due prominence to his confiding trust and confidence in a providential over-ruling God, is, I feel, omitting the largest and most beautiful trait in his character. But in this paper I have no space to dwell on the reverential attitude of all in the Island of Saints. Well may it be called Ter-na-nog or the Country of the Young. Neither age nor infirmity can quench their playfulness, or dim their credulity. There is nothing in Nature-not even its silver setting of breakers and spray, its lacework of Osmunda Regalis, its crown of waxlike arbutus, or its rings of opal and azure and amethyst-so wonderful as the legends which cluster round every stone of the Emerald Isle. To the peasantry, Labhradth Loingseach, the Kings of Cashel, the Fingal of Ossian and the little people, still exist. The devil mixes punch in many enormous bowls whenever thunder is heard. The mother of Fin MacCoul eternally climbs her crags. St. Patrick continues to fling the Evil One over purple mountains into the Upper Lake of Killarney when its surface is ruffled with wind. Fairies dance in ancient raths, and The O'Donoghue rides upon every mountain mist.

Humorous enough seems this faith. But we never smile at it in Ireland. It is part and parcel with the characters of those who live in Ter-na-nog.

L. ORMAN COOPER.

1899

THE 'DECAMERON' AND ITS VILLAS

AMONG the books of the great period of Italian literature which show, in their construction and treatment, the awakening pictorial sense and the curious analogies which obtain between literary and pictorial art, the completest example I believe to be the Decameron. It cannot be compared with the Commedia for the vividness of its imagery, and its artistic vein is as widely different from that of the awful realism of the Inferno as the art of Correggio from that of Giotto, but none the less purely artistic. While the vision of the arch-poet comes in an endless series of pictures which, in their dramatic intensity, range of emotion, and completeness as subjects, as well as in their archaic severity and refinement of finish, seem made to challenge design on its own ground and eternally mock its insufficience, the Decameron must be judged as a whole, with all its surroundings and associations, and makes a single picture capable of illustration and variation differing as the characters of the men who shall paint it; a picture in which colour and light, the joyous flush of youth and life, the perfume, and glow of sense in its most exquisite form, challenge the palette and pencil, as the grim and awful immortals who burn or freeze in the Inferno defy the crayon of the designer. The journey of Dante resembles the walls of the Campo Santo of Pisa, an almost interminable succession of pictures struck out with a power as parsimonious as it is immense, in the dry tints of an art which has no need of the refinements of modern method to tell all it has to say; pictures unframed and without the decoration of a needless detail, more impressive in their sombre tints and subdued light and shade than if all the colour of Venice had been lavished on them, and in connection with which we can only think of Michael Angelo or Blake. The ten days of Boccaccio, on the other hand, form but one image-every day is like every other, a day bright with sunshine, glowing with the glow of that dear Florentine sun under which whatever springs from earth seems to have been planted by the genius of art to grow into forms of beauty, and in which the lieta brigata, the merry troupe of ten, all in the flush of youth and happiness, careless of all that is, has been, or elsewhere may be, are set, as in a picture of the spring, and in its art as modern as a picture

of Watteau. There were seven ladies, according to the story, each to ' the other, either by friendship, by neighbourhood, or by blood, connected, of whom no one had passed her twenty-eighth year and none but had seen her eighteenth, all educated and of noble family, beautiful and of polished manners and of virtuous gaiety,' to whom the chance which provides food for the romancer sent three gentlemen 'who in the desolation of the city found their consolation in visiting their beloved ladies,' and who by the same providence of the story-teller were comprised in the seven. These, hoping to escape the mortality which had desolated the city, combined to go into the country near by, and pass the days in such diversion from the fear of death and the grief for the dead as was possible.' And having in order prepared all things necessary and first sent their orders where they intended to go the next morning-i.e. Wednesday at break of day-the ladies with their maids and the three young men with their servants, leaving the city, began their journey. Not above two miles had they travelled, before they reached the place they had fixed on beforehand. That place

was on a little hill, on every side a certain distance remote from the roads, with various trees and plants covered with green leaves, beautiful to see. On the summit was a palace with a large and beautiful court in the midst, with balconies, and halls and chambers, all and each most beautiful and decorated with cheerful and remarkable pictures, with meadows all round and wonderful gardens, wells of cool water and cellars of precious wines, more appropriate to curious wine-tasters than to sober and honest ladies. This, the company arriving, was to their great pleasure all swept out, and the beds made in the chambers and all garnished with flowers such as the season provided, and strewn with rushes; and, being seated in the first chamber, Dioneo, who beyond the other gentlemen was charming and witty, said: 'Ladies, your good sense more than our intelligence has led us here; I do not yet know what in your sober judgment you propose to be done, mine I left in the city when a little time ago I came out with you, and therefore it is for you to dispose of yourselves, take comfort and laugh and sing with me (as much I should say as your dignity permits), or let me return to my own cares and remain in the hapless city. To which Pampinea, as if she, too, had abandoned her grave thoughts, gaily replied: Dioneo, you speak most fitly, we wish to live merrily, and no other reason had we to fly than sadness. But as nothing that is not properly organised can continue long, I, who was the originator of the plans by which this most excellent company has been formed, still thinking of our pleasures, consider that it is necessary that we agree on some chief whom we shall honour and obey as greater than we, and whose every care it shall be to dispose us to live cheerfully. And that every one may feel the weight of their care, together with the pleasure of ruling, choosing therefore from each side (sex), no one shall be envious through not enjoying the power, I say that each shall have the charge and honour for a day and that the first to hold them shall be elected by us all; of those to follow, at the hour of vespers, the ruler of the day shall decide, and this ruler, according to his or her judgment, shall, during his or her period of rule, decide and order as to the place and manner of our lives.'

