There is nothing in the medieval ideals of womanhood to suggest such a phenomenon, still less its cordial acceptance. Not even in the early poets is there a trace of the type of woman which played so distinguished a part in the golden age of the Renaissance. Beatrice was little more than a beautiful abstraction, the spiritual ideal of a man who dwelt mainly upon other-worldly matters. Petrarch found it interesting to kneel before Madonna Laura in the clouds, and sing hymns in her praise; but she was only an elusive figure on which to drape poetic fancies. In these days, when it is quite the fashion to pull the halos from the saints and put them on the sinners,--when even the wicked Lucrezia Borgia has become a respectable wife and a particularly good mother, who expiated the sins of her youth, if she had any, by her pious devotion, her kindness to the poor, and her patronage of art and literature,--it is not surprising to hear that Laura was a common-place matron, “fair, fat, and forty,” who would have found it difficult to live up to the ideals of her adorer,--even if she had known what they were,--and prudently kept out of so rarefied an air. This blending of chivalry and mysticism made fine poetry but not very substantial women. Boccaccio paid a generous tribute to the heroic qualities of the women of the past, but he evidently preferred them at a distance or in books. Personally he seems to have had no more taste for savantes than for saints. He belonged to the new age, which glorified the joys of life and liked to sing love-songs--not of the choicest--to frail beauties. Fiammetta was, no doubt, a clever woman and a beautiful one, but she was no divine Egeria to inspire him with high thoughts. If he did brilliant things at her bidding, the trail of the serpent was over them all. Perhaps he aimed to suit the taste of the day, which was neither delicate nor moral; or he may have lived in bad company from which he took his models. We should be sorry to take as representative the heroines of the Decameron, who must have brought blushes, which the twilight could not hide, to the faces of the little coterie of friends that sat on the grass telling or listening to these tales during the long summer evenings at Florence, when men and women were dying all about them. But they give us one phase of the life of the time, and reflect the taste of an audience composed mainly of men who laughed at morals and deified art, regardless of its aim or its subject. The age was not strait-laced, but Italian ladies were not permitted to read Boccaccio. One story, however, they might read. When the poet wished to portray a good woman, for a change, he made a fine little picture of Griselda, the patient, who was duly thankful for every indignity her amiable lord chose to offer, mainly because she thought her sufferings made him happy. When these incredible cruelties culminated in sending her away loaded with unmerited disgrace, she still thanked him like