While he had the Decameron still in hand, he paused in that great work, with heart full of passionate longing for the lady of his love, far away in Naples, to pour out his very soul in La Fiammetta, the name by which he always called the Lady Maria.

In several of his poems and in the Decameron he alludes to her as being cold as a marble statue, which no fire can ever warm; and there is no proof, notwithstanding the ardor of Fiammetta as portrayed by her loverwho no doubt wished her to become the reality of his glowing picturethat he ever really received from the charmer whose name was always on his lips anything more than the friendship that was apparent to all the world.

The best critics agree in pronouncing La Fiammetta a marvelous performance.

Together the Calabrian and the author of La Fiammetta and the Decameron made a Latin translation of the Iliad, which Boccaccio transcribed with his own hand.

" No translation into English of La Fiammetta has been made since Shakespeare's timewhen a small edition was published, which is now so rare as to be practically unattainableuntil the appearance of the present Scholarly and poetic rendering, which places within the reach of all one of the world's greatest masterpieces of literature.

D.K.R. PROLOGUE Beginneth the Book called Elegy of Madonna Fiammetta, sent by her to Ladies in Love.

Nay, not satisfied even with this, he employed other symbols and metaphors, and labored earnestly to discipline me in such manner of speech; and, to render me the more assured of his unalterable love, he named me Fiammetta, and himself Panfilo.

How often, when warmed with love and wine, did we tell tales, in the presence of our dearest friends, of Fiammetta and Panfilo, feigning that they were Greeks of the days of old, I at one time, he at another; and the tales were all of ourselves; how we were first caught in the snares of Love, and of what tribulations we were long the victims, giving suitable names to the places and persons connected with the story!

In 1341 he fell in love with the daughter of King Robert of Naples, and the lady, whom he made famous under the name of Fiammetta, seems to have loved him in return.

Pampinea, the eldest, was twenty-eight years of age; Fiammetta was a little younger; Filomena, Emilia, Lauretta, and Neifile were still more youthful; and Elisa was only eighteen years old.

At three o'clock, dinner was laid in the banqueting hall, and when this was over, Dioneo took a lute and Fiammetta a viol, and played a merry air, while the rest of the company danced to the music.

Such a verdant covert wood Stothard might paint for the haunting of Dioneus, Pamphillus, and Fiammetta as they walk in the novel of Boccacce.

To have seen Fiammetta there, stepping in silk attire, like a flower, and the sunlight looking upon her betwixt the branches!

He was the father of a numerous familysome historians say he had nineteen children by his wife, Madonna Fiammetta de' Guigni!

She was the youngest of the two daughters, the only children, of Messer Antonio di Domenico de' Martelli, and his wife, Madonna Fiammetta, the daughter of Messer Niccolo de' Soderini, a descendant of that earlier Niccolo, the self-seeking and unscrupulous adviser of Don Piero de' Medici.

The Grand Duke was immovable in his resolution, he counselled the father to let the matter rest, and gave him and Madonna Fiammetta free access to their daughter, but, on no account, was she to visit them.

Fiammetta is introduced by name, and her lover Caleone can hardly be other than Boccaccio.

Fiammetta must have her place in Boccaccio's strange apotheosis of love; the foreboding of Carmosina's death has power to draw her lover from his newly discovered kingdom along the untrodden paths of the waters of the earth.

the heroine returns home disguised as a boy to find her lover courting another nymph; in Francesco Contarini's Finta Fiammetta (1610), on the other hand, the plot turns on the courtship of Delfide by her lover Celindo in girl's attire; while in Orazio Serono's Fida Armilla (1610) we have the annual human sacrifice to a monstrous serpentall of which later became familiar themes in pastoral drama and romance.

Contarini, at the beginning of the next century, followed precedent less closely; his Finta Fiammetta has a dramatic prologue introducing Venus, Cupid, Anteros (the avenger of slighted love), and a chorus of amoretti; that of his Fida ninfa is spoken by the shade of Petrarch.

Thus began Miss Blondeau, with the air of Fiammetta telling her prettiest story to the Florentines in the garden of Boccaccio.