These words pleased exceedingly the company, who with one voice chose her as ruler for the first day, and Filomena, running quickly to a laurel, made a noble and showy wreath which, worn on the head, was, as long as their association lasted, the sign to others of the rule and rank.

The details of the organisation completed, the Queen for the day dismisses the company to wander through the fields and gardens, finding what pleasure they might until the third hour sounded, when all were to assemble to dinner. As the plague lasted from March to August we may accept June as the medium term, at which time one o'clock being about nine the third hour would be about 11 A.M. This is shown to be the probable interpretation by the description of the day as already become very hot when the troupe is called together to their repast in the shade-al fresco-then for music and dancing until the siesta, for which the queen dismisses them to their

rooms.

It had not long sounded nine (5 P.M.) when the queen aroused them all, declaring it to be hurtful to sleep too much in the day, and so they went to a little meadow in which the grass was green and high, nor could the sun reach it in any part; and there, feeling the gentle breeze, according to the orders of the queen sat in a circle on the grass. To them thus the queen: 'As you see, the sun is high and the heat is great, nor is there any sound to be heard but the song of the cicala in the olive trees, wherefore to move about at present would be folly. Here it is beautiful and cool to rest, and there are tables and chess as you see, and each one of us can take the pleasure he prefers, but if in this you follow my counsel, not in playing games in which the mind of one of the parties is troubled without much pleasure on the part of the other, or of those who look on, but in telling stories (which delight all, one telling to the others who listen), we shall pass through the hot portion of the day. You will not have finished each your story when the sun shall have sunk and the heat be gone, and you can then go and find pleasure as you like.

To this picture of a garden of delights in which all is fair and bright, if we add what Pampinea had previously said of the country where she proposed to lead them, 'there we hear the birds sing, the hills and plains are clad in green, and the fields, full of grain, wave like the sea; and of trees there are a thousand kinds -we get a clear picture of that flank of the Val d'Arno which lies between Florence and Fiesole, and on which to-day are hundreds of villas of which many in some points correspond with Boccaccio's description.

The picture is here-the lieta brigata circled before their laurelcrowned queen; the burning sun above; the cool shade around and the olive trees beyond, with the cicalas singing in the fervent heat; the hills rolling into the distance and the height, with Fiesole crowning it; and, sunward, the Val d'Arno, the gracious dome of Brunelleschi and the campanile of Giotto, the grey spire of Santa Croce and the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, all as now, with the gentle slopes of the hills of Chianti and those towards Siena, pale and misty under the 'angry sun'; to the east the last spurs of the Apennine, with the hills of Vallombrosa; to the north the Fiesole range, rising westward in higher heights to the Pistoiese Apennines, and then away to Mount Cimone and the Libro-Aperto; and against the sky, flat and faint, and only to be seen on clearest days, the films we know as the hills of Carrara, by the sea. Nothing of all this is changed-no cataclysm

has ever visited the Val d'Arno-the dead level of the alluvial plains in midst of which Florence lies, shows the building of those torrents which still come down with the spring and autumn rains from the central range of the Tuscan hills, laden with the yellow earth of the Vallombrosan and Arezzian lands-now tranquilly building, as from times unknown they have been, the land out into the Tyrrhenian Sea. In this record of centuries innumerable is no line which tells of shock or sudden change the hills have, mayhap, lost a few inches of their height; and the torrents of to-day, furious in their muddy wrath, may, when Boccaccio strolled along their banks, have been clear rivulets flowing perennially from the forests which clothed the hilly crown of the Val d'Arno; but so far as all the noteworthy features of the landscape go, nothing has changed since Boccaccio walked the streets of Florence.

There is in the Decameron this ensemble of gaiety and sunshine like a moving tableau vivant of which we can never say this is the sole moment for the painter-here and there touches of detail strengthen his hand, but the picture is to be made according to the mood of the painter, not like an episode of the Inferno which seems to engrave itself on the imagination and of which we can only say, 'this is what Dante saw'; but vague and with outlines fused in the sunshine and the splendour of colour, tremulous in the fervid light, laughing a challenge to Giorgione.

But the art of Boccaccio does not rest merely in this picture of the brightest side of the life of his day; he had set it in a frame of the profoundest gloom, shown it through an ambient of horrors, scarcely to be exaggerated, death and a worse fear of death, the demoralisation and destruction of a population, which will now even heighten the effect of the picture immensely, but which, in the day when the great plague was a living memory to every Florentine and the mourning had scarcely been thrown off for its victims, must have given an enhancement we can scarcely conceive, any more than we can the power of the vision of Dante over a generation which accepted his Inferno as the most real of all realities. Taken out of its frame the Decameron falls to pieces-it becomes a mere collection of tales of all times and of all colours, a few objectionable to our standard, some witty and many wise. But Boccaccio never intended it to be so judged; his elaborate preparation of the story which should enclose the tales, the minuteness with which he depicts the ghastly features of the great disaster and its influence on the society of Florence, the artful way in which he prepares the opening out of the charnel-house to the sunshine and health of his merry company,' show that the tales were the incidental material of his whole, and that every part had been regarded as part of a complete work, accessories, indeed, even if he had not declared in the opening of the story that such was his plan.

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