It was an obvious and easy idea for Keats to weave into the St Agnes' Eve motive the motive of a love-passion between the son and daughter of hostile houses, and to bring the youth to a festival in the halls of his enemies in a manner which reminds one both of Romeo and Juliet and of the young Lochinvar in Scott's ballad. A remoter source has lately been pointed out as probable for the subsequent incidents of the lover's concealment by the old nurse in a closet next the maiden's chamber, his coming in to her while she sleeps, the melting of his real self into her dream of him, her momentary disenchantment and alarm on awakening, her re-assurance and surrender and their ensuing happy union and flight. All these circumstances, it has been shown, except the immediate flight of the lovers, are closely paralleled in Boccaccio's early novel _Il Filocolo_, and look as though they must have been derived from it. The _Filocolo_ is an excessively tedious and occasionally coarse amplification in prose, made by Boccaccio when his style was still unformed, of the old French metrical romance, long popular throughout Europe, of _Floire et Blancheflor_. The question is, how should Keats have come to be acquainted with it? At this time he knew very little Italian. He was accustomed to read his _Decameron_ in a translation,[6] and eight months later we find him with difficulty making out Ariosto at the rate of ten or a dozen stanzas a day. A French seventeenth-century version of the _Filocolo_ indeed existed, but none in English. Can it be that Hunt had told Keats the story, or at least those parts of it which would serve him, in the course of talk about Boccaccio? One would not have expected even Hunt's love of Italian reading to sustain him through the tedium of this early and little known novel by the master: moreover in criticizing _The Eve of St Agnes_ he gives no hint that Keats was indebted to him for any of its incidents. But there the resemblances are, too close to be easily explained as coincidences. The part played by the old nurse Angela in Keats's poem echoes pretty closely the part played by Glorizia in the _Filocolo_; the drama, dreaming and awake, played between Madeline and Porphyro, repeats, though in a far finer strain, that between Biancofiore and Florio; so that Keats's narrative reads truly like a magically refined and enriched quintessence distilled from the corresponding chapter in Boccaccio's tale.[7]