Boccaccio’s immediate successors as novelists are FRANCO SACCHETTI and GIOVANNI FIORENTINO, already mentioned as poets of the fifteenth century. Sacchetti (1335-1410) had in his youth been a merchant, and had travelled much both in Italy and in Slavonian countries. After his return he became a Florentine magistrate, and filled some important public offices. He was a man of solid and humorous wisdom, who instructed his times, partly by religious and moral discourses, which frequently display great liberality of feeling, partly by his stories, which, apart from their literary merits, afford a valuable picture of a society half-way on the road from barbarism to civilisation. The majority are founded on real occurrences, generally humorous, though the humour is not always as visible to us as to his contemporaries; but sometimes tragic. Some, as with Boccaccio, are derived from folk-lore in the _Gesta Romanorum_ or the _Fabliaux_. All are recounted with extreme simplicity and brevity. The art of working up a single incident into a long story by subtle delineation of character, elaborate description, and ingenious plot and underplot, was then unknown.[16] Sacchetti is the straightforward _raconteur_ and nothing more, but he deserves as much praise for the ease of his narrative as for the purity of his style. He can hardly be considered as an imitator of Boccaccio, who is always the poet and man of letters, while Sacchetti rather produces the impression of an ordinary Florentine gentleman telling stories after dinner with no special care for artistic effect, which nevertheless he attains by the plain good sense which bids him go straight to his subject and subordinate minor details to the really essential. His tales are single, not set in a framework like Boccaccio’s. This is not the case with his contemporary Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, author of the _Pecorone_ (_Great Stupid_), who has exposed himself to ridicule by the quaintness of his introductory machinery. A friar and a nun are supposed to meet weekly in the parlour of a convent, and console themselves for the insuperable obstacles to their attachment by telling stories, upon the merits of which they compliment each other extravagantly. The tales, however, are interesting, well told, and greatly esteemed for the excellence of their style. Like Sacchetti’s, they are mostly genuine anecdotes, or at least founded upon fact or popular tradition; some are taken with little alteration from Villani’s Chronicles. Nothing is certainly known of the author, except that he began to write his tales in 1378 at the Castle of Dovadola, in compulsory or voluntary exile from his native city. He is believed to have been a notary, and a partisan of the Guelf faction.