While the traditions of medieval song were thus preserved, the prose-romances followed, as closely as possible, the style of a chronicle, and aimed at the verisimilitude of authentic history. The _Reali_, for example, opens with this sentence: "Fuvvi in Roma un santo pastore della Chiesa, che aveva nome papa Silvestro." The _Fioravante_, recently edited by Signor Rajna, begins: "Nel tempo che Gostantino imperadore regiea & mantenea corte in Roma grandissima." This parade of historic seriousness, observed by the subsequent romantic poets, contributed in no small measure to the irony at which they aimed. But with the story-tellers of the _quattrocento_ it was no mere affectation. Like their predecessors of the fourteenth century, they treated legend from the standpoint of experience. It was due in no small measure to this circumstance that the Italian prose-romances are devoid of charm. Nowhere do we find in them that magic touch of poetry which makes the forests, seas and castles of the "Mort d'Arthur" enchanted ground. Notwithstanding all their extravagances, they remain positive in spirit, presenting the material of fancy in the sober garb of fact. The Italian genius lacked a something of imaginative potency possessed in overflowing measure by the Northern nations. It required the stimulus of satire, the infusion of idyllic sentiment, the consciousness of art, to raise the romantic epic to the height it reached in Ariosto. Then, and not till then, when the matter of the legend had become the sport of the æsthetic sense, were the inexhaustible riches of Italian fancy, dealing delicately and humorously with a subject which could no longer be apprehended seriously, revealed to the world in a masterpiece of beauty. But that work of consummate art was what it was, by reason of the master's wise employment of a style transmitted to him through generations of plebeian predecessors.
The same positive and workmanly method is discernible in the versified _novelle_ of this period.[297] The popular poets were wont to recast tales from the Decameron and other sources in octave stanzas. Of such compositions we have excellent specimens in Girolamo Benivieni's version of the novel of Tancredi, and in an anonymous rhymed paraphrase of Patient Grizzel.[298] The latter is especially interesting when we compare it with the series of panels attributed to Pinturicchio in the National Gallery, where a painter of the same period has exercised his fancy in illustrating the legend which the poet versified. Detached episodes of semi-mythical Florentine history were similarly treated. Allusion has already been made to the love-tale of Ippolito and Leonora, attributed on doubtful grounds to Alberti.[299] But by far the most beautiful is the story of Ginevra degli Almieri, told in octave stanzas by Agostino Velletti.[300] This poem has rare value as a genuine product of the plebeian muse. The heroine Ginevra's father was a pork-butcher, says the minstrel, and lived in the Marcato Vecchio, where he carried on the best business of the sort in Florence. It is also important for students of comparative literature, because it clearly illustrates the difference between Italian and Northern treatment of an all but contemporary incident. The events narrated are supposed to have really happened in the year 1396. On the Scotch Border they would have furnished materials for a ballad similar to Gil Morrice or Clerk Saunders. In Florence they take the form of a _novella_, and the _novella_ is expanded in octave stanzas.[301] Ginevra had two lovers, Antonio de' Rondinelli and Francesco degli Agolanti. Antonio loved her the more tenderly; but her parents gave her in marriage to Francesco. Soon after the ceremony, she sickened and fell into a trance; and since Florence was then threatened with the plague, the girl was buried over-hastily in this deep slumber. Her weeping parents laid her in a cippus or _avello_ between the two doors of S. Reparata, where the workmen, unable to finish their job before sunset, left the lid of her sepulcher unsoldered. In the middle of the night Ginevra woke, and discovered to her horror that she had been sent to the grave alive. Happily the moon was shining, and a ray of light fell through a chink upon her bier. She arose, wrapped her shroud around her, and struggled from her marble chest into the silent cathedral square. Giotto's bell tower rose above her, silvery and beautiful, and slender in the moonlight. Like a ghost, sheeted in her grave-clothes, Ginevra ran through the streets, and knocked first at Francesco's door. He was seated awake by the fireside, sorrowing for his young bride's loss: