And with that it happened that we established a custom, and very often,
almost daily, after dinner, we would repair together to the library, and
I--who hitherto had no acquaintance with any save Latin works--began to
make and soon to widen my knowledge of our Tuscan writers. We varied our
reading. We dipped into our poets. Dante we read, and Petrarca, and both
we loved, though better than the works of either--and this for the sake of
the swift movement and action that is in his narrative, though his
melodies, I realized, were not so pure--the Orlando of Ariosto.
Sometimes we would be joined by Fifanti himself; but he never stayed very
long. He had an old-fashioned contempt for writings in what he called the
"dialettale," and he loved the solemn injuvenations of the Latin tongue.
Soon, as he listened, he would begin to yawn, and presently grunt and rise
and depart, flinging a contemptuous word at the matter of my reading, and
telling me at times that I might find more profitable amusement.
But I persisted in it, guided ever by Fifanti's lady. And whatever we read
by way of divergence, ever and anon we would come back to the stilted,
lucid, vivid pages of Boccaccio.
One day I chanced upon the tragical story of "Isabetta and the Pot of
Basil," and whilst I read I was conscious that she had moved from where she
had been sitting and had come to stand behind my chair.
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