Love them who curse you.
He called them all scoundrels, with somewhat less courtesy than cordiality, and less afraid of censure for veracity than adulation: he sent their fathers to hell, with no inclination to separate the child and parent: and now they are hugging him for it in his shroud! Would you ever have suspected them of being such lovers of justice?
You must have mistaken my meaning; the thought never entered my head: the idea of destroying a single copy of Dante! And what effect would that produce? There must be fifty, or near it, in various parts of Italy.
Petrarca. I spoke of you.
Boccaccio. Of me! My poetry is vile; I have already thrown into the fire all of it within my reach.
Petrarca. Poetry was not the question. We neither of us are such poets as we thought ourselves when we were younger, and as younger men think us still. I meant your Decameron; in which there is more character, more nature, more invention, than either modern or ancient Italy, or than Greece, from whom she derived her whole inheritance, ever claimed or ever knew. Would you consume a beautiful meadow because there are reptiles in it; or because a few grubs hereafter may be generated by the succulence of the grass?
Boccaccio. You amaze me: you utterly confound me.
Petrarca. If you would eradicate twelve or thirteen of the Novelle, and insert the same number of better, which you could easily do within as many weeks, I should be heartily glad to see it done. Little more than a tenth of the Decameron is bad: less than a twentieth of the Divina Commedia is good.
Boccaccio. So little?
Petrarca. Let me never seem irreverent to our master.