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" The man, 
 Who in this spirit communes with the forms 
 Of Nature, who with understanding heart 
 Doth know and love such objects as excite 
 No morbid passions, no disquietude, 
 No vengeance, and no hatred, needs must feel 
 The joy of that pure principle of love 
 So deeply, that, unsatisfied with aught 
 Less pure and exquisite, he cannot choose 
 But seek for objects of a kindred love 
 In fellow-natures, and a kindred joy. 
 Accordingly, he by degrees perceives 
 His feelings of aversion softened down ; 
 A holy tenderness pervades his frame. 
 His sanity of reason not impaired, 
 Say rather, all his thoughts now flowing clear, 
 From a clear fountain flowing, he looks around 
 And seeks for good ; and finds the good he seeks ; 
 Until abhorrence and contempt are things 
 He only knows by name ; and if he hear 
 From other mouths the language which they speak, 
 He is compassionate, and has no thought, 
 No feeling, which can overcome his love." 
 
 Wordsworth. 
 
PETEAECH 
 
 BY 
 
 HENKY KEEVE 
 
 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS 
 
 EDINBURGH AND LONDON 
 1878. REPKINT, 1879 
 
 All Rights reserved 
 
PETKAKCH. 
 
 LNTKODUCTIOK 
 
 The most appropriate Introduction to this notice of 
 Francis Petrarch will be a short account of his writings, 
 and of the various forms and editions in which they 
 have been given to the world. Of his Italian poetry, 
 included in the Canzoniere, and consisting of his Son- 
 nets, Canzonets, and the Triumphs of Love, Chastity, 
 Fame, Time, Deity, and Death (in terza-rima), it is 
 scarcely necessary to say much, except that it is prob- 
 able that no poems have been more widely circulated' 
 or more often reprinted. The first printed edition of 
 them appeared at Venice in 1470, and is therefore one 
 of the earliest productions of the press. Eefore the close 
 of the fifteenth century 34 more editions had been sold ; 
 in the sixteenth century 167 editions have been traced; 
 70 in the seventeenth ; 46 in the eighteenth ; and more 
 than 50 in the present age. 1 A catalogue of these 
 
 1 It is curious to contrast with this abundant crop of publications 
 the fact that only four editions of the works of Shakespeare were 
 F.C. IV. A 
 
2 *.... PETRARCH. 
 
 editions was published in 1834 by Kossetti, an advocate 
 in Trieste, and they are all accurately known. One of 
 the best editions of his 'Ernie' is that published by 
 Zatta in Venice, in 1756, with the Commentary of Cas- 
 telveltro, including also the oldest biographies of the 
 poet and a vast superfluity of notes. In modern times 
 the edition published by Ciardetto in Florence, in 1822, 
 is perhaps the most complete. 
 
 The Latin works of Petrarch, from which the materials 
 of the following pages are chiefly taken, were as fol- 
 lows : 
 
 The Familiar Letters. Twenty-four books. 
 The Senile Letters. Seventeen books. 
 The Various Letters. One book. 
 Letters without a title. One book. 
 
 These letters were the work of his life, a complete cor- 
 respondence extending from 1326 to 1374, and em- 
 bracing almost every incident which befell him in those 
 forty -eight years. They were arranged by Petrarch 
 himself, and intended by him to be the record of his 
 thoughts and actions. He tells us that in making the 
 collection he destroyed above one thousand letters and 
 pieces which he thought unworthy to form part of it. 
 Next come his philosophical writings : 
 
 The Secretum, or Conflict of Cares, written in 1342. 
 
 Of Solitary Life, written in 1346. 
 
 Of Monastic Leisure, written in 1347. 
 
 Of Memorable Events (date unknown). 
 
 Of True Wisdom : a Dialogue (date unknown). 
 
 printed (in folio) in the seventeenth century ; and that the first 8vo 
 edition of our great English poet was published in 1709. 
 
HIS LATIN WORKS. 3 
 
 An Itinerary to Palestine. 
 
 An Invective on a Physician. 1355. 
 
 Of the Kemedies of either Fortune. 1358. 
 
 Of Ignorance : his own and that of others. 1368. 
 
 His Last Will and Testament. 1370. 
 
 Invective on a Frenchman. 1372. 
 
 Epistle to Posterity. 1370. 
 
 His Latin poems are 
 
 The Metrical Epistles. 
 
 The Eclogues (rather satirical than bucolic). 
 
 Penitential Psalms. 
 
 The Africa, -an epic poem in nine books, chiefly 
 
 written between 1339 and 1341, but not made 
 
 public in his lifetime. 
 
 A large portion of these works is probably unknown to 
 most readers of the present day, but it was not so three 
 or four centuries ago. On the contrary, they had been i 
 largely circulated in manuscript, and upon the invention 
 of printing, no books were more eagerly published and; 
 sought after. Six folio editions of the Epistles and 
 other prose works were printed at Basle and at Venice 
 between 1484 and 1500 ; seven more in the following 
 century; three more soon after 1600 the last and 
 most complete at Lyons, by Samuel Crispin. It is a > 
 curious fact that the demand for the Latin works of 
 this great medieval classic ceased at the commencement 
 of the seventeenth century, and no further editions of 
 them can be traced for a period of about 160 years. 
 But the commentators on Petrarch were in the meantime 
 not idle. Professor Marsand of Padua collected no less 
 than 800 works relating to Petrarch and his writings. 
 This vast collection was purchased by Charles X., King 
 
4 PETRARCH. 
 
 of France, in 1829, and is now deposited in the Library 
 of the Louvre at Paris. 
 
 It had long been regarded as a reproach to Italy, and 
 especially to Florence, which was Petrarch's native state, 
 though he never lived there, that so little had been done 
 to condense and utilise these vast materials, to correct 
 the errors with which the earlier editions of the Latin 
 works abound, and to print those portions which still 
 existed in manuscript. The libraries of Italy contain at 
 least forty-nine manuscripts of the Letters more or less 
 complete. It was reserved for a Frenchman, the Abbe 
 de Sade, himself descended from the family into which 
 Laura de Noves, the object of Petrarch's amatory verses, 
 married, to publish the first complete life of the poet, 
 based on his own prose writings. This biography ap- 
 peared in three quarto volumes in 1764, with copious 
 translations from the Letters and Poems into French. 
 It was on this publication, rather than on an accurate 
 examination of the originals, that Gibbon founded his 
 graphic account of the triumph and coronation of 
 Petrarch, which is to be found in the seventieth 
 chapter of his great History; and Mr Hallam appears 
 also to have relied mainly on the Abbe de Sade in 
 his criticism of Petrarch's philosophical and familiar 
 compositions. Gibbon said of the Abbe* de Sade, " Not 
 an idea or a fact in the writings of Petrarch appears to 
 have escaped him." The minor biographies of Petrarch 
 which have since appeared in English by Mrs Dobson 
 and Thomas Campbell the poet are mere compilations 
 from the Abbe* de Sade's Memoirs. 
 
 A more original and discriminating work is that of 
 TJgo Foscolo, whose Essays on Petrarch, published in 
 
MODERN EDITIONS OF HIS 'LETTERS.' 5 
 
 English, in 1823, deserve the highest praise. I say- 
 nothing of the labours of Dr Beattie, who endeavoured 
 to prove in 1810 that all we know of Laura, and much 
 that has been written of Petrarch, are apocryphal; or 
 of Signor Eossetti, to whom Beatrice, Laura, and Fiam- 
 metta were myths, the impersonations of what he called 
 the "anti-Papal spirit." In truth, though the poetry 
 addressed to these ladies is high-flown and imaginative, 
 nothing in the history of past ages is better or more 
 accurately known than the lives and opinions of the 
 poets themselves and the manners of the society in which 
 they lived. We have them before us with the stamp 
 of a complete reality ; and recent literary investigations 
 have only rendered this certainty more absolute. 
 
 For in our own time a work of far greater importance 
 has been accomplished in Italy, which leaves nothing to 
 be desired, and probably little more to be discovered. 
 One of the ablest and most indefatigable critics of 
 Petrarch, the Cavalier Battista Baldelli, began the col- 
 lection of materials at the close of the last century. Un- 
 able to complete the undertaking, he handed them over 
 to the Abbate Antonio Meneghelli of Padua, who pub- 
 lished in 1818 an Index to Petrarch's Letters, both 
 printed and in manuscript ; but died before he could do 
 more. Other hands were then employed, till at length 
 the papers were transferred to Signor Giuseppe Fracas- 
 setti, who has given to the world the most perfect edition 
 that exists of the whole body of Petrarch's Epistles. 
 The series was first published in Latin at Florence in 
 1859, with copious indexes, a corrected text, and the 
 addition of no less than 167 unpublished letters to the 
 collection. This Latin edition was succeeded in 1863 
 
6 PETUARCH. 
 
 by an Italian translation of the whole body of Letters, 
 made by Signor Fracassetti, accompanied by copious 
 notes, illustrative of the circumstances under which they 
 were written, and introducing us to all the persons to 
 whom they were addressed. There is not in the whole 
 history of literature, so far as I know, another instance 
 of details so authentic and minute with reference to the 
 life of a great writer, as those which we possess relating 
 to Petrarch and his friends, who lived five hundred 
 years ago. The letters of Cicero and the letters of the 
 younger Pliny offer the nearest parallel; but Cicero 
 leaves much to be gathered from other histories, and 
 Pliny's life is extremely incomplete. Petrarch is his 
 own biographer, and the annalist of that " noble and de- 
 lightful company" (as he terms it) amongst whom his 
 life was spent. Prom these sources Signor Fracassetti 
 has constructed a chronological table which relates year 
 by year every important incident of the poet's career. 
 
 These works have thrown fresh light on Petrarch and 
 his age, and they materially lessen the difficulty of pre- 
 senting a complete picture of him to the English reader. 
 I had. myself, many years ago, and long before the publica- 
 tion of Signor Fracassetti's editions, devoted a good deal of 
 time to the study of Petrarch's Latin writings and philo- 
 sophy ; and I revert with pleasure to one of the pursuits 
 of my youth, having always had the desire to make the 
 man, as well as the poet, better known to my country- 
 men. My design has been in some measure anticipated 
 by M. M^zieres of the French Academy, whose bio- 
 graphical Essay on Petrarch, was published in 1868 ; but 
 the existence of this interesting work was not known to 
 me when I undertook to write this little volume. 
 

 ENGLISH VERSIONS. 
 
 In spite of the long popularity of the poetry of 
 Petrarch in all parts of Europe, it cannot be said that he 
 has been fortunate in his translators. His merit con- 
 sists so much in the exquisite grace and polish of his 
 language, that the chief beauty of his sonnets evaporates 
 in a harsher tongue, and many a greater poet is less 
 difficult to translate. I have endeavoured in the follow- 
 ing pages to select those versions from different writers, 
 which appeared best calculated to convey the impres- 
 sion of the original. Macgregor is, I believe, the only 
 person who has turned the whole Canzoniere into Eng- 
 lish verse. Some elegant specimens are due to Dean 
 Milman and Mr Merivale. But incomparably the best 
 translations extant are those executed by the late Lady 
 Dacre; and of these and some prose translations exe- 
 cuted by Ugo Eoscolo himself, I have gladly availed 
 myself, as far as they extend. In a few instances I 
 have ventured to add to them some poetical versions of 
 my own. 
 
CHAPTEE I. 
 
 THE MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 The fame of Francis Petrarch, which assigns to him the 
 second place among the classics of Italy, and ranks him 
 amongst the greatest poets of the world, rests mainly on 
 the composition of about four thousand lines of Italian 
 verse, addressed to a beautiful and virtuous lady of 
 Provence, who was neither his wife nor his mistress, be- 
 tween his twenty-fourth and his fiftieth year. These 
 sonnets, although the subject is monotonous, and the 
 tone of them frequently affected and unreal, have had 
 a success unexampled in literature. For five hundred 
 years they have been read with pleasure and admiration 
 by twenty generations. They retain to this day all 
 their freshness and their grace. The pure and elegant 
 language in which they are written has nothing of the 
 archaic grandeur and severity of the style of Dante. 
 Like that stream of the Sorgia in the valley Petrarch 
 chose for a retreat, his Italian verse sprang pure and 
 abounding from its source ; and although the poet 
 affected to treat these compositions as the " mere trifles 
 of his youth " (nugellas meas vulgares), he had, perhaps 
 unconsciously, created a language, and scattered round 
 
A MASTER OF STYLE. 9 
 
 him exquisite beauties, which retain, like the lyrical 
 fragments of the Greek poets, a consecrated immor- 
 tality. The latest and the most accomplished of the 
 historians of Florence, Gino Capponi, says : " The 
 poetical language of the 'Canzoni' followed a straight 
 track from the Sicilians to the Bolognese, and thence to 
 Cavalcanti, to the supreme Alighieri, and to Cino da 
 Pistoia ; but these fell short of the ultimate and in- 
 imitable perfection given to poetic diction by Francis 
 Petrarch. In his ' Eime ' there is never a word or mode 
 savouring of old age, or which cannot be used without 
 affectation at the present day." There is no similar in- 
 stance in literature of a writer whose language attained 
 perfection at the first jet, and retains an immaculate 
 purity for five hundred years. 
 
 But this portion of the life and work of Petrarch, though 
 by far the most familiar to posterity, was certainly that 
 which least distinguished him in the eyes of his contempo- 
 raries and in his own. Nor is it easy to explain or account 
 for the extraordinary position to which, in his own age, he 
 attained. Born in the humbler ranks of life, and of a 
 family exiled from Florence, he obtained the rudiments 
 of education at Carpentras, in Provence, where his talents 
 attracted the favourable notice of the chief of the great 
 house of Colonna, then residing with the Papal Court at 
 Avignon. To the patronage of the Colonnas he owed 
 his whole advancement in life. He refused to pursue 
 the study of the law ; he refused to enter the Church as 
 a priest; he despised monastic life; he refused office, 
 though the great post of Papal Secretary was five times 
 offered to him. In a warlike and lawless age he lived 
 exclusively for the glory of letters. In a clerical age he 
 
10 PETRARCH. 
 
 denounced the corruptions and evils of the Church. In 
 a superstitious age he professed a pure and ideal religion. 
 In a scholastic age he taught a philosophy far removed 
 from the traditions of Aristotle and the categories of 
 the Schools. Although his patrimony must have been 
 very small, and the benefices he afterwards held were 
 not important, he never wanted the means of subsis- 
 tence, for incessant journeys, and of collecting books. 1 
 Nevertheless, such was the fame and influence he had 
 acquired at an early age, that, before he had completed 
 his thirty-sixth year, he was simultaneously invited by 
 the University of Paris and by the Senate of Rome to 
 accept the laurel crown of poetry an honour which had 
 not been conferred by the latter for 1300 years. No 
 doubt this singular pre-eminence and rare distinction 
 were aided by the exertions of powerful friends and 
 by his own solicitations (although all trace of them has 
 disappeared from his correspondence), but the fact is 
 not the less extraordinary. " The learning of a theolo- 
 gical school, and the ignorance of a lawless city," says 
 Gibbon, " were alike unqualified to bestow the ideal 
 though immortal wreath which genius may obtain from 
 the free applause of the public and of posterity; but the 
 candidate dismissed this troublesome reflection, and, after 
 some moments of complacency and suspense, preferred 
 the summons of the metropolis of the world." That 
 wreath cannot be said to have been vainly bestowed, 
 since the lapse of five centuries has not withered it. 
 From whatever cause, we find the Laureate Petrarch 
 
 1 A canonry in the chapter of Lombes, where his friend Giacomo 
 Colonna was bishop, was his first benefice, conferred on him by Boni- 
 face XII. in January 1335. These stalls oould be held by persons in 
 deacon's orders. 
 
A POWER IN LETTERS. 11 
 
 invested, at the age of forty, with a species of contem- 
 porary dignity which has no parallel, save that of a 
 Hebrew prophet ; or, if that expression be too strong for 
 his character, he was a prceceptor mundi, a teacher of 
 the world. The far grander genius of Dante had been 
 tried by poverty and exile ; the far more varied genius 
 of Tasso was consigned, in another century, to a mad- 
 man's cell. Petrarch lived on to the verge of human 
 life, rich, honoured of all men, speaking his thoughts on 
 all subjects with absolute freedom ; treating as his equals 
 popes, emperors, kings, and senators ; rebuking the list- 
 less or the corrupt ; stimulating the brave and the free ; 
 receiving homage enough to gratify his capacious van 
 ity; and exercising a vast intellectual power over a 
 lawless and barbarous age. Not Voltaire at Ferney, 
 surrounded by the refinements of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury not Goethe at Weimar, where he lived in Olym- 
 pian majesty, were more honoured than Petrarch amidst 
 the convulsions and ignorance of the fourteenth century. 
 Whatever else he may have done, he was undoubtedly 
 the first man who, after the irruption of the barbarians 
 and the night of the middle ages, raised the culture of 
 letters to supreme honour. 
 
 It has been well said by a recent writer, 1 that Petrarch 
 was the apostle of scholarship, the inaugurator of the 
 humanistic impulse of the fifteenth century. He fore- 
 saw in a large and liberal spirit a new phase of European 
 culture, a revival of the studies and the arts which con- 
 stitute the chief glory and dignity of man ; and there are 
 some fine lines in his " Africa " in which he predicts the 
 advancement of knowledge as he discerned it from afar. 
 1 Symond's Renaissance in Italy, p. 70. 
 
A 
 
 12 PETRARCH. 
 
 " To thee, perchance, if lengthened days are given, 
 A better age shall mark the grace of Heaven ; 
 Not always shall this deadly sloth endure : 
 Our sons shall live in days more bright and pure ; 
 Then with fresh shoots our Helicon shall glow ; 
 Then the fresh laurel spread its sacred bough; 
 Then the high intellect and docile mind 
 Shall renovate the studies of mankind 
 The love of beauty and the cause of truth 
 From ancient sources draw eternal youth." 
 
 Africa, lib. ix. 
 
 I J?etrarch, then, was great, not only by a bootless pas- 
 sion which his poetical genius clothed in imperishable 
 language the chaste language of tenderness and of regret, 
 without a single line that can wound the most refined 
 sensibility but he was great by the love of letters to 
 which he devoted a life of indefatigable industry ; by 
 his extraordinary learning and memory, which enabled 
 him, we know not how, to acquire and retain a minute 
 knowledge of classical literature and history, inconceiv- 
 able in an age when every writer had to be studied in 
 manuscript, and manuscripts themselves were scarce and 
 costly; by his independence of character and love of 
 truth, which made him the fearless advocate of every 
 good and great cause, speaking his mind with an elo- 
 quence and energy then unknown to Europe, and with- 
 out regard to consequences; and by his devoted and 
 passionate adherence to the freedom and glory of Italy, 
 which he sought to promote alike by imperial or aristo- 
 cratic influence and by the democracy of Eome the in- 
 spired herald of a struggle of five centuries, which has 
 accomplished in our times the liberation of united Italy. , 
 A man blest with such gifts, such opportunities, such 
 
THE DARKER SIDE. 13 
 
 friendships, such success, [to which health and long life 
 were added, might well be regarded, not only as one of 
 the most fortunate, but as one of the happiest of mortal 
 men. But there is a darker side to the picture. The 
 poetic temperament is apt to frame imaginary evils and 
 ideal woes, and to augment these by the expressions of 
 an exaggerated sensibility. There remains in the most 
 brilliant of human lives the burden of unsatisfied desires 
 and ineffectual efforts. Petrarch owed a large portion 
 of his fame to the tender and graceful utterances of 
 an unrequited passion, but he speaks of it as the tor- 
 ment of his life. A natural restlessness drove him 
 from the city to solitude, and from solitude to the 
 city a wanderer from one to another of his numerous 
 habitations. He lived without the ties of domestic life ; 
 and the illicit connection he had formed at one period of 
 his youth, with a person of inferior station, by whom he 
 had two children, was his humiliation and his bane. His 
 vanity was easily irritated, and never satisfied, even by 
 the homage paid to his genius. His friendships, which 
 touched the most amiable and interesting part of his 
 character, were cut short by premature deaths inso- 
 much that, at the age of seventy, Boccaccio alone remain- 
 ed to be the confidant of his sorrows. Something of 
 melancholy mingled itself, even from his earliest years, 
 with the consciousness of power, the love of nature, and 
 the current of his philosophy. The shortness of life, the 
 mutability of fortune, the caducity of fame, the disap- 
 pointments of love, were the perpetual subjects of his 
 meditations : and although the latest efforts of his muse 
 were entitled " Triumphs," they describe rather the tri- 
 umphs of fate and death over the destinies of man. Pro- 
 
H PETRARCH. 
 
 bably there is some affectation of sadness in his -writings; 
 and he indulged his querulous disposition by translating 
 it into language. Free alike from the misfortunes and 
 austerity of his more illustrious countryman Dante, Pet- j 
 rarch must have enjoyed life much more than he-would 
 have posterity believe. But the touches of sentiment, 
 whether perfectly genuine or not, with which all his 
 writings abound, have obtained more readers for him, 
 and more sympathy, than the gaiety and gladness of a 
 livelier muse would have secured. 
 
 It has been finely said of Dante, that " The highest 
 of all his gifts were the lofty mind and the lordly 
 genius, and that thirst of excellence, which is not 
 satisfied by any present things, but pursues its ends in 
 the eternity of the future and the ideal effigies of the 
 past." 1 With no lordly genius, but with a larger ex- 
 perience of the world, Petrarch aspired, like Dante, to 
 the religious life. His piety was fervent and pure, though 
 not ascetic. It was his wont to interrupt the few hours 
 of sleep he allowed himself to repeat his midnight prayer. 
 He lived and died in a Christian spirit; and if some 
 morbid affections disturbed his composure, or some dis- 
 appointments interrupted his happiness, the enigmas of 
 life resolved themselves for him in an unshaken trust in 
 God, and an unclouded hope of a better life. His char- 
 acter cannot be better or more favourably described than 
 in the noble words applied to him by Mr Wordsworth 
 in the most eloquent of his prose writings : 2 "He was a 
 man of disciplined spirit, who withdrew from the too 
 busy world not out of indifference to its welfare, or to 
 
 1 Capponi, i. 310. 
 
 2 The pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra. 
 
COMPARED WITH DANTE. 15 
 
 forget its concerns, but retired for wider compass of eye- 
 sight, that he might comprehend and see in just propor- 
 tions and relations; knowing, above all, that he who 
 hath not made himself master of his own mind must 
 look beyond it only to be deceived." 
 
 It is remarkable that Petrarch, though gifted with 
 genius and power of mind far below that of Dante, 
 exercised a much wider influence over his own age, 
 and enjoyed a greater popularity, than the illustrious 
 Florentine, whom all later times acknowledge as su- 
 preme. He had, in truth, nothing of that objective 
 faculty which engraves upon the mind in ineffaceable 
 lines the mystic vision of the terrible and the sublime. 
 As the ages roll on, Dante loses nothing of his power 
 over the imagination and thought of mankind : mean- 
 while, it is only the extreme beauty and melody of his 
 language that keep Petrarch's poetry alive. But in 
 their own times it was otherwise. The fourteenth cen- 
 tury failed to comprehend its greatest poet. Boccaccio 
 seems to be the first who understood his superlative 
 eminence. Petrarch spoke to them in more familiar 
 tones. He was a man of the world, mingling in all the 
 society of his age. Dante was an exile and a solitary, 
 who spake as one that came from beyond the grave ; but 
 what he spake was for all time. 
 
16 
 
 CHAPTEE II. 
 
 THE "EPISTLE TO POSTERITY." 
 
 The most pleasing form of biography is that in which 
 a man retraces the events of his own life and the inci- 
 dents that have formed his character, more especially 
 in his earlier years, of which no other record might exist. 
 Petrarch has left us such a record in his " Epistle to Pos- 
 terity," written, it is believed, in the year 1370, when he 
 had completed the sixty-sixth year of his age. I shall 
 therefore select this document as the first specimen of 
 his narrative powers, for it places the whole of his earlier 
 career at once before the reader ; though it passes over, in 
 significant silence, many important incidents and transac- 
 tions to which I shall have occasion to revert. There 
 is some doubt as to the date of this composition ; for, 
 although it breaks off abruptly at his forty-seventh year, 
 there are expressions in it which prove that it was 
 written at a much later period. For instance, it was 
 not till 1367 that Pope Urban V. returned to Eome, but 
 came back to Avignon in 1370 a fact referred to in the 
 letter. Indeed this reference shows what was uppermost 
 in the poet's mind whilst he was writing it. 
 
EPISTLE TO POSTERITY." 17 
 
 Francis Petrarch To Posterity Greeting. 
 
 <( Perhaps, future reader, you may have heard somewhat 
 about me, doubtful though it may be whether a name so 
 humble and obscure as mine is likely to travel far in point 
 either of time or space. Perhaps, even, you may wish to 
 know what sort of man I was, or what was the fate of my 
 works, and of those in particular whose reputation may have 
 reached you, or whose name, however faintly, you may have 
 heard. 
 
 " As to the first point, indeed, men's opinions will differ ; 
 for nearly every one speaks pretty much, not as truth but as 
 inclination urges : there are no bounds either to eulogy or to 
 blame. One of the human family like yourself, I was but a 
 child of earth and mortal ; of an origin neither particularly 
 illustrious nor humble, my family, as Augustus Csesar says 
 of himself, was ancient. Nature gave me neither a bad nor an 
 immodest disposition, had not the contagion of social inter- 
 course injured it. Youth deceived me ; manhood carried me 
 away ; but old age corrected me, and by experience taught 
 me thoroughly that truth which I had long before studied, 
 namely, that youth and pleasure are vanities. Of a truth the 
 Fashioner of every age and time suffers poor mortals, who 
 are puffed up about nothing, at times to go astray, that they 
 may realise, though late, the remembrance of their sins. 
 
 " My body, when I was a young man, was not remarkable 
 for strength, but had acquired considerable dexterity. I do 
 not pride myself on any excellence of form, beyond such 
 as might be pleasing to a man of greener years. My com- 
 plexion was lively, half-way between fair and dusk. My 
 eyes were sparkling, and for a long time my sight was ex- 
 tremely keen, until it failed me unexpectedly when past my 
 sixtieth year ; so that I was forced, much against the grain, to 
 have recourse to spectacles. Old age came at last upon a 
 body which had never known what illness was, and besieged 
 it with the accustomed array of diseases. 
 
