by the prophecies and denunciations of an expiring monk. Boccaccio nevertheless so far profited by these admonitions as to write nothing more to which morality could take exception. Shortly before his end he received one of the most honourable and appropriate commissions with which he could have been entrusted, that of delivering public lectures on Dante, which he had carried down to the seventeenth canto of the Inferno, when death overtook him on December 21, 1375.
The Filocopo, Boccaccio's first and longest work of fiction, would be thought intolerably tedious at the present day, when one must be indeed Φιλοκόπος to get through it. It forms nevertheless a most important landmark in the history of literature, for it signalises the transition from the metrical romance to the pure novel. Something similar had been attempted two centuries earlier in the delightful miniature romance of mingled prose and verse, Aucassin and Nicolette, but the example had not been followed. About the middle of the thirteenth century the Novellino had been compiled with a distinct moral purpose, but its hundred tales are rather anecdotes than novelettes. The Filocopo is founded upon the ancient lay of Floris and Blanchefleur, which Boccaccio has converted into prose, with a copious admixture of new incidents, characters, and descriptions. There is little semblance of probability in the incidents, or accurate delineation in the characters, while the diction, though polished, is full of what would now be justly considered affectation and bad taste. In the fourteenth century it was neither, but the faithful image of the mental ferment inevitably produced by the irruption of the classical spirit into the contracted world of the Middle Age. Everything, indeed, was confused and
