best lent itself to their objects was the most licentious and corrupt, and the loose women and salacious priests who recur in their tales from generation to generation, though by no means creatures of imagination, are still far from typical of the entire society of Italy. Like the masks of the Greek comedy, like the rakes and topers of the English comedy of the Restoration and Revolution, they are in a certain degree traditional and conventional. Modern fiction is encyclopaedic: no class of the community is outside its scope. Italian fiction was eclectic, restricted by a tacit convention to what was deemed its appropriate sphere. The history of pictorial and plastic art has been reproduced in modern fiction; the property of the connoisseur has become the possession of the nation. Hence, whatever the literary merits of the Italian novelists of this period, whatever the fidehty with which they reproduce the social atmosphere of the time, their works all taken together count for less in the history of the human mind than those of a single first-class modern novelist such as Dickens or Balzac.
Boccaccio's immediate successors as novelists are Franco Sacchetti and Giovanni Fiorentino, already mentioned as poets of the fifteenth century. Sacchetti (1335–1410) had in his youth been a merchant, and had travelled much both in Italy and in Slavonian countries. After his return he became a Florentine magistrate, and filled some important public offices. He was a man of solid and humorous wisdom, who instructed his times, partly by religious and moral discourses, which frequently display great liberality of feeling, partly by his stories, which, apart from their literary merits, afford a valuable picture of a society half-way on the road from barbarism to civilisation. The majority are founded
