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It was the constant destiny of Boccaccio to make epochs—producing something absolutely or virtually new, and tracing out the ways in which his successors, far as they might outstrip him, were bound to walk. We have seen that the heroic, the pastoral, the familiar romance owed, if not their actual birth, at least their first considerable beginnings to him; and his activity was no less important in the domain of narrative poetry. He may not have been the inventor of the octave stanza, but undoubtedly he was the first to show its supreme fitness for narrative, and thus mark out the channel in which the epic genius of Italy has flowed ever since. The peculiar grace of her language, and its affluence of rhymes, adapt it especially to this singularly elegant, if not massive or sublime, form of versification, superior for narrative purposes to the sinuous and digressive terza rima, or to Italian counterfeits of the majestic blank verse of England. It could not be expected that Boccaccio’s attempts should at first display all the perfection his metre is capable of receiving, he is undoubtedly lax and diffuse. Yet all the main recommendations of the octave are discoverable in hisTeseide andFilostrato, poems especially interesting to English readers from the imitation—frequently translation—of them in Chaucer’sKnight’s Tale andTroilus. TheTeseide is the earlier, having been composed shortly after Boccaccio’s return to Florence in 1340 for the gratification of his Neapolitan mistress; while theFilostrato, apparently composed upon his second visit to Naples about 1347, is a disguised satire upon her inconstancy.