Note 22 — Chapter I
Reading edition
Boccaccio was of course acquainted with Dante's eclogues, and in his life of the poet he allows them considerable beauty. It seems never to have occurred to him, however, to regard them as serious contributions to pastoral literature, for, as we have already seen, he stigmatizes all bucolic writers between Vergil and Petrarch as ignobiles. I do not think this attitude was due to the influence of Petrarch having lessened his admiration of Dante, as maintained by Wicksteed and Gardner, but simply to his recognition of the absolute unimportance of the poems in question from the historical point of view.