"How much do I admire Boccaccio! What descriptions of nature are those in his little introductions to every new day! It is the morning of life stripped of that mist of familiarity which makes it obscure to us.

Boccaccio seems to me to have possessed a deep sense of the fair ideal of human life, considered in its social relations.

His more serious theories of love agree especially with mine.

He often expresses things lightly too, which have serious meanings of a very beautiful kind.

He is a moral casuist, the opposite of the Christian, stoical, ready-made, and worldly system of morals.