[83] Revival of Learning, p. 88.
[84] I may specially refer to the passages of the Amorosa Visione (cap. v. vi.) where he meets with Dante, "gloria delle muse mentre visse," "il maestro dal qual'io tengo ogni ben," "il Signor d'ogni savere;" also to the sonnets on Dante, and that most beautiful sonnet addressed to Petrarch after death at peace in heaven with Cino and Dante. See the Rime (Op. Volg. vol. xvi.), sonnets 8, 60, 97, 108.
[85] De Sanctis, Storia della Letteratura Italiana, vol. i. cap. 9.
[86] "Che la ragion sommettono al talento:" Inferno v. Compare these phrases:
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Le genti dolorose Che hanno perduto il ben dell'intelletto. —Inferno iii. |
And Semiramis:
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Che libito fe lecito in sua legge. —Inferno v. |
[87] In all his earlier works, especially in the Fiammetta, the Filostrato, the Ninfale Fiesolano, the Amorosa Visione, he sings the hymn of Il Talento, triumphant over medieval discipline. They form the proper prelude to what is sometimes called the Paganism of the Renaissance, but what is really a resurgence of the natural man. It was this talento which Valla philosophized, and Beccadelli and Pontano sang.
[88] One instance will suffice to illustrate the different methods of Boccaccio and Dante in dealing with the same material. We all know in what murk and filth Dante beheld Ciacco, the glutton, and what torments awaited Filippo Argenti, the fiorentino spirito bizzarro, upon the marsh of Styx (Inferno vi. and viii.). These persons play the chief parts in Giorn. ix. nov. 8, of the Decameron. They are still the spendthrift parasite, and the brutally capricious bully. But while Dante points the sternest moral by their examples, Boccaccio makes their vices serve his end of comic humor. The inexorableness of Dante is nowhere more dreadful than in the eighth Canto of the Inferno. The levity of Boccaccio is nowhere more superficial than in that Novella.
[89] See the little work, full of critical learning, by Adolfo Bartoli, I Precursori del Boccaccio, Firenze, Sansoni.