Prose fiction had existed before Boccaccio, and his manner had been in some measure anticipated by some of the tales which have found their way into the _Cento Novelle Antiche_, but he was probably the first to employ in Europe the Oriental device of setting his stories in a frame. The structure of the _Decameron_ is too generally known to render it necessary to more than barely mention its scheme as a succession of stories told by ten persons in ten successive days, on the feigned occasion of the retirement of a _lieta brigata_ to a delightful retreat from the plague which devastated Florence in 1348. Many among us will think that they ought to have remained to aid their perishing fellow-countrymen, and, what is more, would themselves have done so. But it would be absurd to blame the fourteenth century for a conception of public duty and a completeness of organisation in public calamity which did not and could not exist in it. Mediæval Italy produced but one Florence Nightingale, and she was a saint. The step once taken, the exclusion of all unpleasant tidings was its indispensable corollary; and hence the scene of the story-telling, with its groves and orchards, gardens and fountains, charming company and frank converse, has ever remained one of the green spots on which imagination loves to rest. Such an ideal of cultivated society afforded no room for the vivacity of delineation so admirable in Chaucer’s portraits derived from all classes; yet the prologue and the little introductory passages to each day are, with their feeling for landscape and poetic truth, even more delightful than the stories themselves. If, as seems probable, some of these were composed at Naples before the pestilence, this lovely framework must have been an afterthought. Of Boccaccio’s greatness as a master of narrative, nothing need here be said, unless that his progressiveness is even more surprising than his talent. Ten years (1339-49) had sufficed to raise him from the eloquent but confused and hyperbolical style of the _Filocopo_ to the perfection of Italian narrative. He was now the unapproached model of later story-tellers, who can, indeed, produce stronger effects by the employment of stronger means, but have never been able to rival him on his own ground of easy, unaffected simplicity. Two minor works of Boccaccio, written subsequently to the _Decameron_, deserve a word of notice--the _Corbaccio_, a lampoon upon a widow who had jilted him, which does him no credit morally, but evinces much satiric force; and the _Urbano_, a pretty little romance of the identification of an emperor’s abandoned son--the genuineness of which, however, has sometimes been doubted.