We must take the ten days’ holiday as it is painted:  a gay and entrancing record of a fortunate and brilliant summer vacation, every one of its hundred pictures united with the rest by a delicate tracery of flowers and landscape, with bird-songs and laughter, bits of tender and chaste by-play—­for there were recognized lovers in the company; and when this is conceived in its entirety, we must set it in the massive frame of terrible gloom of the great plague, through which Boccaccio makes us look at his picture.  And then the frame itself becomes a picture; and its ghastly horror—­the apparent fidelity of the descriptions, which makes one feel as if he had before him the evidence of an eye-witness—­gives a measure of the power of the artist and the range of his imagination, from an earthly inferno to an earthly paradise, such as even the ‘Commedia’ does not give us.  In this stupendous ensemble, the individual tales become mere details, filling in of the space or time; and, taken out of it, the whole falls into a mere story-book, in which the only charm is the polish of the parts, the shine of the fragments that made the mosaic.  The tales came from all quarters, and only needed to be amusing or interesting enough to make one suppose that they had been listened to with pleasure:  stories from the ‘Gesta Romanorum,’ the mediaeval chronicles, or any gossip of the past or present, just to make a whole; the criticism one might pass on them, I imagine, never gave Boccaccio a thought, only the way they were placed being important.  The elaborate preparation for the story-telling; the grouping of them as a whole, in contrast with the greater story he put as their contrast and foil; the solemn gloom, the deep chiaroscuro of this framing, painted like a miniature; the artful way in which he prepares for his lieta brigata the way out of the charnel-house:  these are the real ‘Decameron.’  The author presents it in a prelude which has for its scope only to give the air of reality to the whole, as if not only the plague, but the ‘Decameron,’ had been history; and the proof of his perfect success is in the fact that for centuries the world has been trying to identify the villas where the merry men and maidens met, as if they really had met.

“Whenever, most gracious ladies, I reflect how pitiful you all are by nature, I recognize that this work will in your opinion have a sad and repulsive beginning, as the painful memory of the pestilence gone by, fraught with loss to all who saw or knew of it, and which memory the work will bear on its front.  But I would not that for this you read no further, through fear that your reading should be always through sighs and tears.  This frightful beginning I prepare for you as for travelers a rough and steep mountain, beyond which lies a most beautiful and delightful plain, by so much the more pleasurable as the difficulty of the ascent and passage of the mountain had been great.  And as the extreme of pleasure touches pain,