The development of romance in these authors is not always and in all respects a gain. Even the pathetic stories of the _Decameron_ (such as the _Pot of Basil_, _Tancred and Gismunda_, _William of Cabestaing_) seem to have lost something by the adoption of a different kind of grammar, a more learned rhetoric, in comparison with the best of the simple French stories, like the _Chastelaine de Vergi_. This is the case in a still greater degree where Boccaccio has allowed himself a larger scale, as in his version of the old romance of _Flores and Blanchefleur_ (_Filocolo_), while his _Teseide_ might be taken as the first example in modern history of the pernicious effect of classical studies. The _Teseide_ is the story of Palamon and Arcita. The original is lost, but it evidently was a French romance, probably not a long one; one of the favourite well-defined cases or problems of love, easily understood as soon as stated, presenting the rivalry of the two noble kinsmen for the love of the lady Emily. It might have been made into one of the stories of the _Decameron_, but Boccaccio had other designs for it. He wished to write a classical epic in twelve books, and not very fortunately chose this simple theme as the groundwork of his operations. The _Teseide_ is the first of the solemn row of modern epics; "reverend and divine, abiding without motion, shall we say that they have being?" Everything is to be found in the _Teseide_ that the best classical traditions require in epic--Olympian machinery, catalogues of armies, descriptions of works of art to compete with the Homeric and Virgilian shields, elaborate battles, and epic similes, and funeral games. Chaucer may have been at one time tempted by all this magnificence; his final version of the story, in the _Knight's Tale_, is a proof among other things of his critical tact. He must have recognised that the _Teseide_, with all its ambition and its brilliancy of details, was a failure as a story; that this particular theme, at any rate, was not well fitted to carry the epic weight. These personages of romance were not in training for the heavy classical panoply. So he reduced the story of Palamon and Arcita to something not very different from what must have been its original scale as a romance. His modifications of Boccaccio here are a lesson in the art of narrative which can hardly be overvalued by students of that mystery.