"Boccaccio" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was merely to amuse, sometimes to instruct. With this process are intimately connected famous books, such as "The Gesta Romanorum" (which, by the way, has nothing to do with the Romans) and famous writers like Boccaccio. ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... 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 ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... 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
... to offer a story, one might now suppose that there would gather around him, not the men of muscle, but a throng of sallow listeners, as improperly expectant as were those who hearkened under the moon to the narrations of Boccaccio, or, in old Baghdad, gave ear to the tales of the thousand and one nights. One might suppose that his audience would be drawn from those classes most fondly addicted to pleasure, or most nearly representative, in their land and in their time, of the light-hearted ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... work of a certain Lucius of Patras, of which we have another version in the [Greek: Loukios e onos], falsely attributed to Lucian. He enlarged the original by the free insertion of sensational or humorous stories of the kind popularized later by the Decameron of Boccaccio, above all by the insertion of the beautiful fairy-tale of Cupid and Psyche. And then at the end comes the curious personal note, where Lucius, a Greek at the outset of the romance, becomes strangely transformed into a native ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... called 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
... of European popular tales are merely naturalized aliens in Europe, being as little the inheritance of its present inhabitants as were the stories and fables which, by a circuitous route, were transmitted from India to Boccaccio or ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... appears also from the following passage of a treatise by Thomas of Capua[44] on the Art of Writing: Dictaminum vero tria sunt genera auctoribus diffinita, prosaicum scilicet, metricum et rithmicum; prosaicum ut Cassiodori, metricum ut Virgilii, rithmicum ut Primatis. Boccaccio was in all probability referring to the same Primas in the tale he told about Primasso,[45] who is described as a man of European reputation, and a great and rapid versifier. It is curious that just as Giraldus seems to have ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... 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 ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... Imogem—so devoted in Desdemona—so fervent in Helen—so tender in Viola,—is each and all of these in Juliet. All these remind us of her; but she reminds us of nothing but her own sweet self: or if she does, it is of the Grismunda, or the Lisetta, or the Fiamminetta of Boccaccio, to whom she is allied, not in the character or circumstances, but in the truly Italian spirit, the glowing, national complexion of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... aristocratic families, and has put 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
... 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 new day! It is ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... 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 move ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... to see what he read; his aunt gave him the keys of his father's library in the old house, where he shut himself in, now to read Spinoza, now a novel, and another day Voltaire or Boccaccio. ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... as he was, you need but to bethink you that this was the age in which the Decamerone of Giovanni Boccaccio, the Facetiae of Poggio, the Satires of Filelfo, and the Hermaphroditus of Panormitano afforded reading-matter to both sexes. This was the age in which the learned and erudite Lorenzo Valla—of whom more anon—wrote his famous indictment of virginity, ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... down. Next, in a group, are all the nine 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 grace, and ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... 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 ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... self-deception. Every other book becomes clean, once one has read the New Testament: for example, immediately after reading Paul I took up with delight that most charming and wanton of scoffers, Petronius, of whom one may say what Domenico Boccaccio wrote of Caesar Borgia to the Duke of Parma: "e tutto festo"—immortally healthy, immortally cheerful and sound.... These petty bigots make a capital miscalculation. They attack, but everything they attack is thereby distinguished. Whoever is attacked by an "early ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... 72: 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 Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... on a pedestal which trembles as if it were founded on the sands." These sands, your uncounted volumes, are all of gold, and make a foundation more solid than the rock. As well might the singer of Odysseus, or the authors of the "Arabian Nights," or the first inventors of the stories of Boccaccio, believe that their works were perishable (their names, indeed, have perished), as the creator of "Les Trois Mousquetaires" alarm himself with the thought that the world could ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... of Jewish literature, the most prominent figure is Immanuel ben Solomon, or Manoello, as the Italians call him. Critics think him the precursor of Boccaccio, and history knows him as the friend of Dante, whose Divina Commedia he travestied in Hebrew. The author of the first Hebrew sonnet and of the first Hebrew novel, he was a talented writer, but as frivolous ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... when his friend Chaucer was busy with his Pilgrims. The story here extracted was an old favourite. It appeared in Greek about the year 800, in the romance of Barlaam and Josaphat. It was told by Vincent of Beauvais in the year 1290 in his "Speculum Historiale;" and it was used by Boccaccio for the first tale of the ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... Suffolk. He received his education at Oxford; and when it was finished, he travelled through France and Italy, mastering the languages and literature of both countries, and studying their poets, particularly Dante, Boccaccio, and Alain Chartier. When he returned, he opened a school in his monastery for teaching the sons of the nobility composition and the art of versification. His acquirements were, for the age, universal. He was a poet, a rhetorician, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... ancients in epic poetry and tragedy. But if we do not surpass the Greeks and Latins in story-telling it is net the fault of the ladies of Paris, who never cease enriching the material for tales by their ingenious and graceful inventions. You certainly know, sir, the stories of Boccaccio. I am sure that had that Florentine lived in our days in France he would make of Quonion's misfortune one of his pleasantest tales. As far as I am myself concerned I have been reminded of it at this table for the sole purpose, and ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... admiration, you keep aloof. 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
