CRITICAL BIOGRAPHIES.
Some Aspects of the Genius of Giovanni Boccaccio. By E. Hutton. (H. Milford. Is. 6d. net.) - The British Academy's annual Italian Lecture was devoted last year to Boccaccio. Mr. Hutton's account of his troubled career and of his numerous works is learned, judicious and sympathetic. Boccaccio lives in his masterpiece, the Decameron, but his significance for the Middle Ages is not to be measured by that great book alone. Mr. Hutton reminds us that Boccaccio wrote much else in his native Tuscan, thus establish- ing that dialect as the standard of Italian prose, and, moreover, that he produced voluminous Latin works, as well as the first translation of Homer and the first life of Dante. It is curious to learn that Boccaccio copied the Divine Comedy with his own hand for his friend Petrarch, who 'had no copy of Dante in his famous library. Books were very scarce in those days, but Petrarch, we may infer, thought little of the stern Florentine in comparison with his beloved Greek and Latin authors. There was need, then, for the public lectures which Boccaccio delivered in Florence in 1373 on the Divine Comedy, for, if Petrarch himself underrated Dante, we may be sure that lesser men of his time knew little of the poet.
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