It is unnecessary to speak here of Boccaccio’s other Italian works, beyond naming his romances _Fiammetta_ and _Filocopo_, and his heroic poems _La Teseide_ and _Filostrato_. The Latin compositions of Boccaccio are voluminous, and materially contributed, at the time they were written, to the advancement of letters. The most celebrated of these works are two treatises; the one on the genealogy of the gods, and the other on mountains, forests, and rivers. In the first, he gave an exposition of the ancient mythology; and in the second, rectified many errors in geography. These two works have fallen into neglect, since the discovery of manuscripts then unknown, and in consequence of the facilities which the art of printing, by opening new sources, has afforded to the study of antiquity. In the age in which they were composed, they were, however, equally remarkable for their extensive information and for the clearness of their arrangement; but the style is by no means so pure and elegant as that of Petrarch. But, while the claim to celebrity, in these great men, is restricted to the Italian poetry of Petrarch and to the novels of Boccaccio, our gratitude to them is founded on stronger grounds. They felt more sensibly than any other men that enthusiasm for the beauties of antiquity, without which we in vain strive to appreciate its treasures; and they each devoted a long and laborious life to the discovery and the study of ancient manuscripts. The most valued works of the ancients were at that time buried among the archives of convents, scattered at great distances, incorrect and incomplete, without tables of contents or marginal notes. Nor did those resources then exist, which printing supplies, for the perusal of works with which we are not familiar; and the facilities which are afforded by previous study, or the collation of the originals with each other, were equally wanting. It must have required a powerful intellect to discover, in a manuscript of Cicero, for example, without title or commencement, the full meaning of the author, the period at which he wrote, and other circumstances, which are connected with his subject; to correct the numerous errors of the copyists; to supply the chasms, which, frequently occurring at the beginning and the end, left neither title nor divisions nor conclusions, nor anything that might serve as a clew for the perusal; in short, to determine how one manuscript, discovered at Heidelberg, should perfect another, discovered at Naples. It was, in fact, by long and painful journeys that the scholars of those days equipped themselves for this task. The copying a manuscript, with the necessary degree of accuracy, was a work of great labour and expense. A collection of three or four hundred volumes was, at that time, considered an extensive library; and a scholar was frequently compelled to seek, at a great distance, the completion of a work, commenced under his own roof.