... 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 ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Bibliotheque/Bibliotheque Boccaccio/Bocaccio/Boccacio De Foe/Defoe Francais/Francois Lomenie/Lomenie Montfaucon/Montfaucon Roxburgh/Roxburghe Shakspeare/Shakespeare Spenser/Spencer Tewrdannckhs/Tewrdranckhs/Teurdanckhs (and other ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... deeply impregnated with a passion for classical lore, was smitten 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 ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... the name given to ANGELO ALLORI (1502-1572), the Florentine painter. He became the favourite pupil of J. da Pontormo. He painted the portraits of some of the most famous men of his day, such as Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Most of his best works are in Florence, but examples are in the National Gallery, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... Chaucer's Knight's Tale, 2019., is explained by Tyrwhitt to mean dancing, and that in the feminine—a very odd epithet. He tells us that the corresponding epithet in Boccaccio is bellatrici. I have no doubt that Chaucer mistook it ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 32, June 8, 1850 • Various
... the 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
... universal hatred, or to take vengeance for some family misfortune or personal affront. Since the governments were absolute, and free from all legal restraints, the opposition chose its weapons with equal freedom. Boccaccio declares openly: 'Shall I call the tyrant king or prince, and obey him loyally as my lord? No, for he is the enemy of the commonwealth. Against him I may use arms, conspiracies, spies, ambushes and ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... earliest of the Italian books, and, to use the words of Dr. Dibdin, perhaps the most notorious volume in existence, was the celebrated Boccaccio, printed at Venice by Valdarfer in 1471. This book deserves particular mention, because of an extraordinary contest which once took place for its possession between two wealthy bibliomaniacs. It was a small black-letter folio, in faded yellow morocco, and supposed to be unique. Its history ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... was an equally clear and graphic writer. He read the best literature, preferring, among other things, the story of David, the ODYSSEY, the ARCADIA, the saga of Burnt Njal, and the GRAND CYRUS. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ariosto, Boccaccio, Scott, Dumas, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot, were some of his favourite authors. He once began a review of George Eliot's biography, but left it unfinished. Latterly he had ceased to admire her work as much as before. He was a rapid, fluent talker, ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... 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 ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... 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 a sojourn ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... my 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
... fluent Italian poet Petrarch, and where at any rate the revelation of Italian life and literature must have aroused his intense enthusiasm. From this time, and especially after his other visit to Italy, five years later, he made much direct use of the works of Petrarch and Boccaccio and to a less degree of those of their greater predecessor, Dante, whose severe spirit was too unlike Chaucer's for his thorough appreciation. The longest and finest of Chaucer's poems of this period, 'Troilus and ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... 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 the ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... perhaps I should say, than the world has thought 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, Lope de Vega, and Calderon! What would be the fame of Portugal, without her Camoens; of ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... the ladies, 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 ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... not by any means so unpoetical as Gissing would make out. Only the other day a baby was found buried in a window flower-box; which is practically the idea of Keats' "Isabella, or the Pot of Basil," an idea which was itself a graft from the stock of Boccaccio. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... license. The beautiful is no 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 ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... poems in the collection, taken from Boccaccio, were to have been associated with tales from the same source, intended to have been written by a friend; but illness on his part and distracting engagements on mine, prevented us from accomplishing our plan at the time; and Death ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... weakened his position by so often contradicting himself. Besides Ruskin, Watts was beginning to make other friends, and was a member of the Cosmopolitan Club, which counted among its members Sir Robert Morier, Sir Henry Layard, FitzGerald, Palgrave, and Spedding. The large painting of the 'Story from Boccaccio', which now hangs in the Watts room of the Tate Gallery, hung for many years on the walls of this club and was presented to the nation in 1902. How frequently Watts attended the club or other social gatherings at this time we do not know. His name figures little ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... 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
... Book of the Courtier, Castiglione said very little about perfection of speech; he discust only the standard of literary language and the prescribed limits of the "vulgar tongue," or the Italian in which Petrarch and Boccaccio had written. What he says about grace, however, applies also to conversation: "I say that in everything it is so hard to know the true perfection as to be well-nigh impossible; and this because of the variety of opinions. Thus there are many who will like ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... here, 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... 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 ...
