Boccaccio, late in life, assumed the ecclesiastical habit, and entered on the study of theology. When the Florentines founded a professorship for the reading and exposition of the Divine Comedy, Boccaccio was made the first incumbent. The result of his labors was a life of Dante, and a commentary on the first seventeen cantos of the Inferno. With the death of Petrarch, who had been his most intimate friend, his last tie to earth was loosed; he died at Certaldo a few months later, in the sixty-third year of his age. His dwelling is still to be seen, situated on a hill, and looking down on the fertile and beautiful valley watered by the river Elsa. Of the other prose writers of the fourteenth century the most remarkable are the three Florentine historians named Villani, the eldest of whom (1310-1348) wrote a history of Florence, which was continued afterwards by his brother and by his nephew; a work highly esteemed for its historical interest, and for its purity of language and style; and Franco Sacchetti (1335-1400), who approaches nearest to Boccaccio. His "Novels and Tales" are valuable for the purity and eloquence of their style, and for the picture they afford of the manners of his age. Among the ascetic writers of this age St. Catherine of Siena occupies an important place, as one who aided in preparing the way for the great religious movement of the sixteenth century. The writings of this extraordinary woman, who strove to bring back the Church of Rome to evangelical virtue, are the strongest, clearest, most exalted religious utterance that made itself heard in Italy in the fourteenth century. 6. THE FIRST DECLINE OF ITALIAN LITERATURE.--The passionate study of the ancients, of which Petrarch and Boccaccio had given an example, suspended the progress of Italian literature in the latter part of the fourteenth century, and through almost all the fifteenth. The attention of the literary men of this time was wholly engrossed by the study of the dead languages, and of manners, customs, and religious systems equally extinct. They present to our observation boundless erudition, a just spirit of criticism, and nice sensibility to the beauties and defects of the great authors of antiquity; but we look in vain for that true eloquence which is more the fruit of an intercourse with the world than of a knowledge of books. They were still more unsuccessful in poetry, in which their attempts, all in Latin, are few in number, and their verses harsh and heavy, without originality or vigor. It was not until the period when Italian poetry began to be again cultivated, that Latin verse acquired any of the characteristics of genuine inspiration.