This celebrated tale was probably taken by Boccacio from some ancient chronicle or traditional legend. It excited great attention among the learned of his time, and was translated into Latin by Leonardo Aretino. Francesco di Michele Accolti de Arezzo, who was accounted one of the best civilians of his age, rendered into Italian verse the lamentation of Sigismonda over her lover's heart; and the learned Philip Beroald made a Latin poetical version of the whole fable. Translations and imitations without number have been executed in foreign languages, without mentioning the tragedies which have been founded upon it. In England, the story was translated and versified in the octave stanza by William Walter, a follower of Sir Henry Marney, chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster.[212] A prose translation is to be found in Painter's "Palace of Pleasure;" and the tale being wrought into a tragedy by Robert Wilmot and others, was presented before Queen Elizabeth, at the Inner Temple, in 1568.[213] Dryden will not readily be suspected of deriving much aid from his black-lettered predecessors. He made Boccacio's story his own, and told it in his own way. One gross fault he has engrafted upon his original; I mean the coarseness of Sigismonda's character, whose love is that of temperament, not of affection. This error, grounded upon Dryden's false view of the passion and of the female character, and perhaps arising from the depravity of the age rather than of the poet, pervades and greatly injures the effect of the tale. Yet it is more than counterbalanced by preponderating beauties. Without repeating the praise, elsewhere given to the majesty of the poet's versification, and which this piece alone would be sufficient to justify, the reader's attention may be solicited to the colours with which Dryden has drawn a mind wrought up to the highest pitch of despair. Sigismonda is placed in that situation, in which, above all others, the human disposition seems to acquire a sort of supernatural strength or obstinacy: for although guilty of a crime, she is punished in a degree far exceeding the measure of the offence. In such a situation, that acuteness of feeling, which would otherwise waste itself in fluctuations betwixt shame, fear, and remorse, is willingly and eagerly turned into the channel of resistance and recrimination; and perhaps no readier mode can be discovered of hardening the human heart, even to the consistence of the nether millstone. It is in this state, that Sigismonda resolutely, and even joyfully, embraces death, in order to punish her father, and rejoin her lover. The previous arguments with Tancred, sufficiently, and, in the circumstances, naturally, intimate the tone of her mind, and are a striking instance of Dryden's power in painting passion wrought up to desperation.