 " I was born of honourable parents of the city of Florence. 
 
 f.c. IV. B 
 
18 PETRARCH. 
 
 Their fortune was scanty, and, to tell the truth, verging to- 
 wards poverty ; but they were exiles from their country. 
 I was born in exile at Arezzo, on Monday, July 20, 1304. 
 Eiches I held in sovereign contempt, not because I did not 
 wish to have them, but because I hated the labour and anxiety 
 which are the inseparable companions of wealth. I cared not 
 for abundance of sumptuous repasts ; on the contrary, with 
 humble fare and common food I led a more enjoyable life 
 than all the successors of Apicius, with their most exquisite 
 dishes. Banquets, as they are called or rather eating enter- 
 tainments, inimical alike to modesty and good manners 
 have always been displeasing to me. I have counted it an 
 irksome and a useless thing to invite others to such gatherings, 
 and no less so to be invited by others. But to associate with 
 my friends has been so agreeable to me, that I have held 
 nothing more grateful than their arrival, nor have ever 
 willingly broken bread without a companion. Nothing dis- 
 pleased me more than show, not only because it is bad and 
 contrary to humility, but because it is irksome and an 
 enemy of repose. In youth I felt the pains of love, vehe- 
 ment in, the extreme, but constant to one object and honour- 
 able ; and I should have felt them longer had not death 
 bitter, indeed, but useful extinguished the flame as it 
 was beginning to subside. As for the looser indulgences of 
 appetite, would indeed that I could say I was a stranger to 
 them altogether ; but if I should so say, I should lie. This 
 I can safely affirm, that although I was hurried away to 
 them by the fervour of my age and temperament, their vile- 
 ness I have always inwardly execrated. Soon, indeed, as I 
 approached my fortieth year, while I still retained sufficient 
 ardour and vigour, I repelled these weaknesses entirely from 
 my thoughts and my remembrance, as if I had never known 
 them. And this I count among my earliest happy recollec- 
 tions, thanking God, who has freed me, while yet my powers 
 were unimpaired and strong, from this so vile and always 
 hateful servitude. 
 
 " But I pass on to other matters. I was conscious of pride 
 in others, but not in myself ; and insignificant as I might be 
 
"EPISTLE TO POSTERITY." 19 
 
 in reality, I was always more insignificant in my own estima- 
 tion. My irritable temper often injured myself, but it never 
 injured others. Honourable and trusty friendships I keenly 
 sought and cultivated I fearlessly boast, that so far as I 
 know, I speak the truth. Although easily provoked, I was 
 ready to forget offences, and mindful of kind actions. I was 
 favoured with the familiar intercourse of princes and kings, 
 and with the friendships of the great to an extent that ex- 
 cited the envy of others. But it is the penalty of men who 
 grow old, that they have to deplore the death of their friends. 
 The most illustrious sovereigns of my own times loved and 
 honoured me why, I can hardly say ; it is for them, not me, 
 to explain : but as I lived with some of them on the same 
 terms on which they lived with me, I suffered not at all from 
 the eminence of their rank, but rather derived from it great 
 benefits. Yet many of those whom I dearly loved, I avoided : 
 so great was my innate love of liberty, that I studiously 
 shunned any one whose very name might seem to restrict 
 my freedom. 
 
 " My mind was rather well balanced than acute ; adapted 
 to every good and wholesome study, but especially prone to 
 philosophy and poetry. And yet even this I neglected, as 
 time went on, through the pleasure I took in sacred literature. 
 I felt a hidden sweetness in that subject, which at times I 
 had despised ; and I reserved poetry as a mere accomplish- 
 ment. I devoted myself singly, amid a multitude of subjects, 
 to the knowledge of antiquity ; since the age in which I lived 
 was almost distasteful to me so much so, that, had it not 
 been for the love of those who were very dear to me, I should 
 always have wished to have been born at any other time, and 
 to forget the present, ever struggling to engraft myself upon 
 the past. Accordingly I delighted in historians not, how- 
 ever, being in any way the less offended at their contradic- 
 tions, but following, when in doubt, that path which veri- 
 similitude or the authority due to the writer pointed out. 
 
 " As a speaker, some have said I was clear and powerful ; 
 but, as it seemed to myself, weak and obscure. Nor indeed 
 in ordinary conversation with my friends or acquaintances 
 
20 PETRARCH. 
 
 did I ever aspire to eloquence ; and I wonder that Augustus 
 Caesar took pains to excel in conversation. But when the 
 subject itself, or the place, or the hearer seemed otherwise to 
 demand it, I made somewhat of an effort though with what 
 success I know not ; let those judge of that in whose presence 
 I spoke. So that I have lived well, I care but little how I 
 talked : it is a windy sort of glory to seek fame from the 
 mere glitter of words. 
 
 "My time, whether by fortune or inclination, was thus 
 divided. The first year of my life, and that not wholly, I 
 spent at Arezzo, where nature first made me see the light ; 
 the six following years at Incisa, a small estate of my 
 father's, fourteen miles from Florence. My eighth year, 
 after my mother had been recalled from exile, I spent at 
 Pisa ; my ninth and subsequent years in transalpine Gaul, 
 on the left bank of the Rhone. Avignon was the city's name, 
 where the Roman Pontiff maintains, and has long maintained, 
 the Church of Christ ; although a few years ago Urban V. 
 seemed to have returned to his true home. But his intention 
 miscarried, even in his lifetime, for (what affects me most) 
 he gave it up, as if repenting of his good work. Had only 
 he lived a little longer, he would doubtless have known what 
 I thought of his departure. The pen was already in my 
 hands, when suddenly he found his glorious resolution cut 
 short with his life. Alas ! how happily might he have 
 died before the altar of Peter, and in his own home ! For 
 whether his successors had remained in the august see, and 
 completed the work he would have begun, or whether they 
 had departed from it, his merit would have been the more 
 illustrious, and their fault the more conspicuous to the world. 
 But this is a tedious and irrelevant complaint. 
 
 " There, then, by the banks of that windy river, I spent 
 my boyhood under my parents' care, and afterwards the 
 whole period of my early youth, abandoned to my own 
 caprices, not, however, without long intervals of absence. 
 For during this time I stayed for four whole years at Car- 
 pentras, a small town lying near Avignon on the east ; and 
 in these two places I learned a smattering of grammar, and 
 
"EPISTLE TO POSTERITY." 21 
 
 as much of dialectics and rhetoric as the age could afford 
 as much, that is to say, as is wont to be taught in the schools ; 
 though how little that is, you know, dear reader, well enough. 
 Thence I went to Montpelier to study law, where I spent 
 another four years. Thence to Bologna ; and there I re- 
 mained three years, and attended lectures on the whole 
 corpus of civil law ; being then a young man of great promise, 
 as many thought, if I persevered in my work. But I aban- 
 doned that study altogether ; and shortly afterwards I lost 
 my parents. I abandoned it, not because the authority of 
 the laws was irksome to me, which doubtless is great, and 
 redolent of that Koman antiquity in which I delight ; but 
 because the practice of those laws is depraved by the wicked- 
 ness of men. I was disgusted at the thought of having to 
 study thoroughly that which I was resolved not to turn 
 to dishonourable, and could scarcely turn to honourable, 
 uses, for such prudery would have been attributed to igno- 
 rance. Accordingly, in my twenty-second year I returned 
 home. By home I mean that exile at Avignon, where I had 
 been since the close of my childhood ; for custom is second 
 nature. There I had already begun to be known, and my 
 acquaintance to be sought by men of eminence, though why, 
 I confess now I know not, and wonder. At that time, 
 indeed, I was not surprised at seeming to myself, after the 
 fashion common to men of my age, well worthy of all honour. 
 I was sought after, above all, by the illustrious and noble 
 family of the Colonnas, who then frequented I should 
 rather say adorned the Court of Home. Especially, I was 
 invited, and I was held in honour undeserved, certainly, at 
 that time, if not also now by that illustrious and incom- 
 parable man, Giacomo Colonna, then Bishop of Lombes, 
 whose equal I know not if I have seen, or am likely to see. 
 In Gascony, at the foot of the Pyrenees, I spent an almost 
 heavenly summer, in the delightful society of my lord and 
 our companions so delightful that I always sigh when 
 thinking of that time. Returning thence, I remained for 
 many years with his brother John, the Cardinal Colonna, 
 not, as it were, under a patron, but under a father nay, not 
 
22 PETRARCH. 
 
 even that, say rather a most affectionate brother, with whom 
 I lived as at home and in my own house. 
 
 " At that time a youthful longing drove me to travel 
 through France and Germany ; and although other reasons 
 were invented, in order to recommend my going in the eyes 
 of my elders, yet the real reason was my ardour and eager- 
 ness for new scenes. In that journey I first saw Paris, and 
 took delight in finding out for myself what reports were true 
 and what were false about that city. Returning thence, I 
 went to Kome, a city I had longed to see from my infancy. 
 Stephen Colonna, the noble-minded father of that family, 
 and a man equal to any one of the ancients, I loved so 
 dearly, and was so kindly welcomed by him in return, that 
 there was scarcely any difference between myself and any one 
 of his sons. The love and affection of this excellent man con- 
 tinued towards me in unbroken tenor to the last hour of his 
 life, and survive in me still, nor shall ever desert me till I die. 
 
 " Returning again from Rome, and being ill able to endure 
 the hatred and weariness implanted in my mind in that most 
 wearisome abode of Avignon, seeking some byway of retire- 
 ment, as a port of refuge, I found a valley, tiny in size, but 
 solitary and agreeable, called Vaucluse, fifteen miles from 
 Avignon, where the Sorgia, the king of streams, takes its 
 source. Charmed with the sweetness of the spot, I betook 
 myself thither with my books. It would be a long story 
 were I to proceed to trace at length my life there for many, 
 many years. The sum of all is this, that nearly every work 
 that I have published was either finished, or begun, or con- 
 ceived there. Those works have been so numerous as to 
 exercise and fatigue me even to this day. For my mind, 
 like my body, was remarkable rather for dexterity than 
 strength ; and thus I found many things easy to meditate, 
 which I neglected afterwards as difficult to carry out. Here 
 the very aspect of the neighbourhood suggested to me to 
 attempt a bucolic poem, a pastoral, as well as the two books 
 on 'Solitary Life' dedicated to Philip, a man great at all 
 times, but then a humble bishop of Cavaillon, now the 
 bishop of a much greater diocese, and a cardinal, who is now 
 
"EPISTLE TO POSTERITY." 23 
 
 the sole survivor of all my old friends, and who loved, and 
 still loves me, not episcopally, so to speak, as Ambrosius 
 loved Augustine, but as a brother. 
 
 " As I roamed about those hills, on the sixth day of the 
 Great Week, it occurred to me, and I determined, to write 
 a poem in heroic verse on Scipio Africanus the Elder. 
 Him, I mean, whose marvellous name was always dear to me 
 from my first boyhood. What I then began, ardent with 
 the impulse of the moment, I soon discontinued under the 
 distraction of other cares ; but from the name of the subject 
 I gave the title of * Africa' to the book a work, which, I 
 know not by what fortune, its own or mine, was a favourite 
 with many before it was generally known. 
 
 "While I was thus spinning out my leisure in that 
 retreat, on one and the same day I received letters both 
 from the Senate at Eome and from the Chancellor of the 
 University of Paris, sending rival invitations to me the 
 former from Eome, the latter from Paris to accept the 
 laurel crown of poetry. Elated with pride, as was natural 
 with a young man at these proposals, and judging myself 
 worthy of the honour, inasmuch as men of such eminence 
 had thought so, yet weighing not my own merit, but the 
 testimonies of others, I hesitated, nevertheless, for a while 
 as to which invitation I should prefer to accept. On this 
 matter I wrote to Cardinal Colonna, whom I have men- 
 tioned, asking his advice ; for he was so near a neighbour, 
 that although I had written to him late, I received his 
 answer before nine o'clock the next day. I followed the 
 advice he gave me, and my answers to him are still extant. 
 Accordingly I set out ; and although, as is the way with 
 young men, I was a very partial judge of my own pro- 
 ductions, still I scrupled to follow the testimony given by 
 myself, or of those by whom I was invited though doubt- 
 less they would not have invited me, had they not judged 
 me worthy of the honour thus offered. I determined, there- 
 fore, to land first at Naples, where I sought out that dis- 
 tinguished king and philosopher, Eobert not more illus- 
 trious as a sovereign than as a man of letters, and unique 
 
24 PETRARCH. 
 
 in his age as a king and a friend of science and virtue for 
 the purpose of enabling him to express his personal opinion 
 about me. His flattering estimate of me, and the kindly 
 welcome he gave me, are matters now of wonder to me ; and 
 you, reader, if you had seen it, would wonder too. When he 
 heard the cause of my arrival, he was marvellously delighted, 
 reflecting as he did on my youthful confidence, and thinking 
 perhaps that the honour which I was seeking was not with- 
 out some advantage to his own reputation, inasmuch as I 
 had chosen him of all men as the sole competent judge of 
 my abilities. Why should I say more ? After innumerable 
 colloquies on various subjects ; and after having shown to 
 him the ' Africa,' with which he was so delighted as to ask 
 me, as a great kindness, to dedicate it to himself a request 
 which I could not, and certainly did not wish to, refuse 
 he appointed a certain day for the matter on which I had 
 come, and detained me from noon till evening. And as the 
 time fell short from the abundance of matter, he did the 
 same thing on the two following days, and thus for three 
 whole days I shook off my ignorance, and on the third day 
 he adjudged me worthy of the laurel crown. He offered it to 
 me at Naples, and even urged me with entreaties to accept 
 it. My affection for Kome prevailed over the gracious soli- 
 citation of so illustrious a king ; and thus, seeing my pur- 
 j)ose was inflexible, he gave me letters and despatches to the 
 Senate of Rome, in which he expressed his judgment of 
 me in highly flattering terms. And, indeed, what was then 
 the judgment of the king agreed with that of many others, 
 and especially with my own, though at this day I differ from 
 the estimate then formed of me by him, as well as by myself 
 and others. Affection for me and the partiality of the age 
 swayed him more than respect for the truth. So I came 
 [to Rome], and however unworthy, yet trusting and relying 
 upon so high a sanction, I received the laurel crown, while I 
 was still but an unfledged scholar, amid the utmost rejoicings 
 of the Romans who were able to take part in the ceremony. 
 I have written letters on this subject both in verse and in 
 prose. This laurel crown gained for me no knowledge, but a 
 
"EPISTLE TO POSTERITY." 25 
 
 great deal of envy. But this story also has strayed beyond 
 its limits. 
 
 " Departing from Rome, I went to Parma, and stayed 
 some time with the Lords of Correggio, who were the best 
 of men and most liberally disposed towards myself, but 
 sadly at enmity among each other ; and who at that time 
 were ruling in such a fashion as the city had never experi- 
 enced before within the memory of man, nor I believe will 
 ever in this age experience again. Mindful of the honour 
 I had accepted, and anxious lest it might seem to have been 
 conferred upon an unworthy recipient, having one day, after 
 climbing by chance a mountain in the neighbourhood, been 
 suddenly struck with the appearance of the place, I turned 
 my pen once more to the interrupted poem of ' Africa/ and 
 finding that fervour rekindled which had appeared quite laid 
 to sleep, I wrote a little that very day. I added afterwards a 
 little day by day, until, after returning to Parma and obtain- 
 ing a retired and quiet house, which I subsequently bought 
 and still retain, my intense ardour, which even now I am 
 amazed at, enabled me, before long, to bring the work to 
 a conclusion. Returning thence, I sought once more the 
 Sorgia and my transalpine solitude, just as I was turning my 
 back on my four-and-thirtieth year; 1 having spent a long 
 while at Parma and Yerona, being welcomed with affection 
 everywhere, thank God far more so, indeed, than I deserved. 
 
 "After a long while having gained the favour of a most 
 worthy man, and one whose equal, I think, did not exist 
 among the nobles of that age I mean Giacomo di Carrara 
 I was urged by him with such pressing entreaties, addressed 
 to me for several years both through messengers and letters 
 even across the Alps, when I was in those parts, and wher- 
 ever I chanced to be in Italy, to embrace his friendship, that 
 I resolved at length to pay him a visit, and to discover the 
 reason of this urgent solicitation from a man so eminent 
 and a stranger to myself. I came, therefore, tardily indeed, 
 
 1 This date is incorrect. Petrarch was thirty-eight when he re- 
 turned to Vaucluse in 1342. 
 
26 PETRARCH. 
 
 to Padua, where I was received by that man of illustrious 
 memory not only with courtesy, but as happy spirits are 
 welcomed in heaven ; with such abundant joy and such 
 inestimable kindness and affection, that I must fain suppress 
 it in silence, being hopeless of doing justice to it in words. 
 Knowing, among many other things, that I had embraced 
 from boyhood the clerical life, and with a view to attach me 
 the more closely not only to himself, but also to his country, 
 he caused me to be appointed a Canon of Padua ; and, in 
 short, if his life had only been longer, there would then have 
 been an end of my wandering and my travels. But alas ! 
 there is nothing lasting among mortals ; and if aught of 
 sweetness chanced to present itself in life, soon comes the 
 bitter end, and it is gone. When, ere two years had been 
 completed, God took him from me, his country, and the 
 world, He took away one of whom neither I, nor his 
 country, nor the world (my love to him does not deceive me) 
 were worthy. And although he was succeeded by a son, 
 conspicuous alike for his sagacity and renown, and who, 
 following in his father's footsteps, always held me in affec- 
 tion and honour, nevertheless, when I had lost one whose 
 age was more congenial to my own, I returned again to 
 Prance, not caring to remain where I was, my object being 
 not so much the longing to revisit places I had seen a 
 thousand times before, as a desire, common to all men in 
 trouble, of ministering to the ennui of life by a change of 
 scene." 
 
 With these words ends the fragment, for it is but a 
 fragment, which Petrarch has bequeathed to us of his 
 life. He omits in it all mention, save a bare allusion, to 
 his passion for Laura and his Italian poetry. He com- 
 memorates in it his early successes with pardonable 
 vanity, But he reserves his warmest and most enthusi- 
 astic language for his illustrious friends. The later por- 
 tion of his life, which connected him with the political 
 events of the age, is left untold, . 
 
27 
 
 CHAPTEE III. 
 
 EARLY LIFE. 
 
 It would be superfluous to dwell at greater length on 
 the events of his childhood, or on the genealogies of the 
 great poet, which have taxed the ingenuity of the Italian 
 commentators. His father, Petracco, was a notary of 
 Florence, who had joined the party of the White Guelfs, 
 and, under a false accusation of malversation, was driven 
 from the city by the hostile factions in the spring of 1302, 
 together with some six hundred honourable citizens, of 
 whom Dante Alighieri was one. He fled to Arezzo, and 
 there, two years later, on Monday the 20th July, at dawn, 
 Francesco Petrarcha, as he was called, was born. His 
 childhood was spent at Incisa, a small property about four- 
 teen miles from Florence, to which his mother obtained 
 leave to return. But the persecution still continuing, 
 Petracco, the father, migrated in 1313 to Avignon, to 
 which city Clement V. had recently removed the Papal 
 Court. Young Petrarch was sent to a school at Carpen- 
 tras, in the neighbourhood, kept by a Tuscan scholar 
 named Convennole, where he remained four years, and 
 where he already distinguished himself in rhetoric. 
 This early exile produced a marked effect on the des- 
 
28 PETRARCH. 
 
 tiny of Petrarch. Although born, properly speaking; a 
 citizen of Florence, it severed him from that brilliant 
 and turbulent republic ; and it is remarkable that he was 
 better known and more welcome in any part of Italy in 
 Naples, in Rome, in Padua, in Venice than in Tuscany, 
 which he never inhabited. Provence, Italianised by the 
 Papal migration to Avignon, became in more senses than 
 one his adopted home. There he followed his studies, at 
 Carpentras and Montpelier. There he entered into the 
 world ; and in spite of the virulent denunciations which 
 it was the fashion of Italian patriotism to heap upon 
 the Court of Avignon, it cannot be doubted that much 
 of the most brilliant society of the age was collected in 
 the Papal city, and probably afforded to Petrarch an 
 easier access than he would have found to it in Eome. 
 There too, in the immediate neighbourhood of Carpentras, 
 he sought in after-years that secluded valley, which was 
 the retreat of his studious hours and the scene of his 
 impassioned regrets ; insomuch that to this day the 
 memory of Petrarch is nowhere more fondly preserved 
 than by the sources of the fountain of Yaucluse. His 
 father intended him for the profession of the Bar, and he 
 was sent to the University of Montpelier for four years 
 (1319-1323) to study the Pandects. Prom thence he 
 proceeded to Bologna, where three more years were spent 
 in these ungrateful studies, to which, as he tells us, he 
 could never bend his mind. "In that pursuit," he says, 
 " I cannot be said to have spent seven years, but to have 
 lost them." And although success was promised to him 
 by his professors, he disdained to seek it, holding that 
 whatever may be the majesty of legal science, the prac- 
 tice of the courts was not to be carried on without some 
 
PATRONAGE OF THE COLONNAS. 29 
 
 sacrifice of honesty and independence. His father's 
 death in 1326 released him from the obligation to follow 
 this course of life ; and as his mother, Eletta Canigiani, 
 died about the same time, he found himself, with an 
 only brother, his own master. His earliest known com- 
 position was an elegy on his mother's death in Latin 
 verse, not remarkable for beauty, or even correctness, 
 yet even here he expressed the thought that his mother 
 and himself would live for ever in that verse 
 
 " Vivemus pariter, memorabimur ambo." 
 
 These lines appear to have been written on the fly-leaf of 
 a manuscript Yirgil, to which he was much attached. 
 The volume was afterwards stolen, but recovered under 
 singular circumstances. 
 
 It is not easy to discover what were Petrarch's means 
 of subsistence. His father, a banished notary, was never 
 rich, and seems to have left him nothing but a very choice 
 copy of some of the works of Cicero a treasure he valued 
 above all others, for the rhythm of Ciceronian prose was 
 the enchantment of his life, and dearer to him than all 
 the songs of Italy. It is impossible to say how he lived, 
 for we find him at all times in the best society, travelling 
 great distances, and leading a perfectly independent life, 
 without any apparent means of improving his income. 
 It was not until a much later period of his life that he 
 was enabled to hold ecclesiastical benefices that enriched 
 him. 
 
 Probably he owed the position in which we find him 
 at two-and-twenty to the liberal patronage of the Colonna 
 family, for he had formed at the University of Bologna 
 an intimate friendship with Giacomo Colonna, afterwards 
 
30 PETRARCH. 
 
 Bishop of Lombes. His talents and amiable disposition 
 were not unknown to the Cardinal, John Colonna, 
 brother of Giacomo, and he was received on his return 
 to Avignon on the footing of a member rather than a 
 dependant of that illustrious house. But it was not 
 until 1330 that he appears to have taken up his resi- 
 dence in the Colonna Palace. He had visited Lombes 
 in the interval ; and, according to one account, had made 
 a journey to northern Europe. At that time, too, his 
 great poetical talents had not made their mark, for it 
 was not until some years after he conceived his passion 
 for Laura that he began to write sonnets to her. In 
 one of the earliest of them he reproaches himself for not 
 having sung her praises and her beauty before. The 
 mode and means of living he enjoyed during this inter- 
 val, from 1326 to 1330, have not been explained by his 
 biographers. 
 
 It is amusing to trace the first appearance of the future 
 poet, philosopher, and politician in the great world of 
 that day, as a young gentleman of fashion. 
 
 " Don't you recollect," he wrote years afterwards to his 
 brother, Gherardo, who had become a Carthusian monk, 
 " what pains, what useless pains, we took to preserve the ex- 
 quisite whiteness of our linen ; what dressing and undress- 
 ing there was, morning and evening ; what fear lest a breath 
 of air should disturb the elegance of our curls, or a passing 
 horse splash our perfumed and gorgeous cloaks, or derange 
 their folds ? Why all this anxiety ? That we might please 
 the eyes of others. And whose eyes 1 The eyes of many 
 who were displeasing enough to ourselves. But then our 
 shoes ! How they pricked the feet they were meant to pro- 
 tect ! As for mine, they would have been useless if I had 
 not, under the pressure of dire necessity, preferred the sacri- 
 
PETKAKCH A MAN OF FASHION. 31 
 
 fices of appearances to that of my own joints and nerves. 
 And the curling-irons ! How often were our slumbers dis- 
 turbed by that operation ! What pirate could have squeezed 
 and tortured us more than we squeezed ourselves with our 
 own hands ? The morning light showed us nocturnal fur- 
 rows in the glass, so that if we wished to show our heads, we 
 had to hide our faces." * Ep. Famil., x. 5. 
 
 The key to Petrarch's success in life, which raised 
 him at so early an age from a humble to an enviable 
 position, must be sought in his social qualities, his 
 refinement, and his cultivation. He contrived, in every 
 phase of his life, to be, as moderns say, "in fashion." 
 Though not without independence of character, as will 
 be seen in the sequel, he never seems to have felt like 
 Dante that it was an intolerable misery to eat another 
 man's bread or mount another man's stairs. He began 
 life as a man of the world, open to every kindly influ- 
 ence, ardent in friendship, enthusiastic in his patriotism, 
 and exceedingly prone, as the result proved, to fall in 
 love. 
 
 It is certainly much easier to recognise the impassioned 
 admirer of Laura in this young man of fashion and 
 society, at three-and-twenty, with his pointed shoes and 
 frizzled hair, than in the sage, the philosopher, and the 
 poe.t, handed down to us by tradition, in the garb of the 
 Church and the garland of the Laureate; and it is an 
 anachronism to confound the enthusiastic impulses of 
 youth with the graver emotions and reflections of mature 
 
 1 This letter, in which Petrarch reminds his brother of their youth- 
 ful follies and gaieties, was addressed to Gherardo after he had been 
 seven years a Carthusian monk ; and he contrasts with amusing so- 
 lemnity their boyish dandyism with the tonsure and the sandals of 
 monastic life. 
 
32 PETRARCH. 
 
 life. Here, in his early years, we catch a glimpse of him 
 in the follies and gaieties of his age. But it was his lot 
 to allow that youthful passion to "grow with his growth, 
 and strengthen with his strength," until it was insepar- 
 ably blended in after -years with his literary life, and 
 with his fame. 
 
33 
 
 CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 PETRARCH AND LAURA. 
 
