Note 88 — Chapter II
Reading edition
One instance will suffice to illustrate the different methods of Boccaccio and Dante in dealing with the same material. We all know in what murk and filth Dante beheld Ciacco, the glutton, and what torments awaited Filippo Argenti, the fiorentino spirito bizzarro, upon the marsh of Styx (Inferno vi. and viii.). These persons play the chief parts in Giorn. ix. nov. 8, of the Decameron. They are still the spendthrift parasite, and the brutally capricious bully. But while Dante points the sternest moral by their examples, Boccaccio makes their vices serve his end of comic humor. The inexorableness of Dante is nowhere more dreadful than in the eighth Canto of the Inferno. The levity of Boccaccio is nowhere more superficial than in that Novella.