— A Day with Keats • May (Clarissa Gillington) Byron
... He 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 ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... certain 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 ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... in literature that occur to me at the moment except Tagore's, and the three terrified ones in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, who were hurriedly painting the white roses red. I should love to read the diary of the one who trimmed the borders while Boccaccio's gay company were occupying that garden; or to hear what the head gardener of the d'Este's could tell us, but I know now why it is so. With the best of intentions I haven't been able ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... 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, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... 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: The House of Fame, from the French or Italian: ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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
... time I 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 in audacity, heads of harebrained mistresses who ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... 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 traced ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... 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 ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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 ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... and loved all the Stuarts, having a positive devotion for Mary, Queen of Scots. One day, however, I discovered somewhere, under a pile of old geometries and books about navigation, a fat, red-bound copy of "Boccaccio." Stockdale said that "Boccaccio" was "wronger" than Dumas, and that his people had warned him against the stories of this Italian. As we lived near an Italian colony, and he disliked Italians, while I loved them, I attributed this ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... of the Plot. The story of Helena's love for Bertram is found in the Decamerone of Boccaccio (giorn. 3, nov. 9). Shakespeare may have read it in the ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... 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 ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... 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, ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... 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 ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... if he had found them in his originals, he ought to have 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 History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... dewfall, splendid as the south, Love touched with speech Boccaccio's golden mouth, Joy thrilled and filled its utterance full with song, And sorrow smiled on doom that wrought no wrong. A starrier lustre of lordlier music rose Beyond the sundering bar of seas and snows When Chaucer's thought took life and light ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... told by Boccaccio, then by Petrarca, afterwards by Chaucer, and which has since become proverbial. Tom Warton, writing about 1770, says, "I need not mention that it is to this day represented in England, on a stage of the lowest species, and ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... 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 gardens know of that, save ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... to wait for the drama's decline, but there was literary story-telling long before that. There were mediaeval romances in prose and verse; Renaissance pastoral tales, and stories of adventure; collections, plenty of them, of short stories like Boccaccio's, and those in Painter's Palace of Pleasure. But none of these, not even romances which deal in moral and sententious advice like Euphues, approach the essence of the novel as we know it. They are all (except Euphues, which is simply a framework of travel for a book ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... 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 ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... 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
... a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished, And fed with true love tears instead of dew. It seems sufficiently clear that Shelley is here glancing at a leading incident in Keats's poem of Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, founded upon a story in Boccaccio's Decameron. Isabella unburies her murdered lover Lorenzo; preserves his head in a pot of basil; and (as expressed in st. 52 of ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... (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
... bottles of claret and argue with a bishop after it. The lean man with the weak knees is General Scott who lives upon toast and water and has won 200,000 pounds at whist. He is talking to young Lord Blandford who gave 1800 pounds for a Boccaccio the other day. ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... especially in Piedmont, where the fetes were splendid. Verses which the poet then composed, such as sonnets, epithalamias, and odes, have been given in certain collections; but all poetry was weak in comparison with her, who was, according to an expression of Monsieur Boccaccio, poetry herself. ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... acquainted with the best models: Pheedrus, Virgil, Horace and Terence amongst the Latins; Plutarch, Homer and Plato, amongst the Greeks; Rabelais, Marot and d'Urfe, amongst the French; Tasso, Ariosto and Boccaccio, amongst ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... the grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin classics through translations, and other books too. I read Lempriere, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio, Scarron, De Brantome, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the unwholesome part of those books ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... The fable 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
