Boccaccio had lately sent to his friend the MS. of the Decamerone, of which it is the concluding tale: the tender fancy of Petrarch, refined by a forty years' attachment to a gentle and elegant female, passed over what was vicious and blameable, or only recommended by the wit and the style, and fixed with delight on the tale of Griselda; so beautiful in itself, and so honourable to the sex whom he had poetically deified in the person of one lovely woman. He amused his leisure hours in translating it into Latin, and having finished his version, he placed it in the hands of a citizen of Padua, and desired him to read it aloud. His friend accordingly began; but as he proceeded, the overpowering pathos of the story so affected him, that he was obliged to stop; he began again, but was unable to proceed; the gathering tears blinded him, and choked his voice, and he threw down the manuscript. This incident, which Petrarch himself relates in a letter to Boccaccio, occurred about the period when Chaucer passed from Genoa to Padua to visit the poet and lover of Laura-- Quel grande, alla cui fama angusto è il mondo. Petrarch must have regarded the English poet with that wondering, enthusiastic admiration with which we should now hail a Milton or a Shakspeare sprung from Otaheite or Nova Zembla; and his heart and soul being naturally occupied by his latest work, he repeated the experiment he had before tried on his Paduan friend. The impression which the Griselda produced upon the vivid, susceptible imagination of Chaucer, may be judged from his own beautiful version of it in the Canterbury Tales; where the barbarity and improbability of the incidents are so redeemed by the pervading truth and purity and tenderness of the sentiment, that I suppose it never was perused for the first time without tears. Chaucer, as if proud of his interview with Petrarch, and anxious to publish it, is careful to tell us that he did not derive the story from Boccaccio, but that it was Learned at Padua of a worthy clerk, As proved by his wordes and his work; Francis Petrark, the Laureat Poete; which is also proved by internal evidence.