 On the 6th April 1327, which was the Monday in Holy 
 Week, Petrarch saw, in the church of the Nuns of St 
 Clara at Avignon, the lady who stamped at a glance her 
 image for ever on his genius and his life. 
 
 . What man is there of tenderness and imagination who 
 does not look back to " some particular star " the 
 morning-star of life which shed an influence over his 
 earlier years that no time can obliterate, and still lingers, 
 though it be in the setting, upon the horizon of the 
 past 1 To Petrarch that influence lasted always ; it rose 
 in the fervour of youth ; it strengthened in the maturity 
 of manhood; it became his art, his philosophy, his 
 religion ; neither Time nor Death quenched its radiance ; 
 and the visionary glory spread and grew until it lost 
 itself in dreams of heaven. 
 
 Laura de Noves (for that was the name of her family) 
 had married in 1325 Hugo de Sade, a gentleman of the 
 Avignonais, whose family flourishes there to this day. 
 Laura was born in 1307; she was consequently three 
 years younger than Petrarch, and just twenty when first 
 he saw her. These facts are attested beyond all doubt 
 
 F.c. iv. c 
 
34 PETRARCH. 
 
 by documents in the archives of the De Sade family; 
 by her will, made a few days before her death, in 1348 ; 
 and by her tomb in the sepulchral vault of the family in 
 the Church of the Cordeliers at Avignon. It is there- 
 fore useless to follow the speculations which have been 
 published as to the person of Laura, and, indeed, as to 
 her existence. The known facts of her life, few in 
 number, correspond exactly with the details which may 
 be collected from Petrarch's own Sonnets and Letters. 
 Laura de Sade was beautiful, and she was virtuous. 
 Her husband is said to have been a jealous man not 
 unnaturally, if the passion of a poet for his wife made 
 her immortally famous as that poet's mistress. But, 
 in truth, there is nothing to show that Laura was at 
 all sensible to the passion she inspired. She was, as 
 far as we know, a very good wife to Hugo de Sade ; 
 and we have Petrarch's own authority for the fact that 
 she presented her husband with a large family of 
 children. The reader of Petrarch's amatory verses, and 
 of these pages dedicated to his memory, will seek in vain 
 for any incidents of romance to give a colour of reality 
 to those endless effusions of the poet's heart and lyre. 
 The merest trifles, such as the passage of his lady's 
 shadow, the dropping of her glove, the scent of a flower, 
 the rustle of a laurel bush, are all that Petrarch's imagin- 
 ation fed on ; and it may be doubted whether he was 
 ever honoured by a nearer approach to her personal 
 favour or even acquaintance. 
 
 Eomantic devotion to a well-known beauty was a 
 characteristic of the age of chivalry, not yet extinct. 
 It inspired the Troubadours of the twelfth and thirteenth 
 centuries, as it had fired the legendary prowess of King 
 
INFLUENCE OF THE TROUBADOURS. 35 
 
 Arthur's knights. It mingled with the feats of arms in 
 the tilt-yard, and with the prayers and ritual of the sanc- 
 tuary. Surrounded and adorned by this atmosphere of 
 dutiful and courteous admiration, the part of a" Queen 
 of Beauty " was one to which women of the purest lives 
 might by the custom of the times aspire. The romances 
 of chivalry breathe no other spirit ; and the same ideal 
 enthusiasm lingered in the world long enough to be 
 ridiculed by Cervantes, and even to inspire the " toasts " 
 of the last century. 
 
 In Petrarch this ideal passion took the shape, not of 
 knightly exercises, but of poetry. He was one of the 
 men gifted with an inimitable art of expression, who 
 can create and perpetuate by language emotions more 
 intense and lasting than their own. Without disputing 
 the reality of his tenderness for Laura, it is impossible 
 not to see that it was prodigiously enhanced by the 
 pleasure he found in transfusing it into verse. There is 
 in the Canzoniere at least as much of the artist as of the 
 lover; and the sonnets which record his sufferings at a 
 separation from an unrelenting mistress, or his matured 
 grief over her early grave, all partake of this artificial 
 character. This, too, was in the spirit and taste of the 
 age. Petrarch boasts in one of his letters that he copied 
 and followed no one, and declared that he would not 
 read the great poem of Dante for many years, lest it 
 should affect his own style. But he is the lineal de- 
 scendant and direct offspring of the troubadours of 
 Languedoc and Provence,- and the earlier poets of Italy. 
 In his own " Triumph of Love " he passes them all 
 in review Arnauld Daniel, Pierre Eoger, De Marueil, 
 Folquet of Marseilles, and Geoffrey Kudel; and in 
 
36 PETRARCH. 
 
 Italy, Cino da Pistoia, Guittone d'Arezzo, Dante him- 
 self. The theme was the same ; and although it cannot 
 be said that the theory of Platonic love, which entered 
 Italy from Greece in the fifteenth century, was familiar 
 to these early poets, yet the spirit of devotion to the 
 beautiful, the pure, and the true was allied in them to 
 a simpler and a nobler faith than that of the Humanists 
 of a later age. The highest and most perfect consecra- 
 tion of these sentiments is, no doubt, to be found in the 
 i Yita Nuova ' of Dante, rising, as it were, by the steps 
 of Paradise, to the beatific vision which is the trans- 
 figuration of love. Petrarch, at his loftiest flight, reaches 
 no such level of grandeur and power; but then he 
 retains a graceful familiarity, a dramatic charm, a per- 
 fection of language, which were sometimes lost in the 
 sublime depths of the Dantesque imagery. 
 
 It is an anachronism to ascribe the diffusion of these 
 sentiments in the Italy of the fourteenth century to the 
 dialogues or influence of Plato. The Greek language 
 was still unknown to the most learned men of that 
 century. No Greek manuscripts had been collected. 
 Here and there, the troubles of the East sent some 
 wandering scholar, like Barlaam or Pilatus, across the 
 Adriatic, who was hailed as a marvel. Nothing is more 
 strange than this total severance of the Latin and the 
 Hellenic races. Aristotle was only known in the schools 
 of the West through an Arabic translation, illustrated by 
 Arabian commentators. Plato was only dimly seen by 
 the reflected light of the Ciceronian dialogues, and by 
 the traces of the Alexandrian school of philosophy in 
 the early Christian Fathers. Dim as that light was, 
 Petrarch followed it. It is curious to remark how little 
 
PLATONIC FAITH AND LOVE. 37 
 
 effect was ever produced on his mind by the Aristotelian 
 traditions or the reigning philosophy of the schools. 
 Averroes, especially, he regarded as a pestilent heretic \ 
 and one of his most vehement controversial passages 
 was directed against four young Yenettan gentlemen 
 professing an unbounded respect for that commentator, 
 who may justly be regarded as one of the founders of 
 sceptical and negative opinions. Petrarch, on the con- 
 trary, held a highly spiritual and Christian creed. For 
 him, this world, this life, were but the first steps on an 
 infinite scale leading from earth to heaven. Nothing in 
 humanity is complete. Nothing in Deity is deficient ; 
 and the spirit of Love, interfused through all the 
 thoughts and actions of our being, is the guiding-star, 
 the link, the clue, which raises the corruptible to the 
 incorruptible, the mortal to immortality, the soul of man 
 to its divine source in God. 
 
 These sentiments, which are nearly akin to those of 
 Dante in the scheme of his great work, gave Petrarch a 
 lofty pre-eminence over all his predecessors save one. 
 He was not only a poet penning a sonnet to the eyebrow 
 of his mistress, but a sage and a philosopher. 
 
 Italy possessed, in truth, an entire cycle of amatory 
 poets, dating from the Sicilian Ciullo d'Alcamo at the 
 close of the twelfth century, down to the constellation of 
 the friends and early companions of Dante, in which the 
 two Guidos, Guido Cavalcanti and Guido Guinicelli, 
 were the most conspicuous stars. 
 
 " Thus hath one Guido from another ta'en 
 The praise of speech, and haply one hath passed 
 Through birth, who from their nest will chase the twain." 
 
 Purgatorio, B. xi. 
 
38 PETRARCH. 
 
 The English reader may make the acquaintance of 
 these charming writers in a volume published in 1861 by 
 Mr D. G. Rossetti, who has transfused the grace and 
 sentiment of medieval Italy with singular success into 
 the measures of our own tongue. He enumerates no less 
 than forty-four writers of vernacular poetry, all belong- 
 ing to the thirteenth century, of whose works some 
 specimens have been preserved in print : probably many 
 more existed in manuscript. Love was their common 
 theme, sometimes treated with gaiety and playfulness, 
 more often with an austere and devout spirit. All these 
 poets belonged to the age preceding that of Petrarch, 
 although some of them may have been personally known 
 to him : thus Francesco da Barberino was born in 1264, 
 the year before Dante's birth, but he lived to be eighty- 
 four, and consequently flourished in Petrarch's lifetime. 
 Cino da Pistoia (whose name in full was Guittoncino de' 
 Sinibaldi) was born at Pistoia in 1270, five years later 
 than Dante. Of him it was that Dante said in his 
 treatise on vernacular eloquence that " those who have 
 most sweetly and nobly written poems in modern Italian 
 are Cino da Pistoia and a friend of Ms" the friend 
 being Dante himself. The canzone Cino addressed to 
 Dante on the death of Beatrice is well known. Cino 
 was a Ghibelline, sometimes persecuted and exiled ; but 
 he was also a successful lawyer and professor of the laws 
 at Siena, Perugia, and Florence. It is doubtful whether 
 Petrarch was ever one of his pupils : but as he only died 
 in 1336, Petrarch must have been well acquainted with 
 his fame and his poetry ; and there is much in Cino's 
 lamentation for his deceased Selvaggia which anticipates 
 Petrarch's querulous strains. With infinitely less of poetic 
 
INFLUENCE ON ENGLISH POETKY. 39 
 
 powers and grace, the vein of thought and feeling is the 
 same it was the fashion of the age. These scattered 
 fragments of a poetic age have a charm of their own. 
 They are entirely devoid of the affectation and antitheses 
 which are the blemishes of Petrarch's Canzoniere. They 
 are far more simple and natural. Perhaps they speak 
 the language of more genuine tenderness and passion. 
 But they want the exquisite refinement of style that 
 Petrarch alone attained ; and that one quality embalmed 
 his memory to imperishable fame, whilst a host of men, 
 gifted perhaps with scarcely inferior genius, but inferior 
 to him in art, have been forgotten by the world. 
 
 Two hundred years later, precisely the same taste and 
 spirit revived and revived in England under the courtly 
 reign of Elizabeth. Indeed our very first sonnet writer, 
 Lord Surrey, who fell a victim to the jealousy or caprice 
 of Henry VIII. in 1547, in the thirty-first year of his 
 age, was a child of the same school. Petrarch's 249th 
 sonnet, " Zephiro torna, e'l bel tempo rinasce," was the 
 parent of Surrey's charming lines : 
 
 " The soote season, that bud and blome forth brings, 
 With grene hath clad the hill, and eke the vale ; 
 The nightingale with fethers new she sings ; 
 The turtle to her mate hath told her tale : 
 Somer is come, for every spray now springs. 
 The hart hath hong his old hed on the pale : 
 The buck in brake his winter coate he flings : 
 The fishes flete with new repayred scale ; 
 The adder all her slough away she flings ; 
 The swift swalow pursueth the flies smale : 
 The busy bee her hony now she mings. 
 Winter is worne that was the flowers bale." 
 
 Sir Thomas Wyat, who is styled with Lord Surrey 
 
40 PETRARCH. 
 
 a father of English classical poetry, imitated Petrarch 
 still more closely, and translated many of his sonnets. 
 The old author of the ' Art of English Poetry ' (quoted 
 by Warton) says of these worthies : " Henry Earle of 
 Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyat, between whom I find 
 very little differences, I repute them for the two chief 
 lanterns of light to all others that have since employed 
 their powers upon English poesie; their conceits were 
 lofty, their styles stately, their conveyance clearly, their 
 terms proper, their metre sweet and well-proportioned, in 
 all imitating very naturally and studiously their master 
 Francis Petrarcha." They were the first genuine imi- 
 tators of the Italian style in England. I say nothing of 
 Chaucer, whose genius was far more original and national, 
 though Chaucer was a contemporary of Petrarch, and 
 was supposed to have met the great poet in Italy. But 
 Chaucer's mission to Italy occurred in 1372, when 
 Petrarch was an old man living in the Euganean hills, far 
 from the world. There is scarcely a trace of Petrarch's 
 somewhat morbid cast of thought, or of his philosophy) 
 in the lively, shrewd, and humorous pictures of life 
 which Chaucer drew; and whatever he derived from 
 Italy was drawn far less from the influence of Petrarch 
 than from that of Boccaccio, with whom, indeed, Chaucer 
 had much in common. 1 
 
 1 The intimacy of Petrarch and Boccaccio is one of the most inter- 
 esting in the annals of lettered friendships : the difference in their 
 ages was just sufficient to give Petrarch the authority of father, and 
 to inspire Boccaccio with the sympathy of a younger brother. He 
 says in the 8th book, "De casibus virorum illustriun], ,, speaking of 
 Petrarch: "In somnis sibi visum adspectu modestum et moribus, 
 venusta facie ac lato pallore conspicua, virenti laurea insignitum, ac 
 pallio amictum regio, summa reverentia dignum." Squarzafichi, who 
 quotes this passage, adds: "Tanta fuit vis ejus am oris, ut alter 
 
DRUMMOND OF HAWTHOllNDEN. 41 
 
 Sir Philip Sidney's "Astrophel and Stella," published 
 in 1583, was an echo of the same strain of romance and 
 unsatisfied passion. Spenser is full of the genuine 
 Italian grace of love, chivalry, and romance ; his " Amor- 
 etti " are pure Petrarchan ; but Drummond of Hawthorn- 
 den is the most complete representation of Petrarch in 
 English literature. He had wooed and won an accom- 
 plished lady who died when the wedding-day was fixed. 
 Drummond was then thirty -eight years old : he sur- 
 vived this melancholy event twenty-six years, and never 
 ceased to pour fresh tears over the tomb of his beloved 
 mistress. Life was to him henceforth " a nought, a 
 thought, a masquerade of dreams." His soul was wrapt 
 in the great mysteries of love and grief, of time and 
 death; he rose on the wings of poetry from earthly 
 things to heaven, and one of his spiritual songs, " The 
 Flowers of Zion," was written in the terza-rima of Pet- 
 rarch's " Triomfi," from which much of it was borrowed. 
 These were all the lineal descendants of the first Italian 
 poets, dating from the thirteenth century. 
 
 It is impossible to rank Petrarch amongst the most 
 original and self-created poets of the world. His early 
 studies were governed by a passionate admiration for 
 Cicero and Virgil, and these great writers are the models 
 whom he imitated with imperfect success, both in prose 
 and verse, in his philosophical essays and in his Eclogues 
 and his "Africa." The love -songs of the troubadours 
 of Southern France, and even Spain, bear a strong 
 
 alterms faciem in gemma annuli gestare, ipso (Boccatio) dicente in 
 una suorum virorum epistola, 
 
 ' Dulcis amice vale ! tua te mini semper imago 
 It prsesens ; mecumque sedet, mecumque quiescit ; 
 Tu nunc reddo vices.' " 
 
42 PETRARCH. 
 
 affinity to his own Canzoniere; and, as we have just 
 seen, the same vein had been successfully cultivated in 
 the preceding generation by Guido Cavalcanti and by 
 Dante himself in the * Yita Nuova.' When his life as- 
 sumed a more decided religious character, the influence 
 of St Augustine may be clearly traced in his thoughts, 
 and even in his style. These, no doubt, were his guid- 
 ing-stars; but it is not too much to say that Petrarch 
 surpassed them all in his constancy to a single theme, 
 and in the incomparable art with which he wrought 
 the vulgar tongue of Italy to the highest perfection 
 of rhythm and elegance. There are still in existence 
 in manuscript, notes that record the extraordinary labour 
 he bestowed upon a single sonnet, and the change he 
 introduced, sometimes by altering the position of a line, 
 sometimes by the substitution of a more graphic word, 
 to reach the perfection of expression. In this respect 
 he may be compared to Virgil, and to Virgil alone : 
 and like Virgil, he sometimes blushed to think that 
 the last perfection of ideal refinement had not been 
 reached, even in passages in which no other eye has 
 found a flaw. 
 
 If the passion of Petrarch had had more sensual 
 reality in it, it might have been less enduring. Its 
 ideal character survived the vicissitudes of life, the de- 
 cline of beauty, the advance of age, and death itself ; for 
 it was enshrined in thought and language, over which 
 time had no power. For more than twenty years the 
 poet continued to celebrate the charms of an adorable 
 and unrelenting mistress. Laura was forty years of age 
 when she died ; but her death only gave a fresh theme 
 to a disconsolate lover. Although they first met amid 
 
STERN CHARACTER OF LAURA. 43 
 
 the scenes of a gay and profligate court, they appear 
 seldom to have held any personal intercourse. Petrarch 
 was not admitted to her house. There is no evidence 
 that she shared his tender sentiments, but the reverse. 
 He describes her as indifferent to the charms of poetry 
 and song. A veiled figure, intent, probably, on other 
 affections and cares, haunted him like a spirit ; but that 
 spirit breathed life, not unmingled with suffering, into 
 his heart, and burst forth in his verses with a splendour 
 and a warmth not its own. There is not the smallest 
 evidence that Laura de Sade returned or requited his 
 passion. He speaks of her countenance as "severe," 
 and this stern demeanour was only relaxed by a rare 
 passing gleam of consideration and courtesy. In his 
 letters he never mentions her at all, except on one occa- 
 sion, when his friend Giacomo Colonna had rallied him 
 playfully on the unsubstantial nature of the object of his 
 affections, and hinted, as some critics have done in later 
 times, that, except as an object of poetical enthusiasm, 
 his Laura might have no real existence. To this Pet- 
 rarch replied : " Look at what I suffer. To fall in love 
 with a purely ideal object might be a folly, but to love 
 as I do, without hope, is a scourge." In his " Triumph of 
 Death," which I shall cite hereafter, he describes the 
 interest felt by Laura in his fate in more tender lan- 
 guage. But that was the dream of a poet after the death 
 of his mistress, when he believed that the shadows and 
 obscurities of the human heart had vanished in the light 
 of eternity. On earth and in life an unfathomable abyss 
 seemed to separate him from her. He loved as one 
 might love an angel or a star. The poetic language in 
 which he depicts her charms the golden-threaded hair 
 
44 PETKAKCH. 
 
 the angelic smile the eyes that reflected the light of 
 heaven may be that of imagination or enthusiasm. 
 But tradition can hardly err in ascribing to Laura de 
 Sade uncommon beauty, though there are doubts of the 
 authenticity of the portraits which exist of her. Pet- 
 rarch states in his letters that he had known two great 
 painters Giotto and Simon Memmi; the latter un- 
 doubtedly gave a portrait of Laura to his friend, and 
 received in return two complimentary sonnets. One can 
 hardly recognise, in the portraits attributed to Memmi 
 in the gallery of the Louvre, the traces of so great a 
 beauty ; and the bas-relief of Petrarch and Laura found 
 at Siena is of still more questionable authenticity. 
 
45 
 
 CHAPTEE V. 
 
 PETRARCH AT VAUCLUSE. 
 
 The passion which Petrarch had conceived for this 
 lady, and perhaps the disappointments attending it, 
 strengthened his taste for rural life and retirement ; and 
 he found at Vaucluse, within easy reach of Avignon, a 
 spot singularly adapted to his convenience. The valley 
 has been described with great force and fidelity by 
 Ugo Poscolo : 
 
 " The house of Petrarch at Vaucluse has disappeared, nor 
 can his frequent descriptions help antiquarians to discover 
 the site of his gardens ; but the valley of Vaucluse is one of 
 those works of nature which five centuries have been unable 
 to disturb. On leaving Avignon, the eye of the traveller 
 reposes on an expanse of beautiful meadow, till he arrives on 
 a plain varied by numerous vineyards. At a short distance 
 the hills begin to ascend, covered with trees, which are re- 
 flected on the Sorgia, the waters of which are so limpid, their 
 course so rapid, and their sounds so soft, that the poet de- 
 scribes them truly when he says that ' they are liquid crystal, 
 the murmurs of which mingle with the songs of birds to fill 
 the air with harmony/ Its banks are covered with aquatic 
 plants ; and in those places where the falls or the rapidity of 
 the current prevent their being distinguished, it seems to 
 roll over a bed of green marble. Nearer the source the soil 
 
46 PETRARCH. 
 
 is sterile ; and, as the channel grows narrow, the waves 
 break against the rocks, and roll in a torrent of foam and 
 spray, glittering with the reflection of the prismatic colours. 
 On advancing still further up the river, the traveller finds 
 himself enclosed in a semicircular recess, formed by rocks 
 inaccessible on the right, and abrupt and precipitous on the 
 left, rising into obelisks, pyramids, and every fantastic shape, 
 and from the midst of them a thousand rivulets descend. 
 The valley is terminated by a mountain, perpendicularly 
 scarped from the top to the bottom, and, through a natural 
 porch of concentric arches, he enters a vast cavern, the silence 
 and darkness of which are interrupted only by the murmur- 
 ing and the sparkling of the waters in a basin, which forms 
 the principal source of the Sorgia. This basin, the depth of 
 which has never yet been fathomed, overflows in the spring, 
 and it then sends forth its waters with such an impetuosity 
 as to force them through a fissure in the top of the cavern, 
 at an elevation of nearly a hundred feet on the mountain, 
 whence they gradually precipitate themselves from height to 
 height in cascades, sometimes showing and sometimes con- 
 cealing, in their foam, the huge masses of rock which they 
 hurry along. The roar of the torrents never ceases during 
 the long rains, while it seems as if the rocks themselves were 
 dissolved away, and the thunder re-echoed from cavern to 
 cavern. The awful solemnity of this spectacle is varied by the 
 rays of the sun, which, towards evening particularly, refract 
 and reflect their various tints on the cascades. After the 
 dog-days, the rocks become arid and black, the basin resumes 
 its level, and the valley returns to a profound stillness." 
 
 The sources of the Sorgia had been well known to 
 Petrarch from his earliest years. They were near Car- 
 pentras, where he was at school. They had been visited 
 by his friend and patron, King Eobert of Naples (to 
 whom, in fact, the little principality belonged *), on his 
 passage to the Court of Avignon. He fled there in youth to 
 
 1 The Comte' Venaissin and Provence had been ceded absolutely by 
 Philip le Bel, in 1290, to Charles II., King Robert's father. 
 
SOLITUDE AT VAUCLUSE. 47 
 
 escape from the turmoil of society and the violence of his 
 passion ; and as he advanced in life, he made the retreat 
 of Yaucluse the central seat of his contemplative life. 
 
 Let us go with Petrarch to " the sources of the Sorgia, 1 
 the well-known haven of his soul, where he was wont to 
 wander solitary at evening, and in the morning the mel- 
 ancholy ripple of the stream against the bank found him 
 there still." If we would meditate, it shall be " in that 
 delightful valley, 2 under the morning shadows of the 
 mountains, where the fountain gurgles from beneath the 
 tangled roots, and over an hundred rocks, welling forth 
 its silver waters and its many waves, which burst in loud 
 rapidity down the glen, till they swell into an enchanting 
 river. In this spot we will sit upon our chosen seats, 
 under the shadow of the ivy, feeding our eyes with the 
 sweet prospect. There we will task the fruitful powers 
 of the mind, there read the secrets of the soul." There 
 we may learn, as he says, " exigui laudasse silentia ruris." 
 And whilst we recollect that 
 
 u The unquiet man, through years of anxious breath, 
 Still hastens death- ward : his best friend is Death ! n 
 
 we shall remember that Petrarch had hopes and medita- 
 tions which his Mago never knew \ and that, whilst he 
 sang of the troubled end of the Carthaginian warrior, the 
 greater part of his own life was only agitated by sweet 
 sorrows, or enlivened by pure joys. 
 
 " I ever sought a life of solitude, 
 This know the shores, and every lawn and wood : 
 To fly from those deaf spirits and blind away, 
 Who from the path of heaven have gone astray." 3 
 
 i Epist. Fam., lib. v. cap. 1. 2 Epist. Variar. 
 
 3 Africa, lib. vi. 
 
48 PETRARCH. 
 
 He gives a pleasing account of his first coming to 
 Vaucluse, in a letter to one of his oldest friends, that 
 shows the happy spirit in which he looked back upon 
 the days of his youth, when years began to lie thick 
 upon him. Guido Septimo, to whom it is addressed, 
 had been the schoolfellow of Petrarch and his brother 
 Gerard : he afterwards became Archbishop of Genoa. 
 His scholars never forgot the obligations they owed to 
 that venerable tutor, Convennole, who was afterwards 
 relieved by Petrarch at the expense of Cicero's treatise 
 <De Gloria/ 
 
 u You may recollect/' says the poet, " that in the flower of 
 our boyhood, when we studied together so happily, my father 
 and your uncle, who were then about as old as we are now, 
 happened to bring us with them to Carpentras, when your 
 uncle, as a stranger, was seized with a violent desire to see 
 the source of the Sorgia, which, though it has always been 
 celebrated for itself, is now more known through my verses 
 if I may be allowed to boast of so small a matter to a friend. 
 After many fears and admonitions from the best of mothers 
 mine in blood, but yours also in affection we started with 
 that excellent man whose name you bear, but whose acquire- 
 ments and celebrity you have so greatly augmented. When 
 we came to the fountain of the Sorgia (for I recollect it as if 
 it were to-day), I was touched by the singular beauty of the 
 spot, and I said, in my childish thoughts, ' This is a place 
 most fitted to my tastes, and I should prefer it to the greatest 
 cities/ Some time afterwards, we, who in our souls were never 
 divided, were separated by the chances of life : you trod the 
 forum, and struggled in debate ; I sought for tranquillity in 
 shady places : you strove for honourable wealth in the path- 
 ways of political distinction ; and that very wealth which I 
 despised and avoided pursued me into my most secret retreats 
 and the recesses of the green woods. At times, however, you 
 have sought a temporary haven from the storms of life in my 
 
LOVE AND MEDITATION. 49 
 
 hermitage. . . . How often has the darkness of the evening 
 found me in the fields afar off ! how often have I risen in the 
 silence of a summer night to offer up my prayers and mid- 
 night orisons to Christ ; and then to steal forth alone, lest I 
 should disturb the servants, heavy with slumber, to wander 
 under the high moon, over the fields and mountains ! If you 
 ask me how I come to be so bold, I answer that I am not 
 afraid of shadows ; no wolves have ever been seen in this 
 valley, and no one ever comes there who would do me any 
 harm : I meet here and there a cowherd in the meadows, or 
 a fisherman watching all night beside the stream, who salute 
 me, and offer me much civility at all hours, because they 
 know that I am on good terms with the lord of the soil." 
 Epist. Senil., x., ep. 2. 
 