... Afterward he was attached 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 of business as well as books, and he loved men and ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the thickest of their enemies, and effected their escape from the city by the Gate of the Cross. They were, however, pursued by vast numbers, and Gherardo was slain upon the bridge of Affrico by Boccaccio Cavicciulli. Corso was overtaken and made prisoner by a party of Catalan horse, in the service of the Signory, at Rovezzano. But when approaching Florence, that he might avoid being seen and torn to pieces by his victorious enemies, he allowed himself ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... infinite, her 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
... depths of the blue. Its pale grey-blue boughs and its silvery stem make a wonderful harmony with the ambient air. The Villa Mellini is full of the elder Italy of one's imagination—the Italy of Boccaccio and Ariosto. There are twenty places where the Florentine story- tellers might have sat round on the grass. Outside the villa walls, beneath the over-crowding orange-boughs, straggled old Italy as well—but not in Boccaccio's velvet: a row of ragged and livid contadini, some simply ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... it befell that when night descended it found them still journeying, and some two leagues distant from Urbino. Another league they travelled in the moonlight, and the fool was beguiling the time for them with a droll story culled from the bright pages of Messer Boccaccio, when of a sudden his sharp ears caught a sound that struck him dumb in the ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... complete and a pleasant retreat. The music and tableaux in this booth were worthy of the immense audience which crowded the space each night. The Italian poets and authors were represented here and it was not at all unusual for Dante, Michael Angelo, Petrarch and Boccaccio to hobnob over a glass of lemonade with a sprightly fairy from the Jacob Grimm booth or some other personage diametrically opposite in legend and dress. The matinees during the week were prepared in many ways for the amusement of the school children. One special tableau ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... of Italian literature with which Shakespeare shows most acquaintance is that of the novelle, though there is no proof that he could read the language. The Decameron of Boccaccio contains the love-story of Cymbeline, though there may have been an intermediary; the plot of All's Well came from the same collection, but had been translated by Painter in his Palace of Pleasure; and the story of the caskets in The Merchant of Venice is found ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... will visit Montmorency and the haunts of Rousseau, sail on the lake at moonlight, dine at gypsy restaurants under trees not yet embrowned by summer heats, discuss literature and politics, "Shakspeare and the musical glasses,"—and be as sociable and pleasant as Boccaccio's tale-tellers, at Fiesole. We shall be but a small party, only the Savarins, that unconscious sage and humourist Signora Venosta, and that dimple-cheeked Isaura, who embodies the song of nightingales and the ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fruits, and other simple and unpretending refreshments, were brought out and ranged on a rude table upon the grass, round which the guests seated themselves with their host and hostess, and the clear moon shone over them, and the lake slept below in silver. It was a scene for a Boccaccio or a Claude. ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... years in his villa on the Fiesolean slope, not far from Maiano, where Leigh Hunt had wandered, dreaming of Boccaccio. Two scenes of the "Decameron" were laid in this region, and the deep ravine at the foot of one of the neighboring hills was the original of the "Valley of the Ladies." Not far away had been the ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... fond of the sciences and of men of learning, of whom she had a great many at her court, liberal and beautiful, prudent, wise, and not lacking in piety. She it is that sold Avignon to the popes. Boccaccio, Balde, and other scholars of her time speak of her ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... have tried to exceed everything that Boccaccio, Aretin, and other masters of their craft, have written in the ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... 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 ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... stereotyped and extravagant characterization. The reader must be tolerant of its heroine's overwhelming lamentations. But she is, after all, in the great tradition of romantic heroines: she compares her own weeping to that of Boccaccio's Ghismonda over the heart of Guiscardo. If the reader can accept Mathilda on her own terms, he will find not only biographical interest in her story but also intrinsic merits: a feeling for character and situation and phrasing that is often ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... 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 the lands which ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... deal, however briefly, with Dante's sojourn in Ravenna we must first find out what we really know concerning it and distinguish this from what is mere conjecture or deduction. Now the first authority for Dante's life generally, is undoubtedly Boccaccio, and as it happens he was in Ravenna, where he had relations, certainly in 1350 and perhaps in 1346. In 1350 he was the envoy of the Or San Michele Society, who by his hand sent Beatrice, the daughter of Dante, then a nun in the convent of S. ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... long before in far 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 ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France
