The sources he drew from for this beautiful poem, so full of learning, but fuller still of a genuine love of nature, prove to us that it was, in its completeness, a mature work. It is derived in part from the _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid, from the _Æneid_, and from Achilles Tatius, a Greek romancer of Alexandria who lived in the fifth century A.D.[303] Moreover, the _Ninfale_ is a pastoral poem that is in no way at all concerned with chivalry; it is wholly Latin, full of nature and the bright fields, expressed with a Latin rhetoric. Curiously enough it has never had much success, especially out of Italy; and though it be voluptuous, it is by no means the immoral book it has been called.
This, as we have seen, is the third poem which Boccaccio wrote in _ottave_, and it has been stated, not without insistence, that he was in fact the inventor, or at any rate the renewer, of that metre in Italian.[304]
The truth seems to lie with Baldelli. The Sicilians had written _ottave_, but they had but two _rime_, and were akin to those of the Provençals. What Boccaccio did was to take this somewhat arid scheme and give it life by reforming it out of all recognition. Moreover, if he was not actually the first poet to write _ottave_ in Italian, he was the first to put them to epic use. There are in fact, properly speaking, no Italian epics before the poems of Boccaccio.
As for the _Ninfale Fiesolano_, it was first published in Venice in 1477 by Bruno Valla and Tommaso d' Alessandria. It has only been translated once--into French--by Anton Guercin du Crest, who published it in Lyons in 1556 at the shop of Gabriel Cotier. This was apparently the last poem on which Boccaccio was engaged--though it may have been put aside for the sake of the _Fiammetta_, and taken up again--before, about 1344, it seems, he returned to Naples.
[213] Cf. CORAZZINI, _op. cit._, p. 17. This letter seems to be a translation from the Latin.
[214] Possibly on the occasion of his father's second marriage (cf. _Fiammetta_, _infra_), which was probably made for purely financial reasons. The lady died possibly in the Black Death of 1348, certainly before 1349. See _infra_.
[215] I write _Filocolo_ rather than _Filocopo_: see A. GASPARY, _Filocolo oder Filocopo_ in _Zeitschrift für Rom. Phil._, III, p. 395.