 Here, then, we may most fitly place a few specimens 
 of the poetry which has given to Petrarch his most en- 
 during fame ; for these verses were chiefly written under 
 the influence of solitude, in that delightful spot ; and he 
 was never more entirely devoted to the objects of his 
 passion and his art than when he lived there. But in 
 translation from the Italian to another tongue these 
 poems lose their greatest charm. The more austere 
 Muse of England disclaims those hyperbolical expres- 
 sions which are natural to the poets of the South ; and 
 though our language has a rhythm and a majesty of 
 its own, it can hardly be said that any of his numer- 
 ous translators have caught the melody of the verse of 
 Petrarch. 
 
 Yet the following lines from one of the canzones may 
 perhaps Uransport the ^& a der to those pine-groves, among 
 the rugged hills of Provence, beneath which the medi- 
 tative poet loved to sit in the dreamy ecstasy of his 
 passion :J 
 
 f.c. IV. d 
 
50 PETRARCH. 
 
 '[Beneath each lofty pine and shady place 
 I stay my wanderings ; with my mind I trace 
 In every rock her blessed countenance ; 
 And when I rouse me from my wistful trance 
 I find my bosom melted by my love, 
 And cry, ' Ah, whither, whither dost thou rove ? 
 Where art thou come, whence art thou separate ? ' 
 Thus in my fevered mind's perturbed state 
 These fleeting dreams to fixed thought return, 
 Myself forgotten, whilst for her I burn. 
 I feel that Love is close at hand 
 So close that in my error lies 
 The ecstasy of my fond eyes. 
 On every side I see my Laura stand ; 
 Did but the illusion last, no more could I demand. 
 
 Often, (yet who will credit my fond speech ?) 
 In the clear waters, or the verdant lawn, 
 Or in the smooth stems of the glossy beech, 
 Or in the snow-white clouds of early morn, 
 I see her live, eclipsing with her charms 
 Leda's fair child, who set the world in arms, 
 As night-stars vanish in the light of dawn. 
 The more I wander in the world's rough ways 
 The more o'er desert wastes my footstep strays 
 The more my fancy her sweet form portrays. 
 Then, when the stern reality of Truth 
 Destroys the visions of my fervent youth, 
 I sit, a dead upon a living stone, 
 As one who thinks and grieves and writes alone." 
 
 Or in a more joyous mood, when Laura's presence ani- 
 mates the landscape : 
 
 \ a Here stand we, Love, our glory to behold 
 ^~* How, passing nature, lovely, high, and rare ! 
 
 Behold ! what showers of sweetness falling there ! 
 
 What floods of light by heaven to earth unrolled ! 
 
 How shine her robes, in purple, pearls, and gold, 
 
JOY AND GRIEF. 51 
 
 So richly wrought, with skill beyond compare ! 
 
 How glance her feet ! her beaming eyes, how fair 
 Through the dark cloister which these hills enfold ! 
 The verdant turf, and flowers of thousand hues, 
 
 Beneath yon oak's old canopy of state. 
 
 Spring round her feet to pay their amorous duty. 
 The heavens, in joyful reverence, cannot choose 
 
 But light up all their fires, to celebrate 
 
 Her praise, whose presence charms their awful beauty."... ._ 
 
 Merivale. 
 
 Or in a more melancholy strain, when some solitary 
 bird, twittering on the naked autumnal bough, touches 
 his fancy : 
 
 jJiPoor solitary bird, that pour'st thy lay, 
 Or haply mournest the sweet season gone ; 
 As chilly night and winter hurry on, 
 And daylight fades, and summer flies away , 
 
 If, as the cares that swell thy little throat, 
 Thou knew'st alike the woes that wound my rest, 
 Oh, thou wouldst house thee in this kindred breast, 
 And mix with mine thy melancholy not e, j 
 
 Yet little know I ours are kindred ills : 
 She still may live the object of thy song : 
 Not so for me stern Death or Heaven wills ! 
 
 But the sad season, and less grateful hour, , 
 And of past joy and sorrow, thoughts that throng, 
 Prompt my full heart this idle lay to pour." 
 
 Lady Dacre. 
 
 Th 
 
 The two preceding sonnets illustrate one of the most 
 pleasing characteristics of Petrarch's poetry and character. 
 He professed to a degree rare amongst the medieval 
 poets, and not fully developed till our own time a pas- 
 sionate love of nature, a keen observation of all her 
 changing moods, and a thorough enjoyment of rural and 
 romantic scenery. You may trace in his verses the 
 
52 PETEAKCH. 
 
 flicker of the sunbeams through the boughs which skirt 
 his favourite stream the broad outline of the moun- 
 tains which guard the horizon the voices of the wind 
 the passage of light and shade, of night and day, the 
 silent monitress of passing time the stern lesson of the 
 seasons, which pluck and wither the leaves and flowers, 
 and abandon man to the wintry solitude of his thoughts. 
 The uneasiness of his life, which hung heavily upon 
 him in cities and courts, was dissipated when he regained 
 the liberty of the country; for it was there he found his 
 truest inspiration. These rural intervals are the sun- 
 beams of his life, otherwise too prone to self-examination 
 or regret. Even his occasional interviews with Laura 
 have an air of stolen pleasure, scarcely amounting to 
 enjoyment, and leave behind them a trace of melancholy. 
 The following sonnet is supposed to have been written 
 when he was on the eve of leaving Avignon for one of 
 his journeys, and he imagines that her looks reproach 
 him for his intended absence : 
 
 " A tender paleness stealing o'er her cheek 
 Veiled her sweet smile as 'twere a passing cloud, 
 And such pure dignity of love avowed, 
 That in my eyes my full soul strove to speak ; 
 
 Then knew I how the spirits of the blest 
 Communion hold in heaven ; so beamed serene 
 That pitying thought, by every eye unseen 
 Save mine, wont ever on her charms to rest. 
 
 Each grace angelic, each meek glance humane, 
 That Love e'er to his fairest votaries lent, 
 By this were deemed ungentle cold disdain ! 
 
 Her lovely looks, with sadness downward bent, 
 In silence to my fancy seemed to say, 
 Who calls my faithful friend so far away ? " 
 
FAITH AND HOPE. 53 
 
 The next sonnet has in it a tone which Shakespeare 
 might have caught, and indeed did catch, in those most 
 plaintive and mysterious utterances of his verse, which 
 also bear marks of an Italian tradition : 
 
 " If faith most true, a heart that cannot feign, 
 If love's sweet languishment and chastened thought, 
 And wishes pure by nobler feelings taught, 
 If in a labyrinth wanderings long and vain, 
 
 If on the brow each pang portrayed to bear, 
 Or from the heart low broken sounds to draw, 
 Withheld by shame, or checked by pious awe, 
 If on the faded cheek love's hue to wear, 
 
 If then myself to hold one far more dear, 
 If sighs that cease not, tears that ever flow, 
 Wrung from the heart by all love's various woe, 
 
 In absence if consumed, and chilled when near, 
 If these be ills in which I waste my prime, 
 Though I the sufferer be, yours, lady, is the crime." 
 
 Lady Dacre. 
 
 And we may here introduce an elegant translation of a 
 sonnet of a more devotional character, for which we are 
 indebted to a member of the gifted family of Mr Eoscoe, 
 the historian of Lorenzo de Medici : 
 
 J u Mourning the waste of my departed days 
 
 ^ I wander ; days, when vain and worldly things 
 
 Drew my soul down to earth, though blest with wings 
 To reach perchance no vulgar height of praise. 
 Thou that hast marked my low and worthless ways 
 
 Invisible, immortal King of kings ! 
 
 Succour my soul in these her wanderings, 
 And on her darkness turn Thy gracious rays, 
 So shall this life of war and tempest close, 
 
 Havened in peace ; my sojourn has been vain, 
 
 But my departure shall be strong in bliss, 
 
54 PETRARCH. 
 
 If o'er what little space may yet remain 
 
 Thy hand the shelter of its mercy throws ___^ 
 Thou knowest I have no other hope but this." J 
 
 ^Although Petrarch carried the composition of the Son- 
 net to great perfection, and every one of these small 
 poems is a masterpiece of rhythm and appropriate lan- 
 guage, he appears to me to show himself a far greater 
 poet in his canzonets, where the melody of his verse has 
 a freer course, and the current of sentiment is at once 
 more varied and more sustained. The two following 
 poems are the most admired specimens of the love-lorn 
 bard of Vaucluse. They transport the reader to the 
 scene and the hours of his meditations ; and if the senti- 
 ment be overstrained, the language is at least in perfect 
 harmony with it. 
 
 Canzonet. 
 
 " In the still evening, when with rapid flight 
 Low in the western sky the sun descends 
 To give expectant nations life and light ; 
 The aged pilgrim, in some clime unknown 
 Slow journeying, right onward fearful bends 
 With weary haste, a stranger and alone ; 
 Yet when his labour ends 
 He solitary sleeps, 
 And in short slumber steeps 
 Each sense of sorrow hanging on the day 
 And all the toil of the long-passed way : 
 But oh ! each pang, that wakes with morn's first ray, 
 More piercing wounds my breast 
 
 When Heaven's eternal light sinks crimson in the West. 
 
 His burning wheels when downward Phoebus bends 
 
 And leaves the world to night, its lengthened shade 
 Each towering mountain o'er the vale extends ; 
 The thrifty peasant shoulders light his spade, 
 
VAIN REGRETS. 55 
 
 With, sylvan carol gay and uncouth note 
 Bidding his cares upon the wild winds float, 
 Content in peace to share 
 His poor and humble fare, 
 As in that golden age 
 
 We honour still, yet leave its simple ways ; 
 Whoe'er so list, let joy his hours engage : 
 No gladness e'er has cheered my gloomy days 
 Nor moment of repose, 
 However rolled the spheres, whatever planet rose. 
 
 When as the shepherd marks the sloping ray 
 Of the great orb that sinks in ocean's bed, 
 While in the East soft steals the evening grey, 
 He rises and resumes the accustomed crook, 
 Quitting the beechen grove, the field, the brook, 
 And gently homeward drives the flock he fed ; 
 Then far from human tread, 
 In lonely hut or cave, 
 O'er which the green boughs wave, 
 In sleep without a thought he lays his head : 
 Ah ! cruel Love ! at this dark silent hour 
 Thou wak'st to trace, and with redoubled power, 
 The voice, the step, the air 
 
 Of her, who scorns thy chains, and flies thy fatal snare. 
 
 And in some sheltered bay, at evening's close 
 
 The mariners their rude coats round them fold, 
 
 Stretched on the rugged plank in deep repose : 
 
 But I, though Phoebus sink into the main, 
 
 And leave Granada wrapt in night with Spain, 
 
 Morocco and the pillars famed of old, 
 
 Though all of human kind, 
 
 And every creature blest, 
 
 All hush their ills to rest, 
 
 No end to my unceasing sorrows find ; 
 
 And still the sad account swells day by day ; 
 
56 PETRARCH. 
 
 For since these thoughts on my torn spirit prey, 
 I see the tenth year roll ; 
 Nor hope of freedom springs in my desponding soul. 
 
 Thus, as I vent my bursting bosom's pain, 
 
 Lo ! from their yoke I see the oxen freed, 
 Slow moving homeward o'er the furrowed plain : 
 Why to my sorrow is no pause decreed ? 
 Why from my yoke no respite must I know 1 
 Why gush these tears and never to cease to flow I 
 Ah me ! what sought my eyes, 
 When fixed in fond surprise, 
 On her angelic face 
 
 I gazed, and on my heart each charm imprest, 
 From whence, nor force nor art the sacred trace 
 Shall e'er remove, till I the victim rest 
 Of Death, whose mortal blow 
 
 Shall my pure spirit free, and this worn frame lay low 1 " 
 
 Lady Dacre. 
 
 The second of these passionate strains is even more 
 melancholy than the preceding one. He anticipates his 
 own death, and hopes that at last Laura may cast a look 
 of kindness and regret upon his tomb. How different 
 was their fate ! Laura died in the prime of life, and 
 the desponding lover survived her long enough to write 
 another volume of verses to her memory. 
 
 Canzonet. 
 
 " Ye waters clear and fresh, to whose bright wave 
 She all her beauties gave, 
 Sole of her sex in my impassioned mind ! 
 Thou sacred branch so graced 
 (With sighs e'en now retraced !) 
 On whose smooth shaft her heavenly form reclined ! 
 Herbage and flowers that bent the robe beneath, 
 
DEATH. 57 
 
 Whose graceful folds comprest 
 Her pure angelic breast ! 
 Ye airs serene that breathe 
 Where love first taught me in her eyes his lore ! 
 Yet once more all attest 
 The last sad plaintive lay my woe-worn heart may pour ! 
 
 If so I must my destiny fulfil, 
 
 And love to close these weeping eyes be doomed 
 
 By Heaven's mysterious will, 
 
 Oh grant that in this loved retreat, entombed, 
 
 My poor remains may lie, 
 
 And my freed soul regain its native sky ! 
 
 Less rude shall Death appear, 
 
 If yet a hope so dear 
 
 Smooth the dread passage to eternity ! 
 
 No shade so calm serene, 
 
 My weary spirit finds on earth below ; 
 
 No grave so still so green 
 In which my o'ertoiled frame may rest from mortal woe ! 
 
 Yet one day, haply, she so heavenly fair ! 
 
 So kind in cruelty ! 
 
 With careless steps may to these haunts repair, 
 
 And where her beaming eye 
 
 Met mine in days so blest. 
 
 A wistful glance may yet unconscious rest, 
 
 And seeking me around, 
 
 May mark among the stones, a lowly mound, 
 
 That speaks of pity to the shuddering sense ! 
 
 Then may she breathe a sigh 
 
 Of power to rain me mercy from above } 
 
 Doing Heaven violence, 
 All beautiful in tears of late relenting love ! 
 
 Still dear to memory ! when in odorous showers, 
 Scattering their balmy flowers 
 To summer airs th' o'ershadowing branches bowed, 
 
58 ' PETRARCH. 
 
 The while, with humble state 
 In all the pomp of tribute sweets she sate, 
 Wrapt in the roseate cloud ! 
 Now clustering blossoms deck her vesture's hem, 
 Now her bright tresses gem, 
 (In that all-blissful day, 
 
 Like burnish'd gold with orient pearls inwrought,) 
 Some strew the turf some on the waters float ! 
 Some, fluttering, seem to say ^-i 
 
 In wanton circlets tost, * Here Love holds sovereign sway ! ' " I 
 
 Lady Dacre. *~^ 
 
 [jThere is nowhere any trace of gaiety or gladness in 
 Petrarch's poetry. His love for Laura is a perpetual 
 complaint. Whether he invokes her charms or deplores 
 her coldness whether he records a passing glance of 
 his mistress, or laments her absence he seems doomed 
 to continual misery. No tinge of humour breaks the 
 wearisome solemnity, or the eternal monotony, of his 
 unrequited vows. The figure of Laura herself is, after 
 all, not so much a charming woman, as a stern monitress 
 pointing to the grave. Such a passion, expressed in such 
 terms, might be conceived in the cell of an anchorite. 
 And if Petrarch in daily life had not been a much livelier 
 companion than he is in his sonnets, he would scarcely 
 have obtained the universal popularity he enjoyed. 
 
 In the singular dialogue or colloquy between St 
 Augustine and himself, which Petrarch entitled his 
 " Secret," or remarks on the contempt of the world a 
 dialogue having very little resemblance to those of Cicero 
 or of Plato, though professedly written in imitation of 
 them the author affects to lay bare the defects of his 
 character and the workings of his heart. "Love and 
 glory," says the Saint, " are the chains which bind you 
 
CONTEMPT OF THE WORLD. 59 
 
 to earth ; " and the charge is not denied. " Love," re- 
 joins the impenitent poet, " has made me all I am ; and 
 I confess that there is nothing I would not sacrifice for 
 immortal fame." " Nay,' says Augustine, " cast aside 
 your historical manuscripts leave Africa to herself ; as 
 for the fame of Scipio, you cannot augment it ; turn all 
 your thoughts to the vicissitudes of time and the end of 
 life. As often as you see the corn of summer succeed 
 the flowers of spring ; or the coolness of autumn tem- 
 per the heat of summer ; or the snows of winter sweep 
 over the vine-wreaths of autumn, say to thyself, they 
 pass, but soon to return : it is I who depart for ever." 
 
 This vein of reflection runs through all the writings of 
 Petrarch ; but when he speaks of the passion of love, it 
 is always to describe himself as its victim and its slave 
 too much engrossed by sentiments and desires that tore 
 him from nobler employents as a man would speak of 
 opium-eating, or any other resistless appetite that occu- 
 pies and depraves the mind. It never seems to have 
 occurred to St Augustine or to himself that this species 
 of ideal passion was obnoxious to a severer sentence, if 
 tried by an independent standard of right and wrong. 
 On the contrary, it was transfused with pious senti- 
 ments, and it aspired to a celestial union. The death of 
 Laura, like the death of Beatrice, was to be the natural 
 consummation the apotheosis of his passion ; and there 
 is nothing in his writings finer than the poem entitled 
 " The Triumph of Death," in which he describes a vision 
 of his departed mistress. At that stage of his life, he 
 seems to have flattered himself that she had shown him 
 a preference, which in truth had never existed in her 
 lifetinieT] The following translation of this work is by 
 
GO PETRARCH. 
 
 Ugo Foscolo, and in prose ; but it may be preferred to the 
 attempts which have been made to fuse it into English 
 verse. The original is in terza-rima, the metre of Dante. 
 
 " Laura descends from heaven on the dew, the night after 
 she had left for ever the miseries of the world. She ap- 
 pears before her lover, stretches forth her hand, and sigh- 
 ing, says to him : ' Recognise the woman who, from the 
 first moment that thy young heart knew her, withdrew thee 
 from the path of the crowd.' Whilst my tears testified the 
 sorrow which her loss had occasioned me, ' Thou wilt never 
 be happy,' she said, ' while thou art the slave of the world. 
 To a pure mind, death is emancipation from a dreary prison. 
 My loss would give thee pleasure if thou knewest but the 
 thousandth part of my happiness/ In uttering these words, 
 she turned her eyes with religious gratitude towards heaven. 
 
 " She ceased ; and I said to her, ' Do not the weight of 
 infirmities, and the tortures invented by tyrants, sometimes 
 embitter the agonies of death V 'I cannot deny,' said she, 
 1 that death is preceded by acute suffering and by the dread 
 of eternity ; but if we place our trust in God, it is but as 
 a sigh. In the flower of my youth, when thou lovedst me the 
 most, life had its greatest charm for me ; but when I quitted 
 it, 1 felt the gaiety of one who leaves the place of his exile to 
 return to his home. I felt no sorrow except pity for thee/ 
 
 " ' Ah ! but tell me/ said I, ' in the name of that fidelity 
 which you formerly knew, and which you now know more 
 certainly in the presence of that Being from whom nothing is 
 hidden tell me, was the pity which you felt for me inspired 
 by love 1 ' 
 
 " I had hardly uttered these words, when I perceived her 
 countenance illumined by that heavenly smile which had 
 ever shed serenity over my sorrows, and she sighed. ' Thou 
 hast always possessed my affection,' said she, 'and thou 
 always wilt possess it, 
 
 ' Mai diviso 
 Da te non fu il mio cor, nfc giammai fia : 
 
THE VISION OF LAURA. 61 
 
 but I have deemed it right to temper thy passion, by the 
 sternness of my looks. A mother never loves her child more 
 dearly than when she seems to chide it. How often have I 
 said to myself, he is consumed by a raging fire, and I must 
 not therefore let him know what is passing in my heart! 
 Alas ! we are little capable of such efforts when we ourselves 
 love and yet fear. But it was by these means only that we 
 could preserve our honour and save our souls. How often 
 have I feigned anger while love was struggling in my heart ! 
 When I saw thee sinking beneath despondency, I gave thee 
 a look of consolation I spoke to thee. The grief and the 
 dread which I felt must have altered the tone of my voice, 
 and thou must have perceived it. At other times thou wert 
 carried away by rage, and I could control thee by severity 
 only. These are the expedients, these are the arts I have 
 practised. It was by this alternation of kindness and of 
 rigour that I have conducted thee sometimes happy, some- 
 times unhappy, wearied in truth, but still I have conducted 
 thee till there is no more any danger : I have saved us both, 
 and my happiness is the greater that I have done so/ 
 
 " My tears flowed fast while she spoke, and I answered 
 her, trembling, that I should be rewarded if I might dare to 
 believe her. She interrupted me, and her face reddened as 
 she said, ' thou of little faith, wherefore dost thou doubt ? 
 My tongue shall never reveal whether thou hast been as 
 dear to my eyes as to my heart 
 
 Se al mondo tu piacesti agli occhi miei, 
 Questo mi taccio. 
 
 But in nothing have I delighted more than in thy love, and 
 in the immortality which thou hast given to my name. All 
 that I required of thee was to moderate thy excess. In en- 
 deavouring to tell me the secret of thy soul, thou openedst it 
 to all the world. Thence arose my coldness. The more thou 
 calledst aloud for pity, the more was I constrained by mod- 
 esty and fear to be silent. There has been little difference 
 in our sympathy, except that the one proclaimed, and the 
 
62 PETRARCH. 
 
 other concealed it. But complaint does not embitter suffer- 
 ings, nor does silence soften them.' 
 
 " Her lover then asked her if it would be long before he 
 should rejoin her. Laura departed, saying : ' As far as it is 
 permitted me to know, thou wilt remain long upon earth 
 without me/ " 
 
 Petrarch survived Laura twenty-six years. 
 
 In all Petrarch's philosophical writings, as well as in 
 his poems, he gives way to that spirit of introspection 
 and analysis, which was the strongest feature in his char- 
 acter, and which had been matured by his habits of se- 
 clusion and study. His own feelings, his own thoughts, 
 the relation in which he stood to the great minds of 
 antiquity whom he worshipped, to the truths of religion, 
 and to the life to come, are his unceasing theme. Thus, 
 in his dialogues on "His Own Ignorance and that of 
 Others," on the " Eemedies of Either Fortune," and on 
 " Solitary Life," he analyses more than he speculates ; 
 he contrasts the vanities and ignorances of life, in the 
 spirit of the great Preacher of old, with its ephemeral 
 pleasures and successes; and he moralises on the un- 
 satisfied longings of his own intellect and heart. Joy 
 and Hope are waging a perpetual warfare with Grief and 
 Fear. In the dialogue on " True Knowledge," it is the 
 Idiota rather than the vainglorious Orator who has truth 
 on his side, for it is the truth of humility and common 
 sense. The books on " Solitary Life " are said to have 
 been the most popular of his prose writings. But 
 Petrarch's conception of solitary life was that of the 
 student rather than of the saint. He sought the retreat 
 of Vaucluse, surrounded by natural beauties and moral 
 pleasures, rather than the cell of the monk or the 
 
THE CONFLICT OF LIFE. 63 
 
 ascetic life in which his brother Gherardo took refuge ; 
 and he applied himself to work out his own spiritual life 
 and progress, not only in solitude, but in the world. 
 His own existence was a dialogue between the con- 
 templative and active faculties of man between a lofty- 
 sense of moral duty and the frailty of his desires and 
 habits between a noble sense of intellectual power, and 
 the childish irritability of disappointed vanity, singularly 
 impatient of criticism or censure. Thus his life and 
 writings present a lively image of a double nature, so 
 opposed and inconsistent, that the conflict of these two 
 beings in one man may best explain the melancholy and 
 discontent which seemed inseparable from his pleasures and 
 his triumphs. On the one hand, a sensitive and solitary 
 disposition a man beaten by the storms of an objectless 
 passion, weary of the world, irritated by the evil of 
 his times and the anarchy of his country, seeking a 
 refuge in rural life, in absolute retirement, and in the 
 ardent pursuit of letters and philosophy ; on the other, 
 an eager curiosity, an incessant love of change, inde- 
 fatigable travelling, a thirst for fame, a love of society 
 (for he says that even at Yaucluse he seldom dined 
 alone, though he declares himself unskilled in conver- 
 sation), a heart as enthusiastic in friendship as it was in 
 love, and an ambition to take part in, and direct, the 
 great political movements of his age. Qualities so dis- 
 similar it is hard to reconcile. Yet both these natures 
 existed in Petrarch, and both were gratified. 
 
 An ideal passion, an ideal philosophy, an ideal stand- 
 ard of political liberty and virtue were the character- 
 istics of Petrarch's enthusiastic nature; he carried the 
 same romantic sentiments into his friendships with the 
 
64 PETEAECH. 
 
 great and good ; and they embellished with a sort of 
 radiance the daily intercourse and common incidents of 
 his life. Thus he speaks in the same terms of the 
 peasant and his wife who waited on him at Vaucluse, 
 as he uses when recording the good qualities of his 
 powerful friends : 
 
 " He was my counsellor, and the keeper of all my most 
 secret designs ; and I should have lamented his loss still 
 more grievously had I not been warned by his advanced age 
 that I could not expect long to retain possession of such a 
 companion. In him I have lost a confidential servant, or 
 rather, a father, in whose bosom I had deposited my sorrows 
 for these fifteen years past ; and his humble cottage was, to me, 
 as a temple. He cultivated for me a few acres of indifferent 
 land. He knew not how to read, yet he was also the 
 guardian of my library. With anxious eye he watched over 
 my most rare and ancient copies, which, by long use, he 
 could distinguish from those that were more modern, or of 
 which I myself was the author. Whenever I consigned a 
 volume to his custody, he was transported with joy ; he 
 pressed it to his bosom with sighs ; with great reverence 
 he repeated the author's name ; and seemed as if he had 
 received an accession of learning and happiness from the 
 sight and touch of a book. His wife's face was scorched by 
 the sun, and her body extenuated by labour ; but she had a 
 soul of the most candid and generous nature. Under the 
 burning heat of the dog-star, in the midst of snow and of 
 rain, she was found from morning till evening in the fields, 
 whilst even a greater part of the night was given to work 
 than to repose. Her bed was of straw her food was black 
 bread, frequently full -of sand and her drink was water, 
 mixed with vinegar ; yet she never appeared weary or 
 afflicted never showed any desire of a more easy life nor 
 was ever heard to complain of the cruelty of destiny and of 
 mankind." 
 
