Boccaccio’s private character was stained by licentiousness. Besides his Fiammetta, he had several mistresses whom he mentions in his Ameto. A natural daughter, whose name was Violante, he lost while she was an infant, and he mourns over her in his eclogues under the name of Olympia. He had also an illegitimate son who survived him, but who is not mentioned in his testament. In the latter years of his life, Boccaccio was poor, though not in absolute want, and his friend Petrarch, who died little more than one year before him, left him by his will fifty golden florins, “to buy him a winter pelisse to protect him from cold while in his study at night,” adding, that if he did no more for Boccaccio, it was not through want of inclination but want of means. Boccaccio, on his part, had given Petrarch several works copied by his own hand, among others, a Latin translation of Homer, Dante, and some works of St. Augustine. His modest dwelling at Certaldo, in which he died, still remains. The Princes of the House of Medici protected it by affixing their armorial ensigns on the outside, with an inscription. A Florentine lady, of the name of Medici Lenzoni, purchased it in 1822, in order to preserve it from dilapidation as a relic of departed genius. The appearance of the house is exactly similar to the sketch given by Manni a century since, in his life of Boccaccio. It is built of brick, according to the fashion of the fourteenth century, with a square turret on one side of it commanding a fine view of the surrounding hills; one of which is still called by the country people, “the hill of Boccaccio,” from a tradition that this was his favourite place of resort for meditation and study in the summer heats. The grove which crowned its summit was cut down not long ago. A curious circumstance is said by Professor Rosellini to have happened some years before the purchase of the house by the Signora Lenzoni. An old woman, who tenanted the premises, was busy weaving in a small room next to the sitting apartment, when the repeated shaking of her loom brought down part of the wall, and laid open a small recess hollowed in the thickness of it, from which a large bundle of written papers tumbled down. The old woman, through ignorance or superstition, or both, thought it a pious duty to consign the whole of the MSS. to the flames. Probably many interesting autographs of Boccaccio have thus been lost.