It was the constant destiny of Boccaccio to make epochs--producing something absolutely or virtually new, and tracing out the ways in which his successors, far as they might outstrip him, were bound to walk. We have seen that the heroic, the pastoral, the familiar romance owed, if not their actual birth, at least their first considerable beginnings to him; and his activity was no less important in the domain of narrative poetry. He may not have been the inventor of the octave stanza, but undoubtedly he was the first to show its supreme fitness for narrative, and thus mark out the channel in which the epic genius of Italy has flowed ever since. The peculiar grace of her language, and its affluence of rhymes, adapt it especially to this singularly elegant, if not massive or sublime, form of versification, superior for narrative purposes to the sinuous and digressive _terza rima_, or to Italian counterfeits of the majestic blank verse of England. It could not be expected that Boccaccio’s attempts should at first display all the perfection his metre is capable of receiving, he is undoubtedly lax and diffuse. Yet all the main recommendations of the octave are discoverable in his _Teseide_ and _Filostrato_, poems especially interesting to English readers from the imitation--frequently translation--of them in Chaucer’s _Knight’s Tale_ and _Troilus_. The _Teseide_ is the earlier, having been composed shortly after Boccaccio’s return to Florence in 1340 for the gratification of his Neapolitan mistress; while the _Filostrato_, apparently composed upon his second visit to Naples about 1347, is a disguised satire upon her inconstancy. Both from the acuteness of feeling thus engendered, and from the rapid progress Boccaccio had in the interim made in the poetic art, the _Filostrato_ is the more powerful and poetical composition; the prosperity of Troilus’s love while returned, for example, is described in the liveliest colours and with the truest feeling. The _Teseide_, on the other hand, has the advantage of a more dignified and heroic story, known to the English reader, not only from Chaucer, but from Dryden’s imitation of the latter in his _Palamon and Arcite_. It also gave the plot to Fletcher’s _Two Noble Kinsmen_. Boccaccio’s source is uncertain, but is believed to have been some Greek romance written under the later Roman Empire. If so, he can only have been acquainted with it in a Latin translation, now lost as well as the original. His own poem was translated back into Greek in a miserable Romaic version printed in 1529. For the tale of _Troilus and Cressida_ he had Guido de Colonna’s history of the Trojan war, itself indebted for this episode to an ancient metrical romance.