65 
 
 CHAPTEE VI. 
 
 PETRARCH ON HIS TRAVELS. 
 
 It would be a vain and superfluous labour to detain 
 the readers of this little volume with an analysis of the 
 theory of Petrarch's love for Laura, or to follow the 
 Italian commentators who have written for centuries on 
 the graces of his style or the mysterious language of his 
 allusions. My desire is rather to present Petrarch to 
 them as a man of the world, collecting with indefati- 
 gable industry all the learning of his age, corresponding 
 with the most eminent and accomplished men of his 
 time, and sharing in the great patriotic movements of 
 Italy and of Europe. He continued, indeed, to repair 
 at intervals to the rustic solitude of Yaucluse, and 
 always affected to regard the months or years he spent 
 there as the best portions of his life ; but his letters and 
 literary labours show that these intervals were employed 
 in preparing for fresh efforts in the field of active life. 
 I shall therefore follow in chronological order the inci- 
 dents of his varied career. 
 
 Whatever may have been the attractions of Avignon 
 and of Laura, they did not prevent him from gratifying 
 his desire to travel as early, it is said, as the year 1329, 
 
 f.c. IV. E 
 
66 PETRARCH. 
 
 when he first visited Switzerland and Belgium ; but the 
 only record which exists of this journey is to he found 
 in a letter written from Arqua within a few months of 
 the close of his life. It is a letter of early recollections. 
 He relates the scene in which his father, to stimulate 
 him to the study of laws, threw his adored Virgil and 
 Cicero into the fire, from which they were with difficulty 
 rescued ; and he then goes on to say : 
 
 " It was about the twenty - fifth year of my life that, 
 travelling through Belgium and Switzerland, I arrived at 
 Liege, a city in which I heard there was a good collection 
 of books. Having asked my companions to wait for me, 
 I found two orations of Cicero, one of which I transcribed 
 myself the other was copied by a friend; thus both of 
 them were secured by me for Italy. You would laugh to 
 hear that in this considerable city, frequented by strangers, 
 we cudgelled our brains to procure a little ink ; and when 
 we got it, it was as yellow as saffron. I had lost all hope of 
 finding the book * De Kepublica ; ? and I searched in vain 
 for the book ' De Consolatione.' Under the false title of a 
 work of St Augustine, I read for some time, without finding 
 out the truth, what was really the divine eloquence of 
 Cicero ; and I afterwards discovered by comparison that 
 what I had read was nearly the whole of the second and 
 third books of the l Academics/ 
 
 "By great good fortune I had made the acquaintance, 
 some forty years ago, of a most learned jurisconsult, 
 Raimondo Soranzio, the possessor of a capital library 
 but the work he cared for besides his law-books was Livy. 
 In this he took great delight ; though, not being accus- 
 tomed to read histories, he found it difficult to understand. 
 I did what I could to assist him, on which he took me to 
 his heart like a son, and not only lent me, but gave me 
 some of his books. From him I had Varro, and a volume 
 of Cicero containing, amongst other well-known works, the 
 
THE TISIT TO LOMBES. 67 
 
 books 'De Oratore' and 'De Legibus (important as they 
 always are), and, above all, the two most rare books 'De 
 Gloria.' I thought myself the possessor of a treasure in- 
 deed." Epist. Senil., xvi. 1. 
 
 And so it was, a treasure for all time ; but the sequel of 
 the story destroys our hopes. Long afterwards Petrarch 
 was moved by compassion for his old schoolmaster Con- 
 vennole to lend him these precious volumes. The school- 
 master, in great distress, pawned them for bread ; before 
 Petrarch could recover them, the old man died, and 
 the book ' De Gloria ' was never heard of more. The de- 
 tails are given at length in a letter written from Arqua 
 to Luca della Pemna, the Pope's Secretary, probably 
 in the last year of Petrarch's life. 
 
 The evidence of this journey in 1329 is somewhat 
 vague, as it rests entirely upon an old man's reminis- 
 cence of an incident that occurred in his youth. It is 
 more probable that his first visit to Flanders took place 
 in 1333 ; and that he began his travels by another 
 journey which had a marked influence on his life. 
 
 In the spring of 1330, upon the express invitation 
 of Giacomo Colonna, then recently appointed by the 
 Pope to the small see of Lombes in the Pyrenees, 
 Petrarch accompanied his friend and patron when he 
 went to take possession of this diocese. They passed 
 through Narbonne and Toulouse, where they found some 
 traces of the greatness of Eome and the literary festivals 
 of the Troubadours, which, indeed, still survive under 
 the name of "Floral games," in two of the southern 
 cities of France. Lombes itself was a desolate and se- 
 cluded retreat, but it was enlivened to Petrarch by the 
 enjoyment of the liveliest friendship ; for, in addition to 
 
68 PETRARCH. 
 
 his host, it was here he formed a lasting attachment to 
 his Lselius and his Socrates, as he was wont to call them 
 friends to whom much of his correspondence was ad- 
 dressed with whom he was ever ready to share all he 
 possessed and whose intimacy with him continued till it 
 was terminated by death. Lselius was a young Roman of 
 the family of Stephano, a stanch partisan of the Colon- 
 nas, in whom Petrarch discovered something of the genius 
 of ancient Rome. The youth to whom he gave the name 
 of Socrates was in fact a Dutchman, from Eois le Due 
 his real name was Louis de Campigny or Kempen. 
 This charming barbarian, as they styled him, was an 
 excellent musician, an accomplished scholar, and a most 
 faithful friend. On one occasion only this triple band 
 of friendship seems to have been interrupted by a quar- 
 rel between Laelius and Socrates, arising out of mutual 
 jealousy of Petrarch's regard. It was many years after 
 their first meeting ; and the poet instantly addressed to 
 them a letter on the sacred duties of friendship, in the 
 most passionate and eloquent language. He enjoined 
 upon them to read it together. They did so ; and the 
 breach was healed for ever. 
 
 Upon the return of Petrarch from Lombes to Avig- 
 non, he was formally installed in the dwelling or little 
 court of Cardinal Colonna, and became a member of his 
 household. So great was his consideration there, that 
 on one occasion when evidence was taken on oath as 
 to the cause of some disturbance, and even the prelates 
 of the family had to submit to this test, Petrarch was 
 absolved from it, the Cardinal saying, "The word of 
 Petrarch is enough." 
 
 This anecdote might suffice to show the deference 
 
KICHAED DE BURY. 69 
 
 which already attached itself to the name of Petrarch, 
 though he was not at the time more than twenty-six 
 or twenty-seven. From his establishment as a member 
 of the Cardinal's household dates his entry into the great 
 world and his interest in public affairs, and we find him 
 henceforth living on terms of intimacy with the most 
 eminent persons of the time. Amongst these, one 
 deserves special notice here. 
 
 In 1331, and again in 1333, Eichard of Bury, after- 
 wards Chancellor of England, and Bishop of Durham, 
 was sent by King Edward III. as his ambassador to 
 the Papal Court. In the majestic chapel of the Nine 
 Altars, which closes with a fabric of inimitable beauty 
 the shrine of St Cuthbert in our northern Durham, the 
 traveller may still view the spot which received the 
 mortal remains of this remarkable man ; and it may give 
 additional interest to his memory to recollect that he 
 was the friend of Petrarch. He was in fact the first 
 scholar in Britain, if not in Europe. England had sent 
 forth no one to compare with him since the Venerable 
 Bede, whose remains also rest near his own. He com- 
 bined strong literary tastes with great influence in the 
 Church and in the State. He was a large collector of 
 manuscripts, and the author of the first work that bore 
 the name of ' Philobiblion.' These common pursuits re- 
 commended Petrarch to his notice, and to him Petrarch 
 applied to solve the question, "Where is the Ultima 
 Thule of the Latin poets I" The bishop seems to have 
 eluded the question, and promised to send a solution of 
 it when he got back to his books. But the answer 
 never came. Petrarch fell back on a volume of Giraldus 
 Cambrensis, which he possessed, but that left him in 
 
70 PETRARCH. 
 
 doubt, and whilst he was travelling on the shores of 
 Holland, he recalled to memory all that Virgil, Orosius, 
 Pomponius Mela, Pliny the younger, and Claudian had 
 said on the subject. All this is rather pedantic, but it 
 shows the extent of reading and the retentiveness of his 
 memory. 
 
 The letter on Thule, the fruit of these inquiries, is 
 said to have been written in 1337 "from the shores of 
 the North Sea ;" but in the spring of that year he was in 
 Rome, and in August he had returned to Avignon. The 
 only authentic journey to the north of which we have 
 a detailed account must be placed in the year 1333. He 
 first arrived in Paris, where he doubtless visited the 
 University, which some years later tendered him its 
 highest honour; and then proceeded to Belgium and 
 Cologne, returning to Avignon by Lyons. 
 
 The following letter on his journey is one of the most 
 descriptive he has left : 
 
 "Fran. Petrarcha to John Colonna, Cardinal. 
 
 " I left Aix-la-Chapelle after having availed myself of the 
 baths or douches from which it derives its name, and I arrived 
 at Cologne (Agrippina Colonia), a place situated on the left 
 bank of the Rhine, which is no less celebrated for its posi- 
 tion and its river than for its inhabitants. I was astonished 
 to find in this barbarous land so much courtesy, so much 
 splendour in the city, so much gravity in the men, and such 
 remarkable grace among the ladies. The eve of St John the 
 Baptist happened to fall during my stay there ; and, just as 
 the sun was setting, I was led by my friends (for even here my 
 reputation had gained me more friends than I deserved) from 
 my lodging to the river, there to behold a very curious sight. 
 My expectations were not deceived : the whole bank was 
 covered with an immense number of women, all of surpassing 
 
PETRARCH AT COLOGNE. 71 
 
 beauty, both in figure, in features, and in dress, so that any 
 one whose heart was not already preoccupied could not fail 
 to have fallen in love there. I stood upon a slight eleva- 
 tion, whence I could see all that passed. The crowd was 
 very great, but no offence was given to any one, and all 
 seemed to be in high glee : some were engarlanded with 
 odoriferous herbs, and, with their sleeves tucked up above 
 the elbow, they washed their white hands and arms in the 
 stream, murmuring I know not what in the gentle tones of 
 their foreign tongue. I never understood so well that old 
 proverb, quoted by Cicero, which says that, ' Amongst un- 
 known languages, every one is deaf and dumb/ I did not, 
 however, want for interpreters of the greatest merit ; and 
 nothing would have astonished you more than to find what 
 Pierian spirits are nurtured under this sky. If Juvenal 
 wondered that 
 
 ' Gallia causidicos docuit facunda Britannos/ 
 
 he might indeed marvel at the eloquence and learning of 
 these German poets. Unless I am deceiving you, I would 
 have you know that they have indeed no Virgil, but more 
 than one Ovid, as that poet himself said, at the end of his 
 ' Metamorphoses,' trusting either to the favour of posterity or 
 to his own great wit. For he is even popular wherever the 
 power (or rather the name) of Eome is known over the 
 world. You will readily imagine that with these companions 
 I made the best use of my tongue and of my ears when any- 
 thing was to be said or heard. Now, as I was ignorant of the 
 ceremony which I was then witnessing, I asked one of their 
 number, in the words of Virgil 
 
 ' Quid vult concursus ad amnem ? 
 Quidve petunt animse ? ' 
 
 I was then informed that this was an old custom of the 
 place, and that the common people, and especially the 
 women, were persuaded that any impending calamity of the 
 next year was washed away by that day's ablution in the river, 
 and that happy seasons were sure to follow ; . so that this cere- 
 
72 PETRARCH. 
 
 mony is performed every year with unabated zeal. At this I 
 smiled, saying, '0 happy inhabitants of the banks of the 
 Rhine, whose misfortunes are all swept away by your river, 
 whilst neither Po nor Tiber can rid us of ours ! You throw 
 your ills on the bosom of the Rhine, who bears them away 
 to Britain ; we might send ours to the Afric or Illyrian coast, 
 but (as I am given to understand) our rivers are far too lazy 
 in their course.' 
 
 " A few days afterwards I was taken round the little state 
 by the same friendly guides an excursion which was the 
 more agreeable to me, as I met not only with the objects before 
 my eyes, but with the perpetual reminiscences of the valour 
 and the illustrious monuments of Rome. I thought of that 
 Marcus Agrippa, the founder of this colony, who, though he 
 built so many places both at home and abroad, conferred his 
 name on this spot, as the most worthy to bear it ; and whom 
 Augustus would have chosen out of the whole world to be 
 the husband of his daughter, but especially of his dear and 
 only Augusta. 1 
 
 " I afterwards saw, the bodies of so many thousand holy vir- 
 gins, and the earth, which, as it is consecrated by such sacred 
 relics, is said to reject all degenerate corpses. I saw a Capi- 
 tol the very image of our own, save that instead of a Senate 
 deliberating there on matters of peace and war, beauteous 
 youths and girls are here employed in singing nocturnal 
 psalms to God in eternal harmony. There nothing is heard 
 but the noise of wheels, the clang of arms, and the groans of 
 captives here is peace and joy and the voices of such as are 
 glad ; there is the triumph of the warrior here of the peace- 
 maker. I also saw a temple of singular beauty, built in the 
 midst of the city, which, although it be as yet unfinished, is 
 
 1 Petrarch here makes a strange mistake in his enthusiasm for 
 Agrippa. The daughter of Augustus, to whom that general was 
 married, was the widow of Marcellus, and is well known as the beau- 
 tiful, the infamous, Julia. The Colonia Agrippina took its name, 
 not from Agrippa, but from Agrippina, the daughter oi Germanicus, 
 who was born here. 
 
FIRST VISIT TO ROME. 73 
 
 not unreasonably styled the chiefest in the world. I had 
 here an opportunity of seeing the bodies of the Magian 
 kings, who came from the East to the West to adore the 
 King of Heaven in Bethlehem, and I surveyed their relics 
 with a respectful piety. You will think, O most worthy 
 father, that I am somewhat over-diffuse in these details 
 which I have collected ; but to my mind letter- writing is 
 less intended to confer distinction on the" penman, than to 
 give instruction to the reader. I left Cologne on the 2d of 
 July, and I suffered so much from the sun and dust, that I 
 could not help wishing for a little of that Ehenal snow and 
 frost which Virgil tells of. I crossed the forest of Ardennes, 
 which I had read of, but which, bleak and dreadful as it is, 
 I ventured through alone, and that in time of war ; but, as 
 they say, there is a Providence for the hardy. At length, 
 after a long journey, I reached Lyons, which is also a Eoman 
 colony, and somewhat more ancient than that of Agrippina. 
 The Ehone will now serve me for the rest of my journey ; 
 but I have writ this much that you may know where I am, 
 and still cherish me in your remembrance." Epist. Fam., i. 4. 
 
 In the spring of 1337 Petrarch first visited Borne. 
 He embarked at Marseilles, touched on the Tuscan coast, 
 and landed at Civita Yecchia, whence he made his way 
 to Capranica, in the Sabine hills, the castle of Count 
 Anguillara, who had married a daughter of the house of 
 Colonna for the country was in arms, and Eome itself 
 could scarcely be approached. 
 
 " The armed shepherd," he says, " is watching his 
 flock, not so much afraid of wolves as of men. The 
 bucklered ploughman strikes his ox with an inverted 
 javelin. The fowler hides his nets behind his shield 
 nay, those who draw water from the well seek it in a 
 rusty helmet by a wretched rope. All is in arms." 
 Here he again met his friends Giacomo and Stephen Col- 
 
74 PETRARCH. 
 
 onna, and with their escort he reached the city. Thence 
 he wrote the following lines to the Cardinal : 
 
 " What shall he expect of Eome who has "been so moved 
 by the Sabine hills ? You may have supposed I should 
 write something great on reaching Rome. Perhaps I may 
 have the matter of some future writing, but at present I 
 dare say nothing, crushed by the miracle of its greatness and 
 the weight of my amazement. You were wont, I remember, 
 to dissuade me from coming here ; lest my enthusiasm should 
 be quenched by the aspect of this ruined city, answering 
 neither to its fame nor to the conception I had formed of it 
 from books. I, too, was not unwilling to defer my journey, 
 though burning with desire, from the fear that sight would 
 lower the impression of the mind, and the presence of these 
 objects mar the greatness of their fame. But, on the con- 
 trary, it has diminished nothing it has magnified it all. 
 Truly Eome was greater, and its remains are greater than I 
 had thought them. I now wonder, not that the world was 
 conquered by this city, but that it was conquered so late." 
 (Rome. The Ides of March. From the Capitol.) 
 
 From that moment the glory and greatness of Eome 
 kindled in the heart of Petrarch an undying enthusiasm. 
 He saw her indeed reduced to the lowest extremity of 
 anarchy and destitution by the dissensions of her nobles, 
 by the abandonment of the Papal Court, and by the 
 misery of the people. To raise her once more from this 
 lamentable condition by the return of the Popes, by the 
 protection of the Emperor, by the ascendancy of the 
 Colonnas, and even, as we shall see, by a great popular 
 movement, was the mainspring of Petrarch's political 
 action through life. "No matter by what means the end 
 was attained : for he saw in the restored ascendancy of 
 Eome the future union and independence of Italy. 
 
75 
 
 CHAPTEE VII. 
 
 THE POEM OF " AFRICA " AND LATIN PROSE WORKS. 
 
 Although interrupted by not infrequent journeys, this 
 was the period of Petrarch's life at which he resided 
 most continuously at Yaucluse, and in which he con- 
 ceived or executed his most important literary works. 
 He first undertook a full and complete history of Rome 
 itself from the age of Romulus to the reign of Yespasian 
 a work of immense time and labour, of which no traces 
 remain. Of all the heroes of ancient Rome, Scipio was 
 in his eyes the greatest ; and when he desisted from his 
 historical labours, it was because Scipio fired his imagina- 
 tion as the type of epic heroism. Hence the great Latin 
 poem of "Africa," to which he now devoted all his 
 powers. The poem of Silius Italicus, on the same sub- 
 ject, was then unknown, and Petrarch conceived himself 
 to be engaged on an original work. Ten years afterwards 
 it was still incomplete ; fifteen years afterwards he still 
 spoke of it as " unripe fruit ; " and in his lifetime it was 
 not published at all. It therefore contributed nothing to 
 his reputation while alive, and it has rather detracted 
 from his fame in after-ages. 
 
 Walter Savage Landor, who was no mean judge of 
 
76 PETKARCH. 
 
 Latin poetry, whether classical or medieval, affirmed 
 that no living man had ever had the patience to master 
 ahove 500 lines of Petrarch's ' Africa/ and that he himself 
 stopped at that limit. I am content with the experience 
 and confession of so great an authority; and it would add 
 nothing to the interest of this volume to attempt a sketch 
 of so unattractive a work. The versification is harsh 
 and often incorrect : and wherever it rises into elegance 
 it may be accused of plagiarism. Singularly enough, 
 Petrarch's sense of rhythm and melody, which is so 
 exquisitely refined in his sonnets and canzonets, deserts 
 him under the influence of the Latin muse, which proved 
 to him so stern and sterile a mistress. There is, however, 
 one passage in the 6th Book which has been rescued 
 from oblivion by the hand of a still greater poet ; and 
 the reader will not regret to read the death of Mago, 
 the Carthaginian hero of Petrarch's poem, in the language 
 of Lord Byron. 
 
 The Death of Mago. 
 
 " The Carthaginian rose and when he found 
 The increasing anguish of his mortal wound 
 All hope forbid with difficult, slow breath 
 He thus addressed the coming hour of death : 
 
 ' Farewell to all my longings after fame ! 
 Cursed love of power, are such thine end and aim, 
 Oh, blind to all that might have made thy bliss, 
 And must ambition's frenzy come to this ? 
 From height to height aspiring still to rise, 
 Man stands rejoicing on the precipice, 
 Nor sees the innumerable storms that wait 
 To level all the projects of the great. 
 Oh, trembling pinnacle of power on earth ! 
 Deceitful hopes ! and glory blazoned forth 
 
THE DEATH OF MAGO. 77 
 
 With false, fictitious blandishments ! Oh, life 
 
 Of doubt and danger, and perpetual strife 
 
 With death ! And thou ! worse than this night of woe 
 
 That comest to all, but ah ! when none can know, 
 
 Hour singled from all years ! why must man bear 
 
 A lot so sad 1 The tribes of earth and air 
 
 No thoughts of future ill in life molest, 
 
 And when they die, sleep on, and take their rest ; 
 
 But man in restless dreams spends all his years, 
 
 And shortens life with death's encroaching fears. 
 
 Oh thou, whose cold hand tears the veil from error, 
 
 Whose hollow eye is our delusion's mirror ! 
 
 Death, life's chief blessing ! At this hour of fate, 
 
 Wretch that I am ! I see my faults too late. 
 
 Perils ill-sought, and crimes ill worth the price, 
 
 Pass on in dire review before my eyes ; 
 
 Yet, thing of dust, and on the verge of night, 
 
 Man dares to climb the stars, and on the height 
 
 Of heaven his owlet vision dares to bend 
 
 From that low earth, where all his hopes descend. 
 
 What then avails me in this trying hour, 
 
 Or thee, my Italy, this arm of power ? 
 
 Why did I bid the torch of ravage flame ? 
 
 Ah ! why as with a trumpet's tongue proclaim 
 
 The rights of man ? confounding wrong and right, 
 
 And plunging nations in a deeper night ? 
 
 Why did I raise of marble to the skies 
 
 A gorgeous palace ? Vain and empty prize ! 
 
 When with it lost my air-built dreams must lie 
 
 Gulphed in the ocean of eternity. 
 
 My dearest brother, ah ! remember me, 
 
 And let my fate avert the like from thee.' 
 
 He said, and now, its mortal bondage riven, 
 His spirit fled, and from its higher heaven 
 Of space looked down where Rome and Carthage lay, 
 Thrice blest in having died before the day 
 Whose wing of havoc swept his race away, 
 
78 PETRARCH. 
 
 And had not saved by valour vainly shown 
 His country's woes, his brother's, and his own." 
 
 Lord Byron. 
 
 The writings of Petrarch in Latin prose, which form 
 by far the largest portion of his literary labours, deserve, 
 I think, to be spoken of more favourably than they 
 have been by some modern and recent writers. Ino 
 doubt they want the polish of the Italian humanists of 
 the fifteenth and sixteenth century, Leonardo Aretino, 
 Poggio, Politian, Sannazaro : but they do not deserve 
 the reproach of harshness or barbarism. Erasmus said 
 of him that " he wants the full acquaintance with the 
 language, and his whole diction shows the rudeness of 
 the age ; " but Mr Hallam replies with more liberality and 
 truth, that " relatively to his predecessors of the medieval 
 period, he was successful in what he had most at heart, 
 the acquisition of a Latin style ; " and passages full of 
 eloquence and feeling are not wanting. The first acquaint- 
 ance of Petrarch with the Latin tongue must have 
 been made through the Vulgate, the Digest, and some of 
 the Fathers of the Church. Virgil and Cicero broke 
 upon him like a new light a treasure too precious to be 
 handled. Yet before middle age he had acquired a 
 knowledge not only of their writings, but of every other 
 known writer of antiquity of whom any manuscript at 
 all had been discovered, which is almost incredible. " I 
 detested," he says in one of his letters, " the frivolities 
 and sheer nonsense of the moderns ; and I may venture 
 modestly and privately to boast in writing to you, that 
 I was the first, at least in Italy, who seem to have 
 restored that style of our forefathers, which had become 
 
INFLUENCE OF CICERO. 79 
 
 here so effeminate and enervated, and to have brought 
 it back to vitality and strength." To Cicero his first 
 homage was paid. The following letter to a citizen of 
 Florence describes his zealous interest in the Ciceronian 
 writings : 
 
 "I have kept your Cicero four years and more. The 
 cause of this great delay is the rarity and dearth of copyists 
 who understand such things. So incredible is the prostra- 
 tion of studies in this age of ours, that things in themselves 
 obscure become unintelligible, and things fallen into recent 
 neglect have altogether perished ; so that the richest and 
 sweetest fruits of letters and of intellect are gradually fad- 
 ing away. As, therefore, I could not live without your Cicero, 
 and could get no one to copy the book, I turned from out- 
 ward to inward resources, and set my own tired fingers and 
 used-up pen upon the work. I did not read a line till I 
 had written it. It was enough for me to know that this 
 was a work of Tully and a rare one. But as I advanced I 
 was so enchanted with certain passages, and so powerfully 
 excited, that the copying and the reading became one, and 
 my only dread was lest the eye should outrun the pen, and 
 thus deaden the ardour of my writing. Thus, then, the pen 
 controlling the eye, and the eye urging on the pen, I was 
 borne onwards, not only delighted with the work, but learn- 
 ing and committing to memory much as I went along. For 
 by so much as writing is slower than reading, by so much 
 does what is written strike a deeper root." 
 
 But though the style of Cicero was, no doubt, his 
 model, he attained rather to the epistolary than to the 
 philosophical diction of that great master. It is in the 
 letters of Petrarch, rather than in his dialogues and 
 treatises, that we find him at his best: the latter are stiff 
 and quaint, with a strong tinge of what may be termed 
 
80 PETRARCH. 
 
 clerical language; the former breathe all the life, the 
 friendship, the playfulness, and the vanity of the man. 
 
 It is to Petrarch himself that the world owes the dis- 
 covery of the only authentic manuscript of Cicero's, 
 "Epistolse ad Diversos." It still exists in the Medicean 
 Library at Florence. Politian says of this manuscript 
 that it is the fountain-head from which all the other 
 copies are derived. Ernesti calls it the earliest and the 
 best. It was found in a church at Yerona, perhaps in 
 the chapter-library, in 1345. These were the letters so 
 eagerly sought for, and so fondly perused and even 
 copied by Petrarch's own hand, which he speaks of in 
 a letter addressed to Cicero himself in the other world ; 
 for in his epistolary ardour, Cicero and Seneca, Varro 
 and Quintilian, 1 Livy, Asinius Pollio, Horace, and Vir- 
 gil, and even Homer, were reckoned among his corre- 
 spondents and his friends. He knew them, he says, as 
 if he had lived with them. Yet, one at least of the 
 works of Cicero known to him, has since been lost ; 
 and he speaks of others, such as the " De Oratore," the 
 "Academics" and the "Laws," as so mutilated and cor- 
 rupt, that it were almost better they had perished. 
 With the " De Officiis," the " Tusculan Questions," and 
 the "DeFinibus," he was especially familiar. As his 
 knowledge of the Ciceronian epistles was not attained 
 till Petrarch had passed his fortieth year, it may be con- 
 cluded that his own epistolary style was formed before 
 he knew them, and that something of the tradition of 
 
 1 Quintilian was only known to him by a torn and disordered 
 manuscript. To him Petrarch says, "Yet perhaps your work is 
 still somewhere in existence, unknown even to those who hold it." 
 The prediction was fulfilled by the discovery of a complete manuscript 
 of Quintilian in the library of the great monastery at Constance. 
 
