The terrible plague that swept over the earth in the middle of the Thirteenth Century, known in history as the "Black Death,"[1] ravaged Florence with peculiar malignity, and Boccaccio feigns that five ladies and their cavaliers took refuge in a villa in the neighbourhood and beguiled their leisure by telling stories to each other. Being a collection of tales told by various characters, the _Decamerone_ bears a certain resemblance to another memorable work of the Fourteenth Century, Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales,_ but happier than his great contemporary, Boccaccio lived to complete his design.
The work opens with a noble description of the Plague of Florence, but this gloomy and terrible introduction gives no forecast of the light, festive and occasionally indecorous character of many of the tales. Others, however, are highly picturesque and even poetical, and some have a special interest for English readers as being the sources whence Shakespeare drew _All's Well that Ends Well,_ and _Cymbeline,_--Dryden, _Theodore and Honoria_ and _Sigismonda and Guiscardo,_ and Keats _Isabella, or the Pot of Basil._
Boccaccio had every quality of a great novelist. His style is varied, flexible and animated, and his idiom is so purely Tuscan that it was held up as a standard by the _Accademia della Crusca,_ and if any fault can be found with it, it is that the copiousness of his vocabulary sometimes leads him into florid and redundant amplifications. His characters are drawn with considerable skill. His dialogue is invariably natural and appropriate. His incidents, though sometimes overstepping the limits of decorum, are ingenious and entertaining. The work gives a brilliant panorama of the men and manners of Italy in the Fourteenth Century.
No writer has derived more advantage from the admiration of other writers than Boccaccio. Great poets are indebted to him for the plots of some of their most successful works. Great painters have vied with each other in illustrating the brilliant scenes of his _Decamerone._ Great philologians and grammarians have expressed their admiration for the purity and elegance of his style. Brilliant as his services were to the literature of his country, they have received a more than ample measure of reward from the gratitude of posterity.