand side,

Naked and scratched, fleeing so furiously,
That of the forest every fan they broke.

He who was in advance: "Now help, Death, help!"
And the other one, who seemed to lag too much,
Was shouting: "Lano, were not so alert
Those legs of thine at joustings of the Toppo!"
And then perchance, because his breath was failing,
He grouped himself together with a bush.
Behind them was the forest full of black

She-mastiffs, ravenous, and swift of foot

As grey-hounds, who are issuing from the chain.
On him who had crouched down they set their teeth,
And him they lacerated piece by piece,

Thereafter bore away those aching members."

For the idea of a pitiless maiden who cares not

what becomes of her lovers, may be compared a fine Scots ballad, "Proud Lady Margaret."1 In this a damsel propounds a riddle to her

A Scottish analogy.

suitors. Failing to solve it, they must die.

"And but ye read them richt,' she said,
'Gae stretch ye out and dee.

If

you should dee for me, Sir Knight,
There's few for ye will mean [moan];

For mony a better has died for me,
Whose graves are growing green.'

At length a knight is successful. He is the ghost of Margaret's brother, who rises from his grave to warn Margaret of the consequences if she does not mend her ways.

Style.

"Leave off your pride, Margaret,' he says,

'Use it not any mair,

Or when you come where I hae been,

You will repent it sair.

In Pirie's chair you'll sit, I say,

The lowest seat o' Hell;

If you do not amend your ways,
It's there that ye must dwell.'”

With regard to the merits of Boccaccio's prose, opinions vary. He himself professes to have written in a "fiorentino stile umilissimo." Whatever he may have intended by this apologetic, self-depreciatory phrase, it can hardly be that he aimed at a simple unaffected manner, or, if he did, he is very far from having attained it. His prose

1 The Legendary Ballads of England and Scotland. Compiled and edited by John Roberts. London. P. 154.

is a tissue of Ciceronian periods which, a priori, most people would instantly condemn in a work of fiction, and which, a posteriori, indulgent critics defend on the ground that, before Boccaccio, Italian prose can hardly be said to have existed. How closely Boccaccio had studied ancient models may be seen from a comparison of his tale The Lover in the Cask (vii. 2) with Apuleius's treatment of the same theme.1 In the main the tale is little else than a translation from the ninth book of the Metamorphoses, as such verbal coincidences as the following plainly show.

APULEIUS.

"Ego mulier et intra hospitium contenta, jamdudum septem denariis vendidi."

BOCCACCIO.

"Io feminella che non fui mai appena fuor dell' uscio . . . l'ho venduto sette."

Some writers, like Emiliani - Giudici, have proclaimed an utter distaste for the ponderosity of the style, and this particular judge does not scruple to own that he would find it no light task to read through a giornata of the Decameron at a breath. With him it is a question of "dragging oneself through all the delectable windings of the most elegant of our prose-styles." Nor is it only this literary free-thinker that has felt the irksomeness of a style that is undeniably laboured, and by the

1 It is worthy of remark that, in borrowing tales from the ancients, Boccaccio Italianises them, and adapts them to existing conditions of life.

influence of which Italian prose even now is in some measure controlled. If Coleridge be right, and the best prose is, like Southey's, unobtrusive and thoroughly subordinated to the matter, then there is no more to be said, for this Boccaccio's prose is not. It resembles rather Coleridge's own style, which, as Hazlitt long ago observed, tends to be too majestic for its subject. However, a great master of our own generation—Carducci-takes up the cudgels valiantly on Boccaccio's behalf, and insists that seldom or never has instrument been adapted more perfectly to its ends. "This tongue of the Ciompi he is pleased to wind with all the cries and laments of every passion, to cause it to render with the variations of all the notes all the cries and laments of every passion, to cause it to follow with the blendings of all the tints all the adumbrations of an image" (Discorso sui Parentali del Boccaccio). The truth probably lies about midway between this perfervid estimate and the nihilism of Emiliani-Giudici, though even destructive criticism must, and does, recognise the grandeur of the art. The question really is, whether this art is not out of place, is not artificiality, and the answer to this question will vary with the individual and the age. Properly constructed, the period is an organism of exquisite formation, but it asks some attention; and this the latter-day reader, not being of German nationality, refuses. The refusal is significant-but of what? Is the abruptness of contemporary prose, the dispensing with literary ceremony, a concession to busier habits and inferior power of