THE FAMILIAR LETTERS. 81 
 
 classical antiquity still lingered in the intercourse of the 
 learned through what was then the common language of 
 letters all over the world. 
 
 In the year 1359 Petrarch amused himself by putting 
 his papers in order. The quantity of them was enor- 
 mous. They were discoloured by time. They were eaten 
 by mice. He committed (though not without a sigh) a 
 thousand pieces to the flames. But from this mass he 
 selected and arranged in twenty-four books the " Familiar 
 Epistles," which he placed in the hands of his friend 
 Socrates : his poetry was given to another friend, Bar- 
 bato. The collection must afterwards have been en- 
 larged, for it contains letters of a later date. Petrarch 
 himself lived till 1374, and his literary executors died 
 before himself. Thus, however, and then, the collection 
 was made ; and it is not without interest to hear what 
 he says of his own manner of writing in the preface 
 addressed to his friend Socrates with this volume : 
 
 * You will find here no great force of language, for indeed 
 I do not possess it, nor would it be in place here if I did ; for 
 Cicero himself did not use that faculty in which he excelled, 
 either in his letters or in those works which are, as he says 
 himself, of an equable and temperate discourse. He kept 
 that egregious force, that lucid, rapid, and overwhelming flood 
 of eloquence for his orations ; but that vein is by me un 
 tried. For I have ever stood aloof from public affairs, and 
 though my fame may sometimes have been attacked by low 
 murmurs or clandestine enmity, it has never received a 
 wound that I cared to avenge or to avoid. Nor have I fre- 
 quented the law courts, or learned to adapt my tongue to 
 them, in opposition to nature, which has given me the love 
 of silence and solitude, the hatred of strife, the scorn of 
 money. And it is well : since I have not felt the want of 
 that which, wanting it, I might have been ill provided with. 
 
 F.c. IV. F 
 
82 PETRARCH. 
 
 AVithout, then, that oratorical power, which I desire not, and 
 do not abound in, and which, if I had it in abundance, would 
 remain unused, you will read, my friend, what I have writ- 
 ten in trivial, domestic, and familiar language, such as we 
 are wont commonly to use. The very title I have given to 
 this collection, * Letters on Familiar Things,' describes my 
 meaning : they are simple narratives of daily events, neatly 
 expressed, with a few moral reflections ; and this was the 
 course Cicero himself observed. . . . Yet these are things 
 to which I look with poignant regret. I am ashamed of my 
 too easy life. My letters will show that in early days I spoke 
 with the vigorous sobriety of a healthy mind that I con- 
 soled others as well as myself, as time passed on I became 
 more humble and more frail : so that it may be said of me 
 hereafter, that I was a man in youth and a child in old age." 
 Prsefatoria Epist. Fain. 
 
 How characteristic is this language, and, with some 
 allowance for the slight affectation and the puerility of 
 a mind too self-conscious of its own power and its own 
 defects, how nearly do these letters bring us to an inti- 
 mate knowledge of every chord of the writer's heart ! 
 But Petrarch did injustice to his oratorical powers, as 
 was his wont when he was in one of his solitary moods. 
 Many of his letters on public affairs such as the ad- 
 dresses to Eienzi in his triumph and his fall to the 
 Emperor Charles IV. and to Pope Urban Y. on his re- 
 moval to Italy, are essentially orations, and were com- 
 posed in no familiar strain, but rather with what might 
 be described as an imitation of Ciceronian art. 
 
83 
 
 CHAPTEE VIII. 
 
 ASCENT OF MONT VENTOUX. 
 
 It is impossible, within the limits of this little volume, 
 to include the variety of details suggested by these let- 
 ters, amounting to nearly 500 in number, for 183 addi- 
 tional letters are now added to the collection by the 
 researches of Signor Fracassetti ; for in truth, almost all 
 we know of the true character and life of Petrarch is 
 comprised in them. I shall select from them at least 
 one complete specimen of those familiar narratives of his 
 life at Yaucluse, which is, I think, of peculiar charm 
 and interest. 
 
 The Mons Yentosus, as it was called in Petrarch's 
 language, better known as the Mont Yentoux, is a moun- 
 tain about 7000 feet in height, situated to the north- 
 east of Avignon, and at no great distance from Yaucluse. 
 It is visible all over the country, and as the modern 
 railway traveller passes swiftly down the valley of the 
 Ehone, the blanched rocks of old Yentoux still frown 
 across the plain. This mountain Petrarch resolved to* 
 ascend. On the 26th April 1335 he made the expedi- 
 tion ; and on his return he sent the following vivid de- 
 
84 PETRARCH. 
 
 scription of it to his spiritual adviser, Father Denis di 
 Borgo San Sepolcro i 1 
 
 " I have this day ascended the highest mountain in this 
 district, which is very deservedly called Le Ventoux, for the 
 sake of seeing the remarkable altitude of the place. I have 
 cherished this project for many years. You know that from 
 my boyhood, whilst fate has been disposing of the affairs 
 of men, I have been passing my time here. This mountain, 
 which is visible from a great distance, was always before 
 my eyes, but it was long before I could find any one to ac- 
 company me, till I opened the matter to my only younger 
 brother, whom you know ; and as he was delighted at my 
 proposal, so I was pleased to have a friend and a brother 
 for my companion. On the appointed day we left home, and 
 we got to Malaucene in the evening. 2 This place is at the 
 foot of the mountain towards the north. We stayed there 
 one day, and this morning we started, with some servants, 
 on our ascent, which we did not complete without much 
 difficulty, for the mountain is extremely steep, and an almost 
 inaccessible mass of rock. The poet, however, says rightly, 
 1 Labor omnia vincit improbus.' The day was long, the air 
 
 1 No two men could be more unlike, divided as they were by 
 five centuries of time, and by a chasm of opinions wider than the 
 centuries, than Francis Petrarch and John Stuart Mill. Yet a 
 singular chance led them both to choose a retreat nearly at the same 
 spot, within a short distance of Avignon. Mill, who was a great 
 pedestrian and botanist, must have explored every part of the country 
 once so familiar to Petrarch, including probably the Mont Ventoux ; 
 and what is still more remarkable, both of them were attached to the 
 place by an enthusiastic and undying attachment to the memory of a 
 woman passionately beloved, invested with all the glories of an ideal 
 worship, and buried at Avignon. It would be curious to know if Mill 
 had read Petrarch's letters, which in some outward circumstances 
 bear a resemblance to the incidents of his own life. 
 
 2 Malaucene is a town of about 2700 inhabitants (at the present 
 time), situated at the foot of Le Ventoux, and upon the river 
 Grausel. 
 
ASCENT OF MONT VENTOUX. 85 
 
 balmy, we were supported by the vigour of our minds, and 
 such bodily strength and, activity as we possess, so that the 
 nature of the place was the only obstacle. We met with an 
 old shepherd in one of the dells of the mountain, who did all 
 he could to dissuade us from our attempt, telling us that 
 some fifty years before he had been invited to go to the sum- 
 mit by the ardour of youth, that he had got nothing by it but 
 discouragement and fatigue, and that his body as well as his 
 cloak were torn by the rocks and brambles ; he added that he 
 never heard of any similar enterprise being undertaken either 
 before or since. Whilst he was vociferating all this, our 
 desire to proceed (for thus it is with the incredulous minds 
 of young men) increased with the objections he made. When 
 the old man perceived that all his remarks were vain, he ac- 
 companied us a little way amongst the rocks, and pointed out 
 a made path, giving us at the same time a vast deal of good 
 advice, and making repeated signs to us after we were gone. 
 We threw off such of our garments as might have embar- 
 rassed us, and began the ascent with great vigour and gaiety. 
 But, as usually happens, fatigue very soon follows great 
 efforts. We soon sat down upon a rock, whence we again 
 started at a more moderate pace, I more especially lessened 
 my mountaineering enthusiasm, and whilst my brother was 
 seeking for short cuts over the steepest parts of the mountain, 
 I more warily kept below, and when he pointed out the path 
 to me, I answered that I hoped to find an easier access, and 
 that I willingly went round in order to advance on more 
 level ground. But whilst I was alleging this excuse for my 
 laziness, the others got far above me, and I was wandering in 
 the gullies of the mountain, where my path was far from 
 being easier, so that the way was lengthened, and my useless 
 labour became more and more irksome. As it was too late to 
 repent of my error, I determined to go straight up, and I at 
 last rejoined my brother, whom I had lost from sight, and 
 who had been quietly resting on a rock, after much toil and 
 anxiety, so that we again started together. The same thing, 
 however, happened again and again in a few hours, and I 
 began to find that human ingenuity was not a match for the 
 
86 PETRARCH. 
 
 nature of things, and that it was impossible to gain heights 
 by moving downwards. Passing, however, with the readiness 
 of thought from corporeal to incorporeal things, I could not 
 help apostrophising myself in the following words : The very 
 thing which has happened to thee in the ascent of this 
 mountain, happens to thee and to many of those who seek to 
 arrive at final beatitude, though it is less evident, because the 
 motions of the body are palpable and open, those of the mind 
 are invisible and concealed. The life of the blest is. indeed 
 set on a high place, strait is the path which leads to it, many 
 are the hills which intervene, and the pilgrim must advance 
 with great strides from virtue to virtue. Lofty is the end of 
 all things, the termination of life, to which our peregrination 
 tends. We all wish to arrive thither, but, as Naso has it 
 
 ' Velle parum est, cupias ut re potiaris oportet.' 
 
 But thou, certainly, unless in this as in many things thou art 
 self-deceived not only wishest, but deservest. What, then, 
 retains thee ? nothing, indeed, but the apparent ease and 
 advantage of that path which lies through earthly and low 
 pleasures, wherein when thou hast gone astray, thou must 
 either mount straight to the summit under all the weight of 
 thy misspent toil, or thou must lie thee down in the trenched 
 valleys of thy sins to be haunted by the shadows and dark- 
 ness of death, and to pass an eternal night in perpetual torture. 
 This reflection seemed to reanimate my sinking vigour, and 
 enabled me to complete my ascent. I only wish that I may 
 accomplish that journey of the soul, for which I daily and 
 nightly sigh, as well as I have done this day's journey of the 
 feet, after having overcome so many difficulties. And I do 
 not know whether that pilgrimage, which is performed by 
 an active and immortal soul, in the twinkling of an eye, 
 without any local motion, be not easier than that which is 
 carried on in a body worn out by the attacks of death and of 
 decay, and laden with the weight of heavy members. 
 
 " The highest peak of all is called * Le petit-fils,' by a sort 
 of antiphrasis, for it seems rather to be the father of all the 
 mountains in the neighbourhood. There is a little plot upon 
 
REFLECTIONS ON MONT VENTOUX. 87 
 
 the summit, where we were all very glad to sit down. Since, 
 father, thou hast read of all the perils of our ascent, vouchsafe 
 to listen to the rest, and to the remaining occurrences of this 
 one day of my life. At first, I was so affected by the unaccus- 
 tomed spirit of the air, and by the free prospect, that I stood 
 as one stupefied. I look back ; clouds were beneath my feet. 
 I began to understand Athos and Olympus, since I found 
 that what I heard and read of them was true of a mountain 
 of far less celebrity. I turn my eyes to that Italian region 
 to which my soul most inclines, and the great rugged Alps 
 (through which, we are told, that the greatest enemy of Home 
 made his way with vinegar), seemed quite close to me, though 
 they really were at a great distance. I confess that I sighed 
 for that Italian air, more sensible to the soul than to the 
 eyes, and an intense longing came upon me, to behold my 
 friends and my country once more. Then a new reflection 
 arose in my mind, I passed from place to time. I recollected 
 that on this day ten years had elapsed since I terminated my 
 youthful studies in Bologna, and, immortal God, im- 
 mutable Wisdom, how many changes has that interval wit- 
 nessed ! . . . I wished to recollect my past uncleanness, and 
 the carnal corruptions of my soul, not because I love them, 
 but because I love Thee, O my God. . . . Whilst I was 
 rejoicing in my heart, father, at my advancement in years, 
 I wept over my imperfections, I mourned the common mu- 
 tability of human actions, I forgot the place I was in and the 
 reason of my coming thither, till, deferring my meditations 
 to a fitter opportunity, I looked about to discern that which 
 I came to see. The frontier of France, and the Pyrenees of 
 Spain were not to be descried (though nothing, that I know 
 of, intervened) by reason of the impotence of mortal sight. 
 But I could very clearly see the mountains about Lyons on 
 the right, and on the left the Bay of Marseilles, which is dis- 
 tant some days' journey. The Ehone flowed beneath our 
 eyes. But whilst I was admiring so many individual objects 
 of the earth, and that my soul rose to lofty contemplations, 
 by the example of the body, it occurred to me that I would 
 look into the book of Augustine's ' Confessions/ which I owe 
 
88 PETRARCH. 
 
 to your kindness, and which I generally carry about with me, 
 as it is a volume of small dimensions, though of great sweet- 
 ness. I open it at a venture, meaning to read whatever 
 might present itself for what could have presented itself 
 that was not pious and devout ? The volume opened at the 
 tenth book. My brother was expecting to hear the words of 
 Augustine from my lips, and he can testify that in the first 
 place I lighted upon, it was thus written : ' There are men 
 who go to admire the high places of mountains, the great waves 
 of the sea, the wide currents of rivers, the circuit of the ocean, 
 and the orbits of the stars and who neglect themselves. 7 I con- 
 fess that I was amazed ; I begged my brother, who was 
 anxious to hear more, not to interrupt me, and I shut the 
 book half angry with myself, that I, who was even now admir- 
 ing terrestrial things, ought already to have learnt from the 
 philosophers that nothing is truly great except the soul. I 
 was sufficiently satisfied with what I had seen upon the 
 mountain, and I turned my eyes back into myself, so that 
 from that hour, till we came to the bottom, no one heard me 
 speak. The words I had read busied me deeply, for I could 
 scarcely imagine that they had occurred fortuitously, or that 
 they were addressed to any one but myself. Thou mayest 
 imagine how often on that day I looked back to the summit of 
 the mountain, which seemed but a cubit high in comparison 
 with the height of human contemplation, were it not too 
 often merged in the corruptions of the earth. At every 
 step I thought if it cost so much sweat and toil to bring the 
 body a little nearer to heaven, great indeed must be the cross, 
 the dungeon, and the sting which should terrify the soul as it 
 draws nigh unto God, and crush the turgid height of inso- 
 lence and the fate of man. "Who shall not be drawn aside 
 from this path by the fear of trial or the desire of enjoyment 1 
 Happy, oh happy is he, of whom methinks the poet spoke : 
 
 1 Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, 
 Atque metus omnes, et inexorabile fatum 
 Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari V 
 
 How steadily must we labour, to put under our feet, not a 
 
RETURN FROM MONT VENTOUX. 89 
 
 speck of elevated earth, but the elate appetites of our terres- 
 trial impulses ! 
 
 "In these undisguised reflections, I felt not the stones 
 upon the path, and I regained the rustic cottage which I had 
 left before the dawn, at an advanced hour of the night ; the 
 constant moon afforded sweet attendance to us as we walked ; 
 and now whilst the servants are busy preparing supper, I have 
 stolen aside to write you these lines on the spur of the 
 moment, lest with change of scene and the variety of impres- 
 sions the thoughts I have penned should have deserted me. 
 Thou seest, most beloved father, that there is nothing in me 
 which I desire to conceal from your eyes, since I not only 
 disclose to you my whole life, but even my individual reflec- 
 tions. Father, I crave your prayers, that whatever in me 
 is vague and unstable may be strengthened, and that the 
 thoughts I waste abroad on many things, may be turned to 
 that one thing, which is true, good, and secure. Farewell." 
 Epist. Famil., 1. iv. ep. 1. 
 
90 
 
 CHAPTEE IX. 
 
 THE LAUREL CROWN. 
 
 The scene changes, and we pass again from these 
 mountain - paths and solitary reflections to scenes of 
 courtly splendour and singular honour. On the 23d 
 August 1340, Petrarch, being then at Yaucluse, received 
 within a few hours, on the same day, a missive from the 
 Senate of Rome, and another from the Chancellor of the 
 University of Paris, offering to place on his head the 
 laurel crown of poetry. The laurel wreath, the gift and 
 emblem of Apollo, had been used of old in the Capitoline 
 Games established by Domitian in Eome. Claudian was 
 the last poet said to have received it. The Christian 
 Empire abolished the pagan games; but the old tra- 
 dition and usage survive in our own country to this 
 day, and place the same wreath on the brows of our 
 laureate. Petrarch obtained the revival of the honour, 
 which can hardly have been spontaneous ; and it is not 
 very easy to understand on what grounds he received it. 
 His "Africa" was unpublished; the finest of his Italian 
 poems were not then written; his letters and Latin 
 treatises cannot have had a very wide circulation; he 
 was only thirty-six years of age. Yet the honour was 
 
PETRARCH CROWNED. 91 
 
 not due to the influence of the Colonnas, since it was 
 proffered simultaneously from Paris and from Borne; 
 and the fact proves beyond doubt that Petrarch had 
 already acquired an extraordinary reputation as a lover 
 of learning and a restorer of letters. To himself, it was 
 doubly welcome, as a badge of fame and an emblem of 
 love. For, in the fanciful spirit of the age, the Laurel 
 was Daphne, the Laura of his passion. The same play 
 on her name recurs a thousand times in his sonnets. 
 He faints when he first sees a laurel bush on the Tus- 
 can shore. The laurel wreath dedicated him to his 
 mistress. 
 
 After some hesitation, and an appeal to his patron, 
 Cardinal Colonna, he decides in favour of Borne; and 
 early in the spring of the following year he embarks for 
 Naples, where King Eobert held his Court, who was 
 regarded as the wisest and most accomplished of living 
 princes. King Eobert had previously addressed a letter 
 to Petrarch, on the recommendation of Father Denis di 
 Borgo (the same for whom the account of Mont Yentoux 
 was written), to invite him to Naples. Nothing, there- 
 fore, was wanting to give importance to his voyage. 
 Upon his arrival, learned conferences were held; a 
 portion of the " Africa " was read ; Petrarch insisted on 
 being examined in all branches of learning by the King, 
 who probably knew much less of the poetic art and of 
 ancient literature than his pupil. For, in truth, King 
 Eobert had devoted himself rather to other branches of 
 study ; but he was a liberal patron of learning, and he 
 assisted and encouraged Petrarch to make an active, 
 though vain, search for the lost Decades of Livy. The 
 ceremony was performed at Eome, in the Capitol, on 
 
92 PETRARCH. 
 
 Easter Day (8th April) 1341. Count d'Anguillara, the 
 lord of Capranica, where Petrarch had spent some days 
 on his first visit to Home, placed the laurel on his head. 
 The poet appeared in a royal mantle, previously worn by 
 King Eobert himself, preceded by twelve noble Eoman 
 youths clad in scarlet, and the heralds and trumpeters 
 of the Eoman Senate. These illustrious names, this 
 pomp, this display, and the extravagant laudation of 
 such a ceremony, contrast singularly with the reflections 
 of the solitary of Vaucluse, and appear to a severer 
 taste a mere tissue of puerility and affectation. It is 
 some relief to find that Petrarch himself, in his later 
 years, took this view of it. In one of the last of his 
 letters written to Boccaccio near the close of his life, 
 he says : 
 
 " You think that, having received by solemn decree of the 
 Senate, that most honourable title of the Roman Laureate, 
 as the abundant reward of my labours, since it adj udged me 
 equal to the greatest, I should have desired nothing more. 
 But that laurel was obtained when I was young and inex- 
 perienced ; its leaves have been bitter to me ; and, with 
 more knowledge of the world, I should not have desired it. 
 I gathered from that wreath no fruit of knowledge or elo- 
 quence, but the keenest envy, which robbed me of repose, 
 and made me pay dear for my fame and youthful ambition. 
 All I gained by it was to be known and marvelled at ; had 
 I been without it, I might have enjoyed that state of life 
 which many have thought the best, to be tranquil and un- 
 known." Epist. Senil., xvii. 2. 
 
 But these are the querulous regrets of age, perhaps 
 not less exaggerated than the confidence and eagerness 
 of youth. The laurel crown did undoubtedly make 
 Petrarch great, because it was a recognised symbol of 
 
DEATH OF JACOPO COLONNA. 93 
 
 greatness ; and thenceforward lie might say that it was 
 less true that he lived with princes than that princes 
 sought to live with him. 
 
 From Eome Petrarch proceeded homewards to Parma, 
 where he resided for some time, and even built a house, 
 having established an intimacy with the lords of Cor- 
 reggio, then princes of Parma. Not long afterwards, 
 the result of this new connection was seen by his eleva- 
 tion to a stall in the chapter of Parma, in place of, or 
 in addition to, his canonry at Lombes. To Lombes he 
 returned no more; for the following year he lost, by 
 death, his first and dearest friend, Jacopo Colonna. 
 
 The following passage in a letter to another friend 
 records the mysterious apparition that announced to the 
 imagination of the poet this unhappy event : 
 
 " Jacopo Colonna was a man of sufficient note in our age, 
 but such was his remarkable power of mind, that I am 
 persuaded he will not be forgotten for many ages. I could 
 speak at length on his merits, for whilst he lived he was my 
 very dear friend ; but this is not to the present purpose, nor 
 could any praise of mine be new to you, who ever loved and 
 honoured him as the best of bishops. You judged the worth 
 of the fruit even by the flower ; and when he was in the 
 pride of his early youth, you fostered, like a good husband- 
 man, the treasures of his mind. No one loved the virtue of 
 his manly heart better than yourself ; you yielded the respect 
 which was due to the dignity of the priesthood ; and, lastly, 
 when he was freed from the turmoil and the labour of life, 
 you shed sweet tears over him, who was your father in rank, 
 your son in age, your brother in affection. But to return. 
 He was wearied of the business of the world ; and he had 
 left his honourable father, his brothers, and his country, to 
 return to his diocese, which is in the more distant parts near 
 Pampeluna. I was at that time at a great distance from 
 
94 PETRARCH. 
 
 him, since I was even then in that little cottage in Cisalpine 
 Gaul, which I still inhabit. Some account of his indisposi- 
 tion had reached me, and I was waiting with anxiety for 
 further tidings. I shudder at what I am relating ; but the 
 place is still before my eyes, the very place on which I saw 
 him in the dead of the night. He crossed the brook at the 
 bottom of the garden. I went to meet him in great astonish- 
 ment ; and I asked him whence he came ? why he was in 
 such haste 1 why he was alone 1 He answered nothing ; but 
 at length, smiling, as was his wont in conversation, he said : 
 c Dost thou remember that once when thou wert living with 
 me across the Garonne, thou saidst that the Pyrenean tem- 
 pests were an affliction to thee 1 It is thence that I come ; 
 and I am going to Eome, never to return ! ' With these 
 words, he reached the extremity of the place. I followed, 
 but he gently drove me from him, and said, with a different 
 expression of countenance, and an altered voice : ' Cease ! 
 thou canst not be my companion now ! * I fixed my eyes 
 upon him, and I saw by his ashy paleness that he was dead. 
 I exclaimed so loud in my terror and my grief that with the 
 noise I woke, and found myself still bewailing. I took note 
 of the day, I related the circumstances to those who were 
 about me, and I wrote it to my absent friends ; but it was 
 not till the arrival of a messenger, twenty-five days after- 
 wards, that I found that the moment of his death corre- 
 sponded with that of my vision. His remains were trans- 
 ferred to Home three years afterwards, which I could not 
 have guessed or known at the time. His spirit, as I hope 
 and trust, is returned to heaven." 
 
 Pope Clement VI., in May 1342, succeeded Benedict 
 XII. on the Papal throne. Like his predecessor, he 
 was a Frenchman, little disposed to plunge into the vor- 
 tex of Italian politics. But he was generous, liberal, 
 and tolerant, more courtly than priestly, and he bestowed 
 a great amount of favour, confidence, and patronage on 
 Petrarch. 
 
THE COURT OF NAPLES. 95 
 
 One of the first incidents of his reign was the presen- 
 tation of an address to his Holiness by a deputation of 
 eighteen Eoman citizens, praying that the Papal Court 
 would return to Eome, and that increased power might 
 be given to the municipal government of the city. Pet- 
 rarch was a member of this deputation, in his capacity 
 of Eoman laureate ; and it deserves notice that Nicolas 
 Gabrini, better known as Cola Eienzi, also formed part 
 of it, and attracted the favourable notice both of the 
 Pope and of Petrarch at that time, by his cultivation, 
 his love of letters, and his enthusiasm for his country. 
 This casual acquaintance bore fruit hereafter. 
 
 King Eobert of Naples died in the following winter, 
 to the great regret of the poet, leaving his crown to the 
 elder of his two daughters, Joan and Mary, who were 
 married, or betrothed, respectively to their two cousins, 
 Andrew and Louis, of Hungary. It was hoped that 
 this double marriage would obviate a contest of succession 
 to the crown of Sicily ; for, as the father of the Hungarian 
 princes was the elder brother of King Eobert, they 
 had claims which could hardly be denied. But the mar- 
 riage of Joan and Andrew turned out most unhappily. 
 It was an exact parallel to the tragedy of Darnley and 
 Mary Queen of Scots, two hundred years later. The 
 Queen married her cousin, detested him, was more or 
 less privy to his murder, and immediately married the 
 man who had committed it. 1 
 
 To this Court, deprived of the authority and control 
 of King Eobert by his death, Petrarch was sent by Pope 
 Clement, to assert the rights of the See of Eome over his 
 
 1 This crime was committed on the 15th September 1345, two years 
 after Petrarch had left Naples. 
 
96 PETRARCH. 
 
 fief, and to observe the state of the kingdom. He was 
 also to obtain the liberation of some Colonnese partisans. 
 Nothing could be more deplorable than the aspect of 
 affairs at Naples, and though it is stated that Queen 
 Joanna made Petrarch one of her chaplains, he seems 
 to have been singularly insensible to the compliment, 
 for he describes the Court of Naples in the following 
 terms : 
 
 " I have seen the Queen. I have been present at their 
 Council. May God remove such a plague from the soil of 
 Italy ! Christ was not more scorned at Memphis, Babylon, or 
 Mecca. I mourn for thee noble Parthenope ! No piety 
 no truth no faith ! A ruddy, barefooted wretch, shaven 
 and ill clad, with scarce a cloak on his back, is governing the 
 kingdom as the head of the regency, and conducting not 
 only its affairs, but those of his Holiness, with all the in- 
 solence of supreme authority. They say his dress and his 
 money-chests are very different things. And his name is 
 Kobert ! So that in place of that Eobert who was the glory 
 of his age, we have another Eobert who is its shame ! This 
 asp has sprung from the sepulchre of the King." 
 