... fancy we are fugitives—like Boccaccio's merry company—from the plague of our daily prose, to this garden of sweet poetry!" cried Miss ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... said of Milton, I would say of Dante, or Ariosto, of Petrarch, and of Tasso; nor less would I say it of Boccaccio and Chaucer, of Camoens and Spenser, of Rabelais and of Cervantes, of Gil Blas and the Vicar of Wakefield, of Byron and of Shelley, of Goethe and of Schiller. Nor let us forget those wonderful idealizations of awakening thought and primitive societies, the pictures ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... 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: ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... people say they know nothing of Art, but that they can judge as well as anybody whether a picture is like Nature or not. No doubt Giotto's contemporaries thought so, too, and they were grown men, with senses as good as ours; but we smile when Boccaccio says, "There was nothing in Nature that Giotto could not depict, whether with the pencil, the pen, or the brush, so like that it seemed not merely like, but the thing itself." We smile superior, but Giotto ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... father of the revival of ancient literature. Not only was he himself a profound student of it, but he suggested to Boccaccio that line of study which governed the entire intellectual life of the author of the "Decameron." With the application of Boccaccio to the translation of Homer into Latin we perceive a singular illustration of the trend of the classic devotion of the time. Despite the fact that ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... solace from 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 that my cheeks are even rounder than his were, ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... fantastic quarrel of the cook with the poor devil who had flavoured his dry bread with the smoke of the roast, and the judgment of Seyny John, truly worthy of Solomon? It comes from the Cento Novelle Antiche, rewritten from tales older than Boccaccio, and moreover of an extreme brevity and dryness. They are only the framework, the notes, the skeleton of tales. The subject is often wonderful, but nothing is made of it: it is left unshaped. Rabelais wrote a version of one, the ninth. The scene takes place, not at Paris, but at Alexandria in ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... the kings of Aragon with Sardinia, and in 1326 they finally drove the Pisans out of Cagliari, and made it the seat of their government. In 1348 the island was devastated by the plague described by Boccaccio. It was not until 1403 that the kings of Aragon were able to conquer the district of Arborea, which, under the celebrated Eleonora (whose code of laws—the so-called Carta de Logu—was famous), offered a heroic resistance. In 1479 the native princes were deprived of all independence. The island ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... to have been neglectful of another treasure which was in their keeping. Whether the gay gallant was knight or squire, page or courtier, the feminine heart seems to have been unable to withstand his wiles, and from Boccaccio to Rabelais the deceived and injured husband was ever a butt of ridicule. Of course, there was reason for all this; the ideals of wedded life were much further from realization than they are to-day, and the sanctity of the marriage relation ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... the only singer who has invested this wood with poetical associations. It is well known that Boccaccio laid his story of 'Honoria' in the pine-forest, and every student of English literature must be familiar with the noble tale in verse which Dryden has founded on this part of the 'Decameron.' We all of us have followed Theodore, and watched with him the tempest swelling in the grove, and seen ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... Dante in his Storia della Letteratura Italiana (Firenze, 1878 and subsequent years), and to Scartazzini's Prolegomeni della Divina Commedia (Leipzig, 1890). The fourteenth century Comments, especially those of Boccaccio, of Buti, and of Benvenuto da Imola, are indispensable to one who would understand the poem as it was understood by Dante's immediate contemporaries and successors. It is from them and from the Chronicle ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... persecution, the morbid obsession of the danse macabre—things which many think of as Mediaeval, but which belong really only to the Middle Ages when old and near to death. But all the South was already full of the new youth of the Renaissance. Boccaccio had lived, Leonardo was at the height of his glory. In the fields of Touraine was already playing with his fellows the boy that ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... character, are the Prince of 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, ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... 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 stories are bare plots, ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... of the Roman and foreign nobility. In summer, it must be a heavenly place; even now, with its musical fountains, long avenues, and grassy slopes, crowned with the fan-like branches of the Italian pine, it reminds one of the fairy landscapes of Boccaccio. We threaded our way through the press of carriages on the Pincian hill, and saw the enormous bulk of St. Peter's loom up against the sunset sky. I counted forty domes and spires in that part of Rome that lay ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... it "out of certain books of French and reduced it into English." But it is no mere translation of the older romances, which Malory rather adopted as the basis of his work, moulding them to suit his more refined taste and fancy, much as Chaucer used Boccaccio's tales, and Shakespeare a century after Malory adopted the plots and outlines ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... Paris, and Padua, and after mastering with special delight the writings of such poets as Dante, Boccaccio, and Alain Chartier, Lydgate opened at his monastery of Bury St Edmund's a school of rhetoric in which he taught young nobles literature and the ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... it. I don't believe your brother has, from what you say. Bock here has it. See how he trots along the road, keeps an eye on the scenery, and minds his own business. I never saw him get into a fight yet. Wish I could say the same of myself. I named him after Boccaccio, to remind me to read ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley |
