ABSTRACT
The Rejected Articles, it must be admitted, end with a whimper rather than a resounding imitative bang. ‘Boccaccio and Fiametta; A Tale of the Green-wood-shade’ is a narrative of the supposed passion of the Italian poet for Fiametta, daughter of Robert, King of Naples, which Patmore half-heartedly maintains is the work of Leigh Hunt. Hunt, ‘Signor Le Hunto’ in Blackwood’s terminology, was indeed an enthusiastic devotee of Italian culture and translated from Boccaccio in Foliage; or Poems Original and Translated (1818). However, using a bucolic and Neapolitan setting, echoing the subtitle of Hunt’s Amyntas: A Tale of the Woods (1820) and garnishing the whole with a few quotations from Keats does not add up to a sustained imitation of Hunt. The first sentence is authentically Huntian, but matters hurtle downhill from then on. Patmore’s unease is evident in the introductory editorial footnote: ‘though it undoubtedly includes something of the peculiar manner of that amiable writer, it seems to me to include more that is not in his manner’. And hence the deliberate obfuscation; the article seems to be written ‘in one of the manners of another writer who has also contributed an avowed portion of this volume’. The other writer is Patmore himself. One might unkindly speculate that ‘Boccaccio and Fiametta’ is indeed a ‘rejected article’ in the true sense of the phrase.
