[Illustration: GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO] But the Boccaccio of the _Decameron_ was the mature young man, of personal beauty, and nimble tongue, a Dioneo, who had his own way with the company in which he found himself, and was licensed, like a professional jester, to say the most scandalous things. He knew the rich colour, classical learning, and jollity of morals of the Court of Naples. Here he heard the travelling story-tellers, and perhaps learnt from them a little of the art of narrative. He knew the _Gesta Romanorum_, and began to collect tales himself with the idea of making some similar collection. Noting story after story that he heard told (for it would be ridiculous to reason from the widespread origin of his tales that he had a stupendous knowledge of the world's books), he wrote them with a perfect feeling for value and proportion. In him the story-teller ceased to be an improviser. In his tales the longwindedness of the _trouveurs_ was gone, gone also the nakedness of the anecdote. He refused to excuse them with the moral tags of the Gesta. These new forms were not things of utility that needed justification; they were things of independent beauty. [His story-telling.] Boccaccio was intent simply on the art of telling tales. He knew enough of classical literature to feel the possible dignity and permanence of prose, and he told his stories as they were told to him in a supple, pleasant vernacular that obeyed him absolutely and never led him off by its own strangeness into byways foreign to the tales and to himself. He found his material in anecdotes of current gossip, like Cecco Angiolieri's misadventure with his money, his palfrey, and his clothes, and in popular tales like that of the overpatient Griselda. He took it in the rough and shaped it marvellously, creating two forms, the short story proper, the skilful development of a single episode, and the little novel, the French _nouvelle_, a tale whose incidents are many and whose plot may be elaborate. From his day to our own these two forms have scarcely altered, and in the use of both of them he showed that invaluable art, so strenuously attained by later story-tellers, of compelling us to read with him to the end, even if we know it, for the mere joy of narrative, the delight of his narrating presence. We are so well content with Chaucer's gorgeous improvisations that we never ask whether this piece or that is relevant to the general theme. But in Boccaccio there are no irrelevancies, praise that can be given to few story-tellers before the time of the self-conscious construction of men like Poe, and the austere selection of men like Mérimée and Flaubert. [Importance of framework in books of short tales.]