Shall make me live; who knows himself a braggart,
     Let him fear this; for it shall come to pass,
     That every braggart shall be found an ass. 
     Rust sword, cool blushes, and Parolles live
     Safest in shame; being fooi’d, by fool’ry thrive;
     There’s place and means for every man alive. 
     I’ll after them.

The story of all’s well that ends well, and of several others of Shakespeare’s plays, is taken from Boccaccio.  The poet has dramatized the original novel with great skill and comic spirit, and has preserved all the beauty of character and sentiment without improving upon it, which was impossible.  There is indeed in Boccaccio’s serious pieces a truth, a pathos, and an exquisite refinement of sentiment, which is hardly to be met with in any other prose writer whatever.  Justice has not been done him by the world.  He has in general passed for a mere narrator of lascivious tales or idle jests.  This character probably originated in his obnoxious attacks on the monks, and has been kept up by the grossness of mankind, who revenged their own want of refinement on Boccaccio, and only saw in his writings what suited the coarseness of their own tastes.  But the truth is, that he has carried sentiment of every kind to its very highest purity and perfection.  By sentiment we would here understand the habitual workings of some one powerful feeling, where the heart reposes almost entirely upon itself, without the violent excitement of opposing duties or, untoward circumstances.  In this way, nothing ever came up to the story of Frederigo Alberigi and his Falcon.  The perseverance in attachment, the spirit of gallantry and generosity displayed in it, has no parallel in the history of heroical sacrifices.  The feeling is so unconscious too, and involuntary, is brought out in such small, unlooked-for, and unostentatious circumstances, as to show it to have been woven into the very nature and soul of the author.  The story of Isabella is scarcely less fine and is more affecting in the circumstances and in the catastrophe.  Dryden has done justice to the impassioned eloquence of the Tancred and Sigismunda; but has not given an adequate idea of the wild preternatural interest of the story of Honoria.  Cimon and Iphigene is by no means one of the best, notwithstanding the popularity of the subject.  The proof of unalterable affection given in the story of Jeronymo, and the simple touches of nature and picturesque beauty in the story of the two holiday lovers, who were poisoned by tasting of a leaf in the garden at Florence, are perfect masterpieces.  The epithet of Divine was well bestowed on this great painter of the human heart.  The invention implied in his different tales is immense:  but we are not to infer that it is all his own.  He probably availed himself of all the common traditions which were floating in his time, and which he was the first to appropriate.  Homer appears the most original of all authors—­probably for no other reason than that we can trace the plagiarism no further.  Boccaccio has furnished subjects to numberless writers since his time, both dramatic and narrative.  The story of Griselda is borrowed from his DECAMERON by Chaucer; as is the KNIGHT’S tale (Palamon and Arcite) from his poem of the THESEID.