Even without their setting his tales would have been something memorable, something that lifted the art to a new level and made less loving workmanship an obvious backsliding. But stories put together do not make good books. The _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ are very short and make a collection of anecdotes. The _Exemplary Novels_ of Cervantes are very long and stand and fall each one alone. But the _Canterbury Tales_ are the better for that merry company on pilgrimage. And when Queen Joan of Naples, profligate, murderess, and bluestocking, asked Boccaccio to put his stories in a book, it was well that he should have the plague of 1348 to set as purple velvet underneath his gems--the morality inseparable from the tales was so simple and so careless. Boccaccio's attitude was that of his age. Man has wants: if he can satisfy them, good: if not, why then it may ease his sorrow to hear it professionally expressed:--'Help me,' as Chaucer says:-- 'Help me that am the sorwful instrument That helpeth lovers, as I can, to pleyne!' As for good fortune, it is taken as naïvely as by the topers in the song:-- 'Maults gone down, maults gone down From an old angel to a French crown. And every drunkard in this town Is very glad that maults gone down.' When Troilus is happy with Cressida, Chaucer smiles aside:--'With worse hap God let us never mete.' And Boccaccio, after describing a scene that in England at the present day would be the prelude to a case at law, and columns of loathsomely prurient newspaper reports, ejaculates with simple piety:--'God grant us the like.' The _Decameron_ owes much of its dignity and permanence to its double frame, to the Court of Story-telling in the garden on the hill, and to the deeper irony that places it, sweet, peaceful, and insouciant, in the black year of pestilence and death. THE ROGUE NOVEL THE ROGUE NOVEL [Democracy in literature.] FEW characters in literature have had so large or so honourable a progeny as the gutter-snipe. If the Kings' daughters of High Romance, charming, delicate creatures, had only wedded with Kings' sons, as delicately fashioned as themselves, we should never have known the sterling dynasty of the Tom Joneses and the Humphry Clinkers, with their honest hearts and coarse hides warranted to wear. All those Kings of men, whose thrones were beer-barrels, whose sceptres, oaken cudgels, whose perennial counsellor was Jollity, whose enemy, Introspection, would never have come to their own, and indeed would never have been born, if it had not been for the sixteenth century entry of the rascal into the Palace gardens, for the escapades of such shaggy-headed, smutfaced, barefooted urchins as Lazarillo de Tormes.