The work opens with a noble description of the Plague of Florence, but this gloomy and terrible introduction gives no forecast of the light, festive and occasionally indecorous character of many of the tales. Others, however, are highly picturesque and even poetical, and some have a special interest for English readers as being the sources whence Shakespeare drew _All's Well that Ends Well,_ and _Cymbeline,_--Dryden, _Theodore and Honoria_ and _Sigismonda and Guiscardo,_ and Keats _Isabella, or the Pot of Basil._ Boccaccio had every quality of a great novelist. His style is varied, flexible and animated, and his idiom is so purely Tuscan that it was held up as a standard by the _Accademia della Crusca,_ and if any fault can be found with it, it is that the copiousness of his vocabulary sometimes leads him into florid and redundant amplifications. His characters are drawn with considerable skill. His dialogue is invariably natural and appropriate. His incidents, though sometimes overstepping the limits of decorum, are ingenious and entertaining. The work gives a brilliant panorama of the men and manners of Italy in the Fourteenth Century. No writer has derived more advantage from the admiration of other writers than Boccaccio. Great poets are indebted to him for the plots of some of their most successful works. Great painters have vied with each other in illustrating the brilliant scenes of his _Decamerone._ Great philologians and grammarians have expressed their admiration for the purity and elegance of his style. Brilliant as his services were to the literature of his country, they have received a more than ample measure of reward from the gratitude of posterity. Italy produced in the Fourteenth Century many other prose writers of note, though none so eminent as Boccaccio. First and foremost we must mention the invaluable _Chronicle_ of GIOVANNI VILLANI. This historian rose in the service of the Florentine Republic until he became Prior. He was one of the many victims of the Black Death, and his unfinished work was continued by his brother MATTEO, and this continuation was completed by Matteo's son, FILIPPO. All these are quoted as classics by the Accademia della Crusca. According to competent judges, Giovanni was the most brilliant, Matteo the most noteworthy for the important events he narrates, and Filippo remarkable rather for industry and research than for ability as a writer. The _Travels_ of MARCO POLO, a Venetian, were an inestimable contribution to the knowledge of remote countries. For centuries he lay very unjustly under the suspicion of falsehood and exaggeration, and it was only at a comparatively recent date that his veracity, nay, his scrupulous exactness, received a tardy vindication.