From so much that is coarse, dreadful, and revolting, the romance of Masuccio's more genial tales detaches itself with charming grace and delicacy. Nothing in Boccaccio is lovelier than the story of the girl who puts on armor and goes at night to kill her faithless lover; or that of Mariotto and Giannozza, which is substantially the same as Romeo and Juliet; or that of Virginio Baglioni and Eugenia, surprised and slain by robbers near Brescia; or that of Marchetto and Lanzilao, the comrades in arms, which has points in common with Palamon and Arcite; or, lastly, that of the young Malem and his education by Giudotto Gambacorto.[211]. It is the blending of so many elements--the interweaving of tragedy and comedy, satire and pathos, grossness and sentiment, in a style of unadorned sincerity, that places Masuccio high among novelists. Had his language been as pure as that of the earlier Tuscan or the later Italian authors, he would probably rank only second to Boccaccio in the estimation even of his fellow-countrymen. A foreigner, less sensitive to niceties of idiom, may be excused for recognizing him as at least Bandello's equal in the story-teller's art. In moral quality he is superior not only to Bandello, but also to Boccaccio.
The greatest writer of Italian prose in the fifteenth century was a man of different stamp from Masuccio. Gifted with powers short only of the very highest, Leo Battista Alberti exercised an influence over the spirit of his age and race which was second to none but Lionardo's.[212] Sacchetti, Ser Giovanni, Masuccio, and the ordinary tribe of chroniclers pretended to no humanistic culture.[213] Alberti, on the contrary, was educated at Bologna, where he acquired the scientific knowledge of his age, together with such complete mastery of Latin that a work of his youth, the comedy _Philodoxius_, passed for a genuine product of antiquity. This man of many-sided genius came into the world too soon for the perfect exercise of his singular faculties. Whether we regard him from the point of of art, of science, or of literature, he occupies in each department the position of precursor, pioneer and indicator. Always original and always fertile, he prophesied of lands he was not privileged to enter, leaving the memory of dim and varied greatness rather than any solid monument behind him.[214] Of his mechanical discoveries this is not the place to speak; nor can I estimate the value of his labors in the science of perspective.[215] It is as a man of letters that he comes before us in this chapter.