All the other works of Boccaccio would have fallen into oblivion, had he not written the "Decameron:" they are scarcely read, even though bearing his name; they are heavy and uninteresting; his poetry is not poetry; his prose is long-winded; but the "Decameron;" bears the undoubted stamp of genius. His language is a "well of Tuscan undefiled," whence, as from its purest source, all future writers have drawn the rules and examples which form the correct and elegant Italian style. It possesses, to an extraordinary degree, the charm of eloquence. It imports little whence he drew the groundwork of his tales; yet, as far as we know, many of them are original, and the stories of Griselda and Cymon, of the pot of Bazil, and the sorrows of Ghismonda, are unborrowed from any other writer. The tenderness, the passion, the enthusiasm, the pathos, and above all, the heartfelt nature of his best tales, raise him to the highest rank of writers of any age or country. His defects were of the age. Boccaccio's mind was tarnished by the profligacy of the court of Naples. He mirrors the licentious manners of the people about him in his "Decameron:" it were better for human nature, that neither the reality nor the reflection had ever existed. The faults of the hook rendered it obnoxious, especially to the priests, whom he, in common with all the novelists of his time, treats with galling ridicule. Salvanorola preached against it, and so excited the minds of his fellow citizens, that they brought all their copies of the "Decameron," as well as of, it may be remarked, the blameless poetry of Petrarch and Dante, into the Piazza de' Signori on the last day of the carnival of 1497, and made a bonfire of them: on which account the earlier editions of these books are very rare. After Salvanorola, it continued on the list of prohibited books. This occasioned emended editions to be published,--some of which were so altered as scarcely to retain any thing of the original. It was after many years and with great industry, that the "Decameron" was restored. The first entire edition was published through the care of a society of young Florentines, who were ashamed of the disgraceful condition to which this celebrated work was reduced: this was published in 1527, and goes by the name of the "Ventisettana," or twenty-seventh, and of the "Delphin." After this, however, only mutilated editions were printed, and even now, as it still continues a prohibited book, any perfect edition bears on the title-page the name of some protestant town, London or Amsterdam, as the place where it is printed. [Sidenote: 1350. Ætat. 37.]