After Chaucer, narrative scarcely developed except in prose. Scott, indeed, nearly five centuries later, wrote his first tales in verse, but the rhyming story-teller disappeared in the greater author of the Waverley Novels.[3] Chaucer himself is interesting for marking the transition. He had many attributes of later narrative, in his round English humour, in his concern with actual life, although in this essay I have only needed him to illustrate the beginnings of the portrait-making that has since become so important a byway of the art. But while his verse in the _Canterbury Tales_ has the effect of good prose, his prose, excellent elsewhere, is here unwieldy and beyond his governance. He expressed the new attitude in the old way; but when he was only nine years old, there had been written in Italy prose tales that have hardly been excelled as examples of the two forms of the short story. Chaucer was born in 1340. In 1349 Boccaccio finished the _Decameron_. [Boccaccio.] Boccaccio had a more intricate mind than Chaucer's, and a more elaborate life. He is said to have been an illegitimate son of a Florentine merchant and a Frenchwoman, and the two nations certainly seem to have contributed to his character. He spent six years of his youth apprenticed to a merchant in Paris, forsook business, and was sent to learn law, and only in the end persuaded his father to let him devote himself to books. He had a knowledge of the world uncommon even in his day, and a knowledge of letters that was rare. He was something of a scholar, something of a courtier, and, particularly, something of a poet. Sentence after sentence in the _Decameron_ glides by like a splash of sunlight on a stream with floating blossoms. I must quote one of his poems in Rossetti's most beautiful translation:-- 'By a clear well, within a little field Full of green grass and flowers of every hue, Sat three young girls, relating (as I knew) Their loves. And each had twined a bough to shield Her lovely face; and the green leaves did yield The golden hair their shadow; while the two Sweet colours mingled, both blown lightly through With a soft wind for ever stirred and still'd. After a little while one of them said (I heard her), 'Think! If, ere the next hour struck, Each of our lovers should come here to-day, Think you that we should fly or feel afraid?' To whom the others answered, 'From such luck A girl would be a fool to run away.' He could write a poem like that; he could write the _Decameron_; he could write books of greater impropriety; and at the end of his life could beg his friends to leave such books alone, devoting himself to the compilation of ponderous works of classical learning. There is a legend of a deathbed vision of Judgment where Boccaccio figured, which, being reported to him, nearly gave the wit, the scholar, and the gallant the additional mask of the Carthusian religious.