Boccaccio, the most famous of Italian novelists, was the illegitimate son of a Florentine tradesman, and began life as a merchant's clerk. It is well known that Shakespeare borrowed the plot of "All's Well that Ends Well" from Boccaccio.[12] In fact, the "Decamerone" furnished him with plots for several of his plays. Chaucer derived from the same source his poem of the "Knight's Tale." We never hear shallow people reflecting upon the Bard of Avon for taking some of his plots from earlier writers, and weaving about them the golden threads of his superb genius, without recalling Dryden's remark relative to Ben Jonson's adaptations and translations from the classics, in such plays as "Catiline" and "Sejanus." "He invades authors," says Dryden, "like a monarch; and what would be theft in other writers is but victory in him." Sterne's idea upon the same subject also suggests itself. "As monarchs have a right," he says, "to call in the specie of a State and raise its value by their own impression, so are there certain prerogative geniuses who are above plagiaries, who cannot be said to steal, but from their improvement of a thought, rather to borrow it, and repay the commonwealth of letters with interest again, and may more properly be said to adopt than to kidnap a sentiment, by leaving it heir to their own fame." Columbus, who gave a new world to the old, was a weaver's son, and in his youth he earned his bread as a cabin-boy in a coasting-vessel which sailed from Genoa. The story of the great Genoese pilot possesses a more thrilling interest than any narrative which the imagination of poet or romancer has ever conceived. His name flashes a bright ray over the mental darkness of the period in which he lived. In imagination one sees him wandering for years from court to court, begging the necessary means wherewith to prosecute his inspired purpose,[13] and finally, after successfully accomplishing his mission, languishing in chains and in prison. How naturally Halleck's invocation to Death, in "Marco Bozarris," occurs to us here, as the hero, when his object has been attained, joyfully faces the grim monarch: "Thy grasp is welcome as the hand Of brother in a foreign land; Thy summons welcome as the cry That told the Indian isles were nigh, To the world-seeking Genoese, When the land wind from woods of palm And orange-groves and fields of balm Blew o'er the Haytian seas." De Foe, the author of "Robinson Crusoe," and of over two hundred other books, was a hosier by trade, the son of a London butcher named James Foe. The particle _De_ was added by the son without other authority than the suggestion of his own fancy. Cardinal Wolsey and Kirke White were also sons of butchers.