This poet rose to fame, and became the darling of the ruling classes. He was sent as an ambassador on various important missions to popes and princes; he became the favorite of a queen, and did not reject her favor even when she turned into a murderess. He learned to write beautiful Italian prose, a great service to his country. He used his skill to compose a collection of short stories dealing with the sojourn in a country villa of a number of Italian ladies and gentlemen of wealth and charm, the occasion being an outbreak of the plague in Florence. These ladies and gentlemen did not feel impelled by their religion to nurse the suffering; they were of too great importance to be risked in such crude fashion, so they retired, and passed their time listening to charmingly narrated tales of sexual promiscuity. I do not mean to imply that there is nothing but smut in the “Decameron” of Boccaccio. We shall find it a rule throughout history that leisure-class ladies and gentlemen do not spend their entire time in trying new sexual combinations. They have to eat, and so their artists give us delightful, appetizing accounts of banquets. They have to drink, and so their artists give us an entire lore of intoxicating liquors. They have to cover their nakedness, so we have a complicated art of dress, a mass of subtlety constantly changing, and affording traps to catch the feet of the unwary, so that the sacred inner circles may be protected from those individuals who have disgraced themselves by doing useful work, or by having parents or grandparents who did useful work. Also, the ladies and gentlemen have palaces to live in, and country estates to which they may flee from pestilence, famine and war; so we have the art of architecture. Because these homes have walls which must be decorated, we have the art of painting; and so on through a long list of cultural accomplishments. Moreover, not all ladies and gentlemen have been able to exclude the natural human emotions from their hearts; so in leisure-class art we have sentiments and sentimentalities. We like to be sorry for the poor, provided they are “worthy”; so we have “idylls” and other sad, sweet tales. When we are sick with ennui, we like to imagine going back to the country; so we have a long line of “return to nature” arts--eclogues and bucolics and pastorals, with beautiful shepherds and shepherdesses dancing on the green, and country lads and lasses giving touchingly quaint imitations of the manners of their betters.