BY W. J. STILLMAN

It has been justly observed, and confirmed by all that we know of the early history of literature, that the first forms of it were in verse.  This is in accordance with a principle which is stated by Herbert Spencer on a different but related theme, that “Ornament was before dress,” the artistic instincts underlying and preceding the utilitarian preoccupations.  History indeed was first poetry, as we had Homer before Thucydides, and as in all countries the traditions of the past take the form of metrical, and generally musical, recitation.  An excellent and polished school of prose writers is the product of a tendency in national life of later origin than that which calls out the bards and ballad-singers, and is proof of a more advanced culture.  The Renaissance in Italy was but the resumption of a life long suspended, and the succession of the phenomena in which was therefore far more rapid than was possible in a nation which had to trace the path without any survivals of a prior awakening; and while centuries necessarily intervened between Homer and the “Father of History,” a generation sufficed between Dante and Boccaccio, for Italian literature had only to throw off the leaden garb of Latin form to find its new dress in the vernacular.  Dante certainly wrote Italian prose, but he was more at ease in verse; and while the latter provoked in him an abundance of those happy phrases which seem to have been born with the thought they express, and which pass into the familiar stock of imagery of all later time, the prose of the ‘Convito’ and the ‘Vita Nuova’ hardly ever recalls itself in common speech by any parallel of felicity.

And Boccaccio too wrote poetry of no ignoble type, but probably because he was part of an age when verse had become the habitual form of culture, and all who could write caught the habit of versification,—­a habit easier to fall into in Italian than in any other language.  But while the consecration of time has been given to the ‘Commedia,’ and the ‘Convito’ passes into the shadow and perspective of lesser things, so the many verses of Boccaccio are overlooked, and his greatest prose work, the ‘Decameron,’ is that with which his fame is mostly bound up.

Born in 1313, at seven years of age he showed signs of a literary facility, and his father, a merchant of Florence, put him to school with a reputable grammarian; but afterward, deciding to devote him to merchandise, sent him to study arithmetic,—­restive and profitless in which, he was sent to study canon law, and finding his level no better there, went back to traffic and to Naples in his father’s business when he was about twenty.  The story runs that the sight of the tomb of Virgil turned his thoughts to poetry; but this confusion of the post hoc with the propter hoc is too common in remote and romantic legend to value much.  The presence of Petrarch in the court of Robert, King of Naples,