 The fellow was a Hungarian friar, whom the father of 
 the young princes had left at Naples, and who had 
 plunged with success into all the intrigues of that dis- 
 solute Court. Petrarch accomplished nothing by his 
 mission; but he witnessed an extraordinary tempest, 
 which he describes in one of the most graphic of his 
 letters. Perhaps it was written in imitation of Pliny's 
 celebrated letter on the eruption of Yesuvius, with which 
 it may not unfairly be compared. 
 
 "This visitation from Heaven was foretold several days 
 before its occurrence by the bishop of a little neighbouring 
 island, who rested his prediction on certain astronomical cal- 
 
TEMPEST AND EARTHQUAKE AT NAPLES. 97 
 
 dilations ; but, as it rarely happens that prophets penetrate 
 the whole truth of any future event, so he unluckily an- 
 nounced, as the completion of the catastrophe, l that a terrible 
 earthquake would ensue, by which Naples itself would be 
 destroyed on the 25th of November/ This advertisement 
 obtained so much credit that the greater part of the inhabi- 
 tants actually gave up every other consideration to the grand 
 concerns of religion, imploring the mercy of God, and 
 His forgiveness of their past offences, as if the following day 
 were infallibly to be their last. On the other hand, many 
 laughed at the idle prediction, observing how little faith was 
 due to astrologers, the more especially as only a few days 
 had passed since the last earthquake. In the midst of these 
 apprehensions and encouragements (of which the former, how- 
 ever, predominated), I retired, on the evening of the 24th, 
 just before sunset, to my apartment, and on my way thither 
 met almost all the females of the city (in whom the sense of 
 shame had been swallowed up by that of danger) barefooted, 
 and with hair dishevelled, crowding to the churches, with 
 their babes in their arms, crying and imploring God for 
 mercy. As night came on the sky was more than usually 
 serene. My servants went to bed immediately after supper. 
 For my own part, I proposed to stay up and watch the set- 
 ting of the moon, at that time (I think) in her first quarter. 
 The window which looks to the west was left open, and I 
 saw her as, about midnight, she hid herself behind St Mar- 
 tin's Mount, her face much darkened, and partially covered 
 by clouds. I then closed the window, and stretched myself 
 on my bed, where, after lying for some time awake, I was 
 just falling asleep, when I was roused by the noise of an 
 earthquake. The casement was burst open, the light which 
 I always kept burning in my chamber was extinguished, and 
 the whole house shook to its very foundations. In this 
 state, between sleeping and waking, and assailed by the ter- 
 ror of impending destruction, I ran to the cloisters of the 
 monastery, in which I reside, and where we groped about in 
 the dark (having only the glimmering of one dull lamp to 
 direct us), to receive and administer whatever consolation was 
 
 F.C. IV. G 
 
98 PETRARCH. 
 
 in our power. Here we were shortly met by the abbot a 
 very pious man with his monks in procession, who, terrified 
 by the tempest, were bearing the holy cross and relics of 
 saints, and preceded by lighted torches, with devout prayers 
 and exclamations, on their way to the church to sing matins 
 to the Virgin. This having inspired me with courage, I ac- 
 companied them to the church, where we all with one accord 
 threw ourselves prostrate on the ground, and did nothing 
 else but with loud uplifted voices implore the Divine mercy 
 and forgiveness, expecting every minute the sacred building to 
 fall and bury us in its ruins. 
 
 " It would be much too long to recount all the horrors of 
 that infernal night ; and although the truth very far exceeds 
 all power of description, yet I fear to be thought guilty of 
 exaggeration when I exclaim, What deluges of water ! what 
 wind ! what thunder ! what terrible rumbling in the heavens ! 
 what fearful tremblings of the earth ! what vehement com- 
 motion in the sea ! what shrieks of amazed and distracted 
 multitudes ! The long night seemed extended by magic art 
 to twice its actual duration ; and when morning came, its 
 approach was announced to us rather by the clock than by 
 any corresponding light in the firmament. The priests robed 
 themselves for the celebration of Mass, while we, not having 
 courage to lift our faces to heaven, remained stretched on 
 the ground in prayer and supplication. Though day had 
 broke, it was still as dark as night. The multitudes in the 
 upper part of the city had begun to disperse ; but towards 
 the sea-shore the noise seemed to increase, and the clattering 
 of horses was heard in the street below. What this could 
 mean it was impossible to ascertain ; but, made bold by de- 
 spair, I at last mounted on horseback myself, resolved to see, 
 even though I should perish. 
 
 " Great God ! who ever heard of such things as I then be- 
 held ? The oldest seamen declared that the like was never 
 before witnessed. In the midst of the port was seen an in- 
 finite number of poor wretches scattered about on the sea, 
 and struggling to gain the shore, who, by the violence and 
 fury of the waves, were battered about till they looked like 
 
TEMPEST AND EARTHQUAKE AT NAPLES. 99 
 
 so many eggs dashed to pieces on the beach. The whole 
 space was filled with drowned and half-drowned bodies 
 some with their skulls fractured, others with broken arms or 
 legs, others with their bowels gushing out ; and the screams 
 of men and women who lived near the beach were no less 
 terrific than the uproar of the elements. The very sands, on 
 which the day before you walked in ease and safety, were 
 become more dangerous than the faro of Messina or the 
 whirlpool of Chary bdis. A thousand or more of the Neapoli- 
 tan nobility came to the shore on horseback, as if to solem- 
 nise the funeral obsequies of their country ; and when I 
 found myself among them, I began to be of better cheer, 
 seeing that, if I were doomed to perish, I should die with the 
 honour of knighthood. Soon the dreadful rumour came to 
 our ears that the ground on which we trod had been under- 
 mined by the sea, and was beginning to open. We fled pre- 
 cipitately, and saved ourselves ; but the spectacle we then 
 beheld was the most terrible ever witnessed by mortal eye 
 the heavens so commingled ! the sea so implacably turbu- 
 lent ! the waves mountain-high, and in colour neither black 
 nor blue, as in more ordinary tempests, but perfectly white, 
 like hills of snow, rolling over, the whole expanse from Capri 
 to Naples. 
 
 " The young Queen, barefooted, and attended by a numer- 
 ous train of females, went to visit the churches dedicated to 
 the Blessed Virgin. No vessel in the harbour was capable of 
 resisting the violence of the gale ; and three galleys which 
 had arrived from Cyprus, and were to depart that morning, 
 were seen by sympathising thousands to go down without a 
 soul being saved. Three other large ships, which had an- 
 chored in the port, struck against each other and sank, and 
 all on board perished. Of all the vessels, one only escaped, 
 on board of which were no less than four hundred galley- 
 slaves who had been engaged in the Sicilian war by the 
 strength of these malefactors alone the ship being enabled to 
 stem the fury of the overwhelming element ; and even they 
 were quite exhausted when, at the approach of night, be- 
 yond all hope, and contrary to the universal expectation, the 
 
100 PETRARCH. 
 
 sky cleared, the wind abated, and the sea grew calm. Thus 
 the most infamous of the sufferers are those alone who 
 escaped a watery grave. Alas that the words of Lucan 
 should have thus proved true 'that fortune favours the 
 wicked * or that such is the pleasure of God or that they 
 who in the hour of trial are most indifferent whether they 
 live or die, are the securest from danger ! This is the history 
 of yesterday. November 27, 1343." * 
 
 1 The translation of this letter is by Ugo Foscolo. 
 
101 
 
 CHAPTEE X. 
 
 THE ANARCHY OF ITALY. 
 
 When Petrarch returned from the Court of Naples to 
 the residence which he had acquired at Parma, the con- 
 dition of the northern provinces of Italy was frightfully- 
 disturbed. Mastino della Scala, burning to reconquer 
 Parma, had sent his troops against it in January 1343, 
 under the command of Obizzo d'Este, lord of Eerrara. 
 Azo di Correggio, unable to resist this attack, sold the 
 lordship of Parma for 60,000 florins of gold in October 
 1344; but the neighbouring houses of Gonzaga, Bologna, 
 Verona, and Padua, jealous of the aggrandisement of the 
 D'Estes and the Yiscontis, combined to besiege the city. 
 Petrarch relates, in a spirited letter to his friend Barbato, 
 that, while he was still there, the forces of almost all 
 Italy besieged the town ; and, after an interval of some 
 months, he resolved to effect his escape. He succeeded 
 in reaching Bologna on a stormy night, through perils of 
 robbers and perils of war ; his arm was severely bruised 
 by a fall from his horse ; and then he turned his face 
 once more from his Italian to his Transalpine Helicon. 
 
 These adventures probably inspired him with one of 
 the finest of his political poems the more interesting to 
 
102 PE r J?RAKCH. 
 
 us, as it expresses the earnest desire of Italy for unity, 
 independence, and peace : and the composition is as- 
 signed by the best critics to this period of his life. 
 
 The date of this piece is, however, somewhat doubt- 
 ful. The allusion to the "Bavarico inganno," in one 
 stanza, refers to the treachery of the Emperor Louis' of 
 Bavaria, who entered Italy in 1327, at the head of a 
 confederacy of Italian princes, and betrayed them. But 
 the Canzone is certainly of a later date. Some have at- 
 tributed it to the war which raged from 1351 to 1354, 
 between the Genoese and the Venetians, when Petrarch 
 was employed to mediate between the two republics. 
 A letter from the poet to Andrew Dandolo, the Doge of 
 Venice, dated from Milan, 5th June 1354, expresses pre- 
 cisely the same sentiments, and may be read with inter- 
 est, as it illustrates the poem. 
 
 " With a loud voice I will utter what I feel : how long are 
 we to look for barbarous allies to ravage our country, and to 
 bring about our public ruin ? how long are we to pay with 
 hire * those who come to destroy us 1 In the long catalogue 
 of human follies, I know of none more insane than that which 
 lays waste Italy with Italian brands. And if this was as dis- 
 pleasing to yourself and to the other princes of our republics 
 as it is to me, who am a solitary and unemployed man, Italy, 
 in the enjoyment of her great rights, might command those 
 provinces of which she is now almost the slave. Love of our 
 country, and pity for our misfortunes, should wipe away all 
 animosities from your mind ; for you may be certain, Doge, 
 that Venice cannot be secure if Italy should perish." Epist. 
 Fam., ix. 15. 
 
 1 This alludes to the hired companies of foreign adventurers which 
 had been summoned from Germany by the Viscontis and the Scalas, 
 to serve their own bad purposes and personal ambition. 
 
THE CANZONET OF ITALY. 103 
 
 It is probable, however, that the following noble 
 canzonet was written about ten years before the letter 
 I have just quoted. The allusion to the river Po shows 
 that it was composed at Parma. [The evils of Italy were 
 chronic; and during the whole of the life of Petrarch 
 these internecine conflicts of the Italian republics and 
 princes continued to tear and ravage the land, and to lay 
 her open to foreign invasion. The language of the poet 
 was as applicable to one of these incessant wars as to 
 another ; and it continued, alas ! to be applicable f er 
 centuries. Hence this poem has ever been regarded as 
 one of the great beacons of Italian literature; for it 
 expresses the generous sentiments^ the patriotism, and 
 the sorrows of many generations.^, 
 
 " Oh, my own Italy ! though words are vain 
 The mortal wounds to close, 
 Unnumbered, that thy beauteous bosom stain, 
 Yet may it soothe my pain 
 To sigh forth Tiber's woes, 
 And Arno's wrongs, as on Po's saddened shore 
 Sorrowing I wander, and my numbers pour. 
 Kuler of Heaven ! by the all-pitying love 
 That could Thy Godhead move 
 To dwell a lowly sojourner on earth, 
 Turn, Lord, on this Thy chosen land Thine eye : 
 See, God of Charity, 
 
 Prom what light cause this cruel war has birth ; 
 And the hard hearts by savage discord steeled, 
 Thou, Father, from on high 
 Teach by my humble voice, that stubborn wrath may yield ! 
 
 Ye, to whose sovereign hands the fates confide 
 Of this fair land the reins 
 
 (This land for which no pity wrings your breast) 
 Why does the stranger's sword her plains infest ? 
 
104 PETRARCH. 
 
 That her green fields he dyed, 
 Hope ye, with hlood from the barbarians' veins 1 
 Beguiled by error weak, 
 Ye see not, though to pierce so deep ye boast, 
 Who love, or faith, in venal bosoms seek : 
 When thronged your standards most, 
 Ye are encompassed most by hostile bands. 
 O hideous deluge, gathered in strange lands, 
 That rushing down amain 
 O'erwhelms our every native lovely plain ! 
 Alas ! if our own hands 
 Have thus our weal betrayed, who shall our cause sustain I 
 
 Well did kind Nature, guardian of our state, 
 Hear her rude Alpine heights, 
 A lofty rampart against German hate ; 
 But blind ambition, seeking his own ill, 
 With ever-restless will, 
 To the pure gales contagion foul invites : 
 Within the same strait fold 
 The gentle flocks and wolves relentless throng, 
 Where still meek innocence must suffer wrong ; 
 And these, oh, shame avowed ! 
 Are of the lawless hordes no tie can hold : 
 Fame tells how Marius' sword 
 Erewhile their bosoms gored, 
 Nor has Time's finger blurred the record proud, 
 When they who, thirsting, stooped to quaff the flood, 
 With the cool waters mixed, drank of a comrade's blood ! 
 
 Great Caesar's name I pass, who o'er our plains 
 
 Poured forth the ensanguined tide, 
 
 Drawn by our own good swords from out their veins ; 
 
 But now nor know I what ill stars preside 
 
 Heaven holds this land in hate ! 
 
 To you the thanks ! whose hands control her helm ! 
 
 You, whose rash feuds despoil 
 
THE CANZONET OF ITALY. 105 
 
 Of all the beauteous earth the fairest realm ! 
 Are ye impelled by judgment, crime, or fate, 
 To oppress the desolate ? 
 From broken fortunes and from humble toil 
 The hard-earned dole to wring, 
 While from afar ye bring 
 Dealers in blood, bartering their souls for hire ? 
 In truth's great cause I sing, 
 Nor hatred nor disdain my earnest lay inspire. 
 
 Nor mark ye yet, confirmed by proof on proof, 
 Bavaria's perfidy, 
 
 Who strikes in mockery, keeping death aloof 1 
 (Shame, worse than aught of loss, in honour's eye !) 
 While ye with honest rage, devoted pour 
 Your inmost bosom's gore ! 
 Yet give one hour to thought, 
 And ye shall own how little he can hold 
 Another's glory dear, who sets his own at nought. 
 Latin blood of old, 
 Arise and wrest from obloquy thy fame, 
 Nor bow before a name 
 
 Of hollow sound, whose power no laws enforce ! 
 For if barbarians rude 
 Have higher minds subdued, 
 Ours, ours the crime ! not such wise Nature's course. 
 
 Ah ! is not this the soil my foot first pressed ? 
 
 And here, in cradled rest, 
 
 Was not I softly hushed ? here fondly reared 1 
 
 Ah ! is not this my country 1 so endeared 
 
 By every filial tie ! 
 
 In whose lap shrouded both my parents lie ! 
 
 Oh, by this tender thought, 
 
 Your torpid bosoms to compassion wrought, 
 
 Look on the people's grief, 
 
 Who, after God, of you expect relief ! 
 
 And if ye but relent, 
 
106 PETRAKCH. 
 
 Virtue shall rouse her in embattled might, 
 Against blind fury bent, * 
 Nor long shall doubtful hang the unequal fight ; 
 For no, the ancient flame 
 Is not extinguished yet, that raised the Italian name. 
 
 Mark, sovereign Lords, how Time, with pinions strong, 
 Swift hurries life along ! 
 E'en now, behold, Death presses on the rear. 
 We sojourn here a day the next, are gone ! 
 The soul disrobed alone 
 
 Must shuddering seek the doubtful pass we fear. 
 Oh, at the dreaded bourne, 
 Abase the lofty brow of wrath and scorn, 
 (Storms adverse to the eternal calm on high !) 
 And ye, whose cruelty 
 Has sought another's harm, by fairer deed 
 Of heart, or hand, or intellect, aspire 
 To win the honest meed 
 Of just renown the noble mind's desire ! 
 Thus sweet on earth the stay ! 
 Thus to the spirit pure unbarred is Heaven's way ! 
 
 My song ! with courtesy, and numbers smooth, 
 Thy daring reasons grace ; 
 For thou, the mighty, in their pride of place, 
 Must woo to gentle ruth, 
 Whose haughty will long evil customs nurse, 
 Ever to truth averse ! 
 The better fortunes wait 
 Among the virtuous few the truly great ! 
 Tell them but who shall bid my terrors cease ? 
 Peace ! Peace ! on thee I call ; return, Heaven-born Peace!" 
 
 Lady Dacre. 
 
 From these stormy scenes Petrarch returned to Vau- 
 cluse. He sang once more the pleasures of rural solitude. 
 
PETKARCH IN SOLITUDE. 107 
 
 He began his treatise on " Solitary Life." He added 
 something to his cottage and his garden. But even here 
 he was not quite secluded from the temptations of the 
 world. The Pope offered him the post of Secretary 
 Apostolical, which he declined. He saw Charles of 
 Luxemburg, then recently elected King of the Eomans, 
 imprint an imperial kiss on the brow and eyes of Laura 
 at a festival of the Papal Court, and he ingratiated him- 
 self with the future emperor by a sonnet. It is difficult 
 to reconcile these courtly tastes with a pure passion for 
 solitude, meditation, and philosophy. It is still more 
 difficult to reconcile the benefices Petrarch continued to 
 receive from the Papal Court x with the imprecations he 
 breathed from time to time against the " impious Baby- 
 lon," the " Court of Beelzebub," the " cursed city, only 
 to be cleansed by the fire of heaven." But these contra- 
 dictions abound in the poet's life and character, and 
 never seem to have interfered with his popularity or his 
 reputation. 
 
 1 In 1342 the Pope conferred upon him the Priory of St Nicholas 
 di Miliarino, in the diocese of Pisa, in addition to his other prefer- 
 ments. 
 
108 
 
 CHAPTEE XL 
 
 THE RIENZI REVOLUTION, 
 
 In the following year (1347) an event occurred which 
 was destined to change still more violently the course of 
 Petrarch's secluded life. The state of the city of Eome 
 was, as he had seen some years before, deplorable. 
 Abandoned by the Papal Court, neglected by the impe- 
 rial power, and tyrannised over by the great baronial 
 houses, the people were reduced to the lowest condition 
 of misery ; life and property were unprotected ; and the 
 great name of the Eoman people seemed sunk in igno- 
 miny. A sudden flash of democratic energy illuminated 
 this scene of gloom and depression. Cola di Eienzi, who 
 had returned from Avignon, with the office of Papal 
 Notary, succeeded in rousing the people to a momentary 
 greatness. [_He invoked the memory of their ancestors. 
 He showed them on the monuments and inscriptions 
 of the city a thousand traces of their old fame and 
 power._/ He bade them stand up for the " good estate 
 of Eome." The people followed their new leader with 
 enthusiasm, as in r cjur day they followed the Cicero- 
 vacchio of the timeJ They drove out the nobles ; they 
 hanged some of them for their crimes. j^An attempt was 
 
RIENZI TRIBUNE OF ROME. 109 
 
 made to re-enter the city by force, in which Stephen 
 Colonna, and three other Colonnas, the sons of Petrarch's 
 old friend and patron, were killedj Eienzi declared him- 
 self Tribune of Kome, without however disclaiming the 
 authority of the Pope. Several of the Italian princes of 
 Italy hastened to acknowledge him as the restorer of the 
 Eoman State. The new government was said to have 
 established peace and order. But it was a short-lived 
 vision. Within a few months Eienzi's own arrogance and 
 oppression destroyed the ephemeral fabric of his power, 
 and before the close of the year he was a fugitive and a 
 prisoner. 
 
 JSTo man was more enthusiastically excited by the 
 temporary success of Eienzi than Francis Petrarch. In 
 his eyes the Tribune was a generous and gifted being 
 the Messiah of a new Eome. [Eegardless of the ties 
 which bound him to the Colonnas, though the popular 
 revolution was obviously directed mainly against the 
 aristocratic houses in Eome, and did in fact cost the 
 lives of four members of the Colonna family regardless 
 of the more questionable authority of the Pope Petrarch 
 looked only to the greatness and glory of EomeTI His 
 first act was to address to the Eoman people and their 
 illustrious chief a hortatory address, expressed with great 
 learning and eloquence (if they understood his allusions); 
 and he continued to aid Eienzi with constant encourage- 
 ment and advice. /JETe even started again for Italy to 
 hail the new-born freedom of his Eoman fellow-citizens ; 
 but on reaching Genoa, he learned that the revolutionary 
 drama had collapsed, and that his dream must end. 
 
 It would be tedious in this place to dwell on these 
 details, though it has happened to the present and the 
 
110 PETRARCH. 
 
 last generation to witness similar instances of poetical 
 sympathy in popular movements, followed sometimes by 
 similar disappointments. But i Petrarch, left one record 
 of the Eienzi revolution which can never die. The ode 
 he addressed to the great liberator is regarded by the 
 Italians as one of the finest creations of their national 
 poetry; and they pardon the faithlessness which alien- 
 ated Petrarch from the Colonnas, and the disappointment 
 which " turned his lyrical strain to a satire " before the 
 ink was dry, in consideration of the great Canzone be- 
 ginning " Spirto gentil^L: We shall borrow Maegregor's 
 translation, which is one of the best in our language, 
 though it falls far short of the strength and grace of the 
 original. 
 
 To Eienzi, beseeching him to restore to Rome 
 
 HER ANCIENT LIBERTY. 
 
 " Spirit heroic ! who with fire divine 
 Kindlest those limbs, awhile which pilgrim hold 
 On earth a Chieftain, gracious, wise, and bold ; 
 Since, rightly, now the rod of state is thine 
 Home and her wandering children to confine, 
 And yet reclaim her to the old good way : 
 To thee I speak, for elsewhere not a ray 
 Of virtue can I find, extinct below, 
 Nor one who feels of evil deeds the shame. 
 Why Italy still w T aits, and what her aim 
 I know not, callous to her proper woe, 
 Indolent, aged, slow, 
 
 Still will she sleep ? Is none to rouse her found ? 
 Oh that my wakening hands were through her tresses wound ! 
 
 So grievous is the spell, the trance so deep, 
 Loud though we call, my hope is faint that e'er 
 She yet will waken from her heavy sleep : 
 
THE CANZONET OF RIENZI. Ill 
 
 But not, methinks, without some better end 
 Was this our Rome intrusted to thy care, 
 Who surest may revive and best defend. 
 Fearlessly then upon that reverend head, 
 'Mid her dishevelled locks, thy fingers spread, 
 And lift at length the sluggard from the dust : 
 I, day and night., who her prostration mourn, 
 For this, in thee, have fixed my certain trust, 
 That, if her sons yet turn, 
 And their eyes ever to true honour raise, 
 The glory is reserved for thy illustrious days ! 
 
 Her ancient walls, which still with fear and love 
 The world admires, whene'er it calls to mind 
 The days of Eld, and turns to look behind ; 
 Her hoar and caverned monuments above 
 The dust of men, whose fame, until the world 
 In dissolution sink, can never fail ; 
 Her all, that in one ruin now lies hurled, 
 Hopes to have healed by thee its every ail. 
 O faithful Brutus ! noble Scipios dead ! 
 To you what triumph, where ye now are blest, 
 If of our worthy choice the fame have spread : 
 And how his laurelled crest, 
 Will old Fabricius rear, with joy elate, 
 That his own Rome again shall beauteous be and great ! 
 
 And, if for things of earth its care Heaven show, 
 
 The souls who dwell above in joy and peace, 
 
 And their mere mortal frames have left below, 
 
 Implore thee this long civil strife may cease, 
 
 Which kills all confidence, nips every good, 
 
 Which bars the way to many a roof, where men 
 
 Once holy, hospitable lived, the den 
 
 Of fearless rapine now and frequent blood, 
 
 Whose doors to virtue only are denied. 
 
 While beneath plundered Saints, in outraged fanes 
 
 Plots Faction, and Revenge the altar stains ; 
 
112 PETRARCH. 
 
 And, contrast sad and wide, 
 The very bells which sweetly wont to fling 
 Summons to prayer and praise now Battle's tocsin ring ! 
 
 Pale weeping women, and a friendless crowd 
 Of tender years, infirm and desolate Age, 
 Which hates itself and its superfluous days, 
 With each blest order to religion vowed, 
 Whom works of love through lives of want engage, 
 To thee for help their hands and voices raise ; 
 While our poor panic-stricken land displays 
 The thousand wounds which now so mar her frame, 
 That e'en from foes compassion they command ; 
 Or more if Christendom thy care may claim, 
 Lo ! God's own house on fire, while not a hand 
 Moves to subdue the flame : 
 
 Heal thou these wounds, this feverish tumult end, 
 And on the holy work Heaven's blessing shall descend ! 
 
 Often against our marble Column high 
 Wolf, Lion, Bear, proud Eagle and base Snake 
 Even to their own debasement insult shower ; 
 Lifts against these and theirs her mournful cry 
 The noble Dame who calls thee here to break 
 Away the evil weeds which will not flower. 
 A thousand years and more ! and gallant men 
 There fixed her seat in beauty and in power ; 
 The breed of patriot hearts has failed since then ! 
 And, in their stead, upstart and haughty now, 
 A race, which ne'er to her in reverence bends, 
 Her husband, father thou ! 
 Like care from thee and counsel she attends, 
 As o'er his other works the Sire of all extends. 
 
 'Tis seldom e'en that with our fairest schemes 
 Some adverse fortune wall not mix, and mar 
 With instant ill ambition's noblest dreams ; 
 But thou, once ta'en thy path, so walk that I 
 May pardon her past faults, great as they are, 
 
AN ECLOGUE OF ROME. 113 
 
 If now at least she give herself the lie. 
 For never, in all memory, as to thee, 
 To mortal man so sure and straight the way 
 Of everlasting honour open lay, 
 For thine the power and will, if right I see, 
 To lift our empire to its old proud state, 
 Let this thy glory be ! 
 
 They succoured her when young, and strong and great, 
 He, in her weak old age, warded the stroke of Fate, 
 
 Forth on thy way, my Song ! and, where the bold 
 Tarpeian lifts his brow, shouldst thou behold, 
 Of others' weal more thoughtful than his own, 
 The chief, by general Italy revered, 
 Tell him from me, to whom he is but known 
 As one to Virtue and by Fame endeared, 
 Till stamped upon his heart the sad truth be, 
 That, day by day to thee, 
 With suppliant attitude and streaming eyes, 
 For justice and relief our seven-hilled city cries." 
 
 Macgregor. 
 
 About the same time he wrote his fifth Eclogue, 
 entitled " Pietas Pastoralis," which he sent to Eienzi, with 
 a pleasing letter to describe its mystical meaning. Two 
 peasants, Martius and Apicius, hold a dialogue on the 
 restoration of the old farmhouse' and the old bridge. 
 A shepherd urges them to proceed with the work, and 
 whilst they demur and delay, a winged messenger an- 
 nounces that another has undertaken it. The old farm- 
 house is the Capitol, the bridge is the Milvian Bridge. 
 The contending peasants are types of the Eoman com- 
 munity. The successful intervener is Eienzi himself. 
 He it is who is to silence differences, tame the savage 
 beasts, promulgate laws, and drive away the enemy. 
 
 F.C. IV. H 
 
114 PETRARCH. 
 
 "Thou art," the letter ends, "this younger brother of 
 Eome. The rest is clear to thee. Farewell, great man, 
 and remember me." Epist. Var., 42. 
 
 Eienzi may have been a braggart in power and a 
 coward in the time of danger; but he was the cham- 
 pion of municipal freedom and Eoman independence. 
 The cause, more than the man, kindled the sympathy of 
 Petrarch. Eienzi had communicated to the poet his 
 great design when first they met at Avignon in 1343, 
 in one of the churches of that city; and as the future 
 tribune spoke, his burning words inflamed his hearer 
 and enlisted him in his undertaking. " From that day 
 forth," he writes, " I have been tossed between hope and 
 fear. Oh ! if ever oh ! if in this our day oh that I 
 should ever share in so great a work and so great a glory !" 
 
 The glory sank in crime and disgrace. It is a lasting 
 stain on Petrarch's memory that in the passion of the 
 revolution he exhorted Eienzi to strike and spare not 
 even those to whom he was himself bound by the strongest 
 ties of gratitude and affection. " All severity is an act of 
 piety ; all pity is an act of inhumanity." His rhetoric 
 became ferocious, and he imagined that he imitated Brutus 
 in sacrificing his friends. Eienzi ultimately arrived at 
 Avignon in chains ; for, having escaped to Prague, the 
 Emperor Charles IV. sent him back to the Pope in 
 1350; yet Petrarch retained sufficient influence at the 
 Papal Court to lighten his imprisonment, and sufficient 
 interest in his fallen hero to restore him to liberty. 
 But the ties which bound the poet to the Colonna family 
 were broken for ever. The " Glorious Colonna " to 
 whom one of the noblest of his early sonnets had been 
 addressed was laid low. The youthful scions of that 
 
INGRATITUDE TO THE COLONNAS. 115 
 
 great house shared his fate. The venerable grandsire 
 survived his children. The Cardinal died in the follow- 
 ing year. Petrarch confessed that he owed them every- 
 thing ; but " dearer than even these," he said, " is the 
 commonwealth, dearer is Eome, dearer is Italy." 1 The 
 Colonnas behaved with dignity, and showed no unmanly 
 resentment, when Petrarch quitted Avignon ; and in 
 after-years he lived to say of them, " They will always be 
 my lords and at the same time my children, as many as 
 spring from that, root which I loved and still love." 
 
 There are not many passages in modern English 
 literature more happily conceived or more admirably 
 expressed than the speech placed by Walter Savage 
 Landor in the mouth of Petrarch, in that portion of the 
 dialogues with Boccaccio which relates to the triumph 
 and the fall of Eienzi. It narrates with truth and feel- 
 ing this entire passage in his poetic history. 
 
 " The luxury and rapacity of the Church, together with 
 the insolence of the barons, excited that discontent which 
 emboldened Nicolo de Eienzi to assume the station of Tri- 
 bune. Singular was the prudence and opportune the bold- 
 ness he manifested at first. His modesty, his piety, his calm 
 serenity, his unbiassed justice, won to him the affections of 
 every good citizen, and struck horror into the fastnesses of 
 
 1 This expression occurs in one of the letters addressed by Petrarch 
 to the Commission of Four Cardinals appointed "by Clement VI. to re- 
 port on the reform of government in Home. The poet does not hesi- 
 tate to say that the root of the evil is the domination of the two great 
 houses of Orsini and Colonna, to one of which he was personally 
 attached ; and that the essential reform of government in Home must 
 place it on a popular basis. The Cardinals did but little ; but the 
 people of Rome elected one Cerroni as their chief, who carried on 
 the government of the city with success until the return of the Pope 
 in 1367. 
 
116 PETRARCH. 
 
 every castellated felon. He might by degrees have restored 
 the Kepublic of Rome, had he preserved his moderation ; he 
 might have become the master of Italy, had he continued the 
 master of himself: but he allowed the weakest of the passions 
 to run away with him : he fancied he could not inebriate 
 himself too soon with the intemperance of power. He called 
 for seven crowns, and placed them successively on his head; 
 he cited Lewis of Bavaria and Charles of Bohemia to appear 
 and plead their causes before him ; and lastly, not content 
 with exasperating and concentrating the hostility of bar- 
 barians, he set at defiance the best and highest feelings of his 
 more instructed countrymen, and displayed his mockery of 
 religion and decency by bathing in the porphyry font at the 
 Lateran. How my soul grieved for his defection ! How 
 bitterly burst forth my complaints when he ordered the 
 imprisonment of Stefano Colonna in his ninetieth year ! For 
 these atrocities you know with what reproaches I assailed 
 him, traitor as he was to the noblest cause that ever strung 
 the energies of mankind. For this cause, under his auspices, 
 I had abandoned all hope of favour and protection from the 
 Pontiff; I had cast into peril, almost into perdition, the 
 friendship, familiarity, and love of the Colonnas. Even you, 
 Giovanni, thought me more rash than you would say you 
 thought me, and wondered at seeing me whirled along with 
 the tempestuous triumph that seemed mounting to the 
 Capitol. The calmness, the sagacity, the sanctitude of 
 Rienzi, in the ascent to his elevation, rendered him only the 
 more detestable for his abuse of power. Nothing is so im- 
 moral or pernicious as to keep up the illusion of greatness in 
 wicked men. Their crimes, because they have fallen into 
 the gulf of time, we call misfortunes, and, amid ten thousand 
 mourners, grieve only for them who made them so. Is this 
 reason ? Is this humanity 1 Alas ! it is man." l 
 
 1 Landor's Pentameron, Second Day. 
 
117 
 
 CHAPTEE XII. 
 
 THE DEATH OF LAURA. 
 
 These were stormy and dreadful times. In 1348 the 
 Black Death, as it was called, a pestilence of extreme 
 virulence, spread over Europe. An outbreak of religious 
 fanaticism in the sect styled the Elagellants followed in 
 its train. The contest between France and England was 
 at its height; Crecy was fought in 1346, Poictiers ten 
 years later ; and the land of Erance, which Petrarch had 
 visited in happier days, was utterly laid waste. Italy, 
 too, was devastated by civil war notwithstanding which, 
 Petrarch returned to Parma and Yerona. On the 6th 
 April, the twenty-first anniversary of the day when he 
 had first seen Laura at the Church of St Clara, the 
 plague terminated, after a short illness, the life of that 
 adored lady. To me the following lines, which Petrarch 
 inscribed on the first leaf of his favourite manuscript 
 of Virgil, are more touching than the numerous sonnets 
 he devoted to her memory : 
 
 " Laura, illustrious by her virtues, and long celebrated in 
 my soijgs, first greeted my eyes in the days of my youth the 
 6th April 1327, at Avignon ; and in the same city, at the 
 same hour of the same 6th April, but in the year 1348, 
 
118 PETRARCH. 
 
 withdrew from life, whilst I was at Verona, unconscious of 
 my loss. The melancholy truth was made known to me by 
 letters which I received at Parma on the 19th May. 
 
 " Her chaste and lovely body was interred on the evening 
 of the same day, in the Church of the Minorites ; her soul, 
 as I believe, returned to heaven whence it came. 
 
 " To write these lines in bitter memory of this event, and 
 in the place where they will most often meet my eyes, has in 
 it something of a cruel sweetness, lest I forget that nothing 
 more ought in this life to please me, which by the grace of 
 God need not be difficult to one who thinks strenuously and 
 manfully of the idle cares, the empty hopes, and the unex- 
 pected end of the years that are gone." 
 
 To that ideal passion which inspired the verses of 
 Petrarch, the death of Laura was not so much the 
 severance of earthly ties as the consummation of desire 
 by immortality. It was not the triumph of Death over 
 Love, but of Love over Death. The barriers which life 
 had interposed between them fell away; and, like the 
 Beatrice of a greater poet, the beauty of Laura seemed 
 renovated by a celestial grace, when her finger pointed 
 the path to heaven. Hence the second part of the 
 Canzoniere, written in Petrarch's maturer years, and 
 after the death of Laura, appears to me to surpass the 
 first in elevation of thought and beauty of language. 
 Yet these poems breathe more of art than of nature; 
 and I confess there is more true pathos in Burns's lines 
 to " Mary in Heaven," than in all the sonnets and 
 canzonets which Petrarch composed on the graces of his 
 mistress. They are the creation of the fancy rather than 
 of the heart ; and they excite pleasure and admiration 
 by the exquisite purity of language and rhythm in the 
 original, without touching the deeper sources of tender- 
 
SONNETS ON THE DEATH OF LAUKA. 119 
 
 ness and grief. The three following specimens of these 
 celebrated effusions may give the reader an idea of 
 them : 
 
 Sonnet. 
 
 " Death ! thou the world without a sun hast left, 
 Obscure and cold, Love blind and wanting arms, 
 Gentleness naked, Beauty without charms, 
 Me sunk in sorrow and of quiet reft, 
 
 Gaiety banished, Courtesy laid low 
 
 I mourn alone what all should with me mourn. 
 
 For thou the fair germ hast of virtue torn, 
 
 Its first worth spent, when shaU a second blow 'I 
 
 Ocean and air and earth her dirge should sing 
 To the duU world, without her, which is made 
 A flowerless meadow and a gemless ring. 
 
 It knew her not while still on earth she stayed ; 
 I knew her, who in grief yet linger here, 
 And heaven, who, in my loss, more beauteous doth 
 appear/' Macgregor. 
 
 Sonnet. 
 
 " The eyes, the face, the limbs of heavenly mould, 
 So long the theme of my impassioned lay, 
 Charms which so stole me from myself away, 
 That strange to other men the course I hold ; 
 
 The crisped locks of pure and lucid gold, 
 The lightning of the angelic smile, whose ray 
 To earth could all of Paradise convey, 
 A little dust are now ! to feeling cold l 
 
 And yet I Hve ! but that I live bewail, 
 
 Sunk the loved light that through the tempest led 
 My shattered bark, bereft of mast and sail ; 
 
 Hushed be the song that breathed love's purest fire ! 
 Lost is the theme on which my fancy fed, 
 And turned to mourning my once tuneful lyre." 
 
 Lady Dacre. 
 
120 PETRARCH. 
 
 Sonnet. 
 
 " Recalling the soft looks which heaven adorn, 
 
 The sweet face, and, half bowed, the sunbright hair, 
 That modest angel voice, whose music rare 
 There soothed the heart which now is left forlorn, 
 
 I marvel much I still in life am borne ; 
 
 Nor should I live, but she (who, good and fair 
 Which most she was, left still in doubt) is there, 
 Ready to shield me and to save each morn. 
 
 Oh then our wel comings how sweet yet chaste, 
 And how attentively she notes and hears 
 The tender history of my lifelong pains ! 
 
 But in the East when day's bright step is traced 
 She turns to heaven, her own home that appears, 
 With glistening eye and cheek which pity stains." 
 
 Macgregor. 
 
 The lofty Column was shattered and the Laurel 
 was withered, for the head of the house of Colonna 
 died at Avignon within a short time of the death 
 of Laura. Petrarch, who had lived on love and 
 friendship, was absent and estranged from those 
 whose former bounty had raised him from the dust. 
 But he was destined to survive them twenty-six active 
 and not inglorious years. His lyre was not broken; 
 his pen was not idle. And if his writings assumed 
 a more melancholy tone, it was not so much to mourn 
 over his departed friends as over himself. He returned 
 ere long to Yaucluse ; but there, too, he was surrounded 
 by the memorials of departed friendship and disap- 
 pointed love. 
 
RETURN TO VAUCLUSE. 121 
 
 Sonnet. 
 
 * I feel mine ancient air ; and see where rise 
 
 Mine own sweet hills, where sprung that star so bright 
 Which, while heaven pleased, with passion and delight, 
 As now with tears and sorrow, filled mine eyes. 
 
 vain and foolish thoughts ! hopes born to fade ! 
 Turbid the stream, the green bowers in decay, 
 Empty and cold the nest in which she lay, 
 "Where now I live, where dead I would be laid : 
 
 1 hoped from the bright eyes which fired my breast, 
 From the soft sighs, she might at length afford 
 To my worn wounded soul some hope of rest. 
 
 But no I served a stern and thankless lord ; 
 Alive, with a vain flame he let me burn, 
 And dead, he leaves me o'er her dust to mourn." 
 
 Macgregor-. 
 
 Yet, amidst these touching memorials of the past, Pet- 
 rarch retained imperishable sources of consolation. "I 
 trust," he said, " that Fortune will not again behold me 
 broken and in tears." His literary activity never relaxed. 
 Sixteen hours of the day were devoted to reading or 
 composition. Frequently his slumber was interrupted 
 by his studies or his prayers. His interest in public 
 affairs was not checked by his love of solitude. And as 
 life drew on, his philosophy and his affections sought and 
 found a serener resting-place in faith and piety. "What 
 Chaucer calls " the love as to a creature," melted into the 
 "affeccyoun of holiness;" and the volume of rhymes, 
 dedicated to an earthly mistress, closes with an invocation 
 of the Virgin, scarcely less tender than any of his earlier 
 poems : 
 
122 PETRARCH. 
 
 " Virgin of grace, eternal and most sure ! 
 Thou blessed planet of a stormy sea ! 
 Of every mariner the guide secure, 
 
 Though I recall my many sins, and see 
 The tempest of my passion rudderless, 
 And hear the last long cry of my distress. 
 Yet has my soul its confidence in thee ! 
 
 The day is coming it can not be long : 
 So fast Time journey eth ! 
 Thou, Virgin, thou art blessed and art strong : 
 My heart is stung by conscience and by death ; 
 But to the mercy of thy Son's control 
 (True Man and perfect God) commend my soul, 
 That He receive in peace my parting breath." 
 
 The philosophy of Petrarch, in spite of his admiration 
 for the writings of Seneca, was not of the Stoical school. 
 He was unable to bear with stern resignation the trials 
 of the world. Neither fame nor power neither solitude 
 nor study could reconcile him to the loss of his friends, 
 several of whom died in rapid succession in the fatal 
 year of the plague, or to the death of his mistress. 
 But these mournful sentiments the sense of human 
 ignorance and frailty the pangs of broken affections, 
 were corrected by a noble and abiding trust in that higher 
 state of existence in which the intellect is unclouded, 
 the passions pure, and love eternal. His complaint was 
 answered by his belief in the immortal destiny of the 
 soul of man; and those conceptions of the spiritual 
 nature of our being which Plato had revealed to classical 
 antiquity, and Christianity had realised in a sublimer and 
 more certain language, were the solace of all his cares. 
 
 This union of contemplative with active life or rather, 
 the rapid and frequent alternation of his solitary studies 
 
HIS SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY. 123 
 
 at Yaucluse, and his reappearace on the scene of public 
 events continued until near the close of his existence. 
 Indeed some of the sonnets to the memory of Laura 
 were written in the midst of his Italian travels; and 
 the treatises or dialogues " On the Remedies of either 
 Fortune," and " On the Ignorance of Himself and Others," 
 were begun on the banks of the Po, or at the turbulent 
 Court of the Viscontis. His political influence continued 
 to increase, and he was still only on the verge of his 
 greatest triumphs. 
 
124 
 
 CHAPTEE XIII. 
 
 THE EMPEROR AND THE VISCONTIS.' 
 
 The failure of Eienzi to establish a civil government 
 in Eome, and to restore the authority of the Eoman Ee- 
 public, was a great blow to Petrarch's hopes. But the 
 object he had in view was an ideal Eome, caring little in 
 what form or by what means the state of the Imperial city 
 was revived. From Eienzi, therefore, he turned, within 
 a short period, to the Emperor Charles IV. If the Pope 
 could not be moved from Avignon if the tribune of the 
 Eoman people was unworthy to be free the next best 
 course was to re-establish in Eome the one Imperial author- 
 ity. That was the Ghibelline cause, to which Dante had 
 devoted his treatise on Monarchy ; and it was forcibly 
 expressed by Petrarch in the letter addressed by him to 
 Charles IV., on the 20th February 1350. In rhetorical 
 language he invoked the advent of the Bohemian sov- 
 ereign, as if he were an Italian prince, "for thou art 
 Caesar ! " He drew a picture of Eome herself, under the 
 figure of a venerable matron, pale, torn, and broken in 
 all but her undaunted soul, to invite the presence of her 
 lord. "The way is open," she said; "the task easy; 
 the glory great. To Charles alone had Almighty God 
 
THE COURT OF MILAN. 125 
 
 reserved the glory of this enterprise." The call was not 
 unheard : and, five years later, Petrarch himself entered 
 Milan with the Imperial Court; but, as is usually the 
 case with these visions of glory, the result was not what 
 the poet had fondly anticipated. 
 
 It cannot be denied that Petrarch sought and courted 
 that patronage of the great which Dante accepted or 
 endured with scorn and disdain : in what was then the 
 state of Italy, perhaps this condition of dependence was 
 inevitable by either poet. But it is not to the honour of 
 Petrarch that, after his estrangement from the Colonnas, 
 and the extinction of his friends in that illustrious house, 
 he passed, almost without an interval, to the Court of 
 the Viscontis, who were justly regarded as the most des- 
 potic and cruel of the princely tyrants of Italy. The 
 transition was the more singular as Azo di Correggio, 
 Petrarch's early friend, had been betrayed and persecuted 
 by Luchino Visconti. He seems to have thought, him- 
 self, that his conduct needed some justification, for 
 thus he wrote from Milan to the prior of the Santi 
 Apostoli : 
 
 " You know my habits. I love to shake off fatigue of mind 
 by a change of place and things. Thus it came to pass that 
 I was returning to France after two years' absence, and had 
 reached Milan, when this greatest of Italians " (he means the 
 Visconti) " cast his hand upon me more gently, more honour- 
 ably, than I deserved, or hoped, or even desired. I pleaded 
 my occupations, my hatred of the crowd, my love of quiet ; 
 but he parried all my objections, and not only promised, but 
 has provided, me with a solitary retreat in the midst of this 
 vast city. I therefore agreed to stay, changing nothing in 
 my mode of life, and but little in my habitation, as long as I 
 preserve all my liberty and independence. How long that 
 
126 PETKAKCH. 
 
 may be I know not ; but apparently not long, if I compare 
 myself and him, and the difference of our cares and pursuits. 
 I am living in the outskirts of the city, near the Basilica of 
 St Ambrose. My house is cheerful, on the left side of the 
 church, which rears its leaden pinnacle and double towers 
 before me ; behind I look out on the city walls, and the ridge 
 of the Alps, still crested with snow, though the summer is 
 far spent. But the greatest of all my delights is, that I see 
 not only the tomb, but the living image, of St Ambrose on 
 the walls. I am sure it is like him such is the dignity of 
 the forehead, the majesty of the brow, the serenity of his 
 eyes." 
 
 And again he wrote in the following letter : 
 
 " I was aware what might be said of me. I am in the 
 hands of the public. My lot is an old one. But do not dis- 
 trust. I shall be the more famous for this rub. The public 
 see what I do ; they know not what I think : so that my bet- 
 ter part indeed my inner self lies hid. Be it so. We are 
 judged by our actions. What does the public want 1 Under 
 all the circumstances, I have done for the best ; or, if not 
 that, the least evil. Be it good or bad, I did what was neces- 
 sary. . . . Among other reasons for my staying, he urged 
 that he too was an ecclesiastic, 1 and most devout for a man of 
 such high rank, and that for an honest man to shun his con- 
 versation was a mark of pride. At last, if I am to confess 
 to you the whole truth, when I was curiously inquiring what 
 he wanted of me, since I had none of the qualifications he 
 required, he replied that he wanted nothing of me save my 
 presence, to do honour to himself and to his Court. Con- 
 quered by this compliment, I blushed, was silent, and my 
 silence gave, or was supposed to give, consent. I knew not 
 what to answer. I wish I could persuade the public of all 
 this as easily as yourself. But the public says what it pleases : 
 we do what we can. Farewell." Epist. Fam., xvi. ep. 11 
 and 12. 
 
 1 Giovanni Visconti was Archbishop as well as Lord of Milan. 
 He died in 1354. 
 
NEGOTIATIONS AND ROYAL MARRIAGES. 127 
 
 Certain it is that, in spite of these disavowals, Pet- 
 rarch remained eight years at the Court of the Visconti ; 
 and although he continued to live apart, like a student 
 or an ecclesiastic, he became one of the chief ministers 
 of that prince, and was loaded by him and his nephews 
 with honours and rewards. !Nor were his public ser- 
 vices inconsiderable. In 1354 he went to Venice as the 
 ambassador of Giovanni Visconti, to negotiate a peace 
 with the republic of Genoa. He harangued the people 
 of Milan on the day that the three brothers, Matteo, 
 Barnabe, and Galeazzo, made their triumphal entry. He 
 stood godfather to Marco Visconti. He witnessed the 
 treaty of peace signed at Mantua between the Viscontis 
 and the Emperor. He was sent by Galeazzo as their 
 ambassador to Prague ; and, upon the return of King 
 John of France from his captivity in England, after the 
 battle of Poictiers, Petrarch was chosen to proceed to 
 Paris to congratulate him. In that transaction he had 
 probably taken a more active part, for Galeazzo Visconti 
 had lent the King of Erance (nomine mutui sive doni) 
 the sum of 600,000 florins, as a contribution to his ran- 
 som; and in return the King agreed to bestow his daughter 
 Isabella on the son of Galeazzo Visconti in marriage. 
 Nor was this the only royal marriage in which Petrarch 
 bore some part. In 1368 Violante Visconti was married 
 with singular magnificence to Lionel, Duke of Clarence, 
 second son of Edward III, and brother of the Black 
 Prince ; and, upon the invitation of the princes, whom 
 he had helped to raise to these alliances with the royal 
 houses of Erance and England, Petrarch took his seat 
 at the royal table. 
 
 Whilst the poet was loaded with honours in other 
 
128 PETRARCH. 
 
 parts of Italy, from Naples to the foot of the Alps, there 
 was no State in which his fame and personal merit had 
 been so little acknowledged, or which he had revisited 
 so little, as his native republic of Florence, to which, in- 
 deed, he owed no more than his place of birth, most 
 grudgingly bestowed on him. Probably he felt some 
 resentment against his countrymen, who had unjustly 
 disgraced and banished his father, and cast himself upon 
 the life of an exile. The world had used him well, but 
 he owed nothing to Florence. At length, however, the 
 day of reparation came ; and it was the more welcome, as 
 the florid address of the Prior of Arts and Gonfalonier 
 of Justice which invited their most beloved countryman 
 back to his native town, and promised the restoration of 
 his paternal fields at the public expense, was brought to 
 Petrarch by the friendly hand of Boccaccio on the 6th 
 April 1351 a day already marked by two of the chief 
 events of his life. His friendship for Boccaccio had com- 
 menced in the previous year, and it remained unbroken 
 till his death. The answer of Petrarch to the republic 
 has been preserved. It is written in the high-flown lan- 
 guage of the time and country ; but he adds, with more 
 simplicity and feeling 
 
 " It is, glorious citizens ! a lasting credit to you, and no 
 small comfort to me, that you have thought fit to restore the 
 sweet and chosen seat in which my father, my grandfather, 
 and his father too, a man of no great letters, but of much in- 
 telligence in which these my forefathers, more conspicuous 
 by their honesty than their escutcheons, for generations grew 
 old. I indeed, whether by the aid of nature or of fortune, 
 have flown higher. But now, by you, my old nest is restored 
 to me ; I can fly back to it, and I can fold there my wander- 
 ing wings. And this great gift has been restored to me in 
 
THE EMPEROR CHARLES IV. IN ITALY. 129 
 
 language so flattering, that I must be of stone if it did not 
 serve to light me on to glory and to spur me on to virtue." 
 
 It was not, however, as a citizen of Florence, but as 
 an Italian, and as a servant and adviser of the Italian 
 princes, the King of Naples, the Pope, the Dukes of 
 Milan and Yerona, and the Doge of Venice, that Petrarch 
 was in his political career illustrious. And these rela- 
 tions were all subject in his mind to the grand object 
 of the restoration of the unity of the empire centring 
 in Rome, by the side of the Pope's spiritual power. It 
 deserves a passing remark that in the fourteenth century 
 the temporal power of the Popes had no existence in the 
 sense it acquired in the following ages. They had ceased 
 to be sovereigns of Rome itself in more than name. 
 Their Court was held in Avignon, which scarcely be- 
 longed to them. The occupation of Rome by the em- 
 perors would not have been, in the eyes of Petrarch, any 
 invasion of the Papal rights. 
 
 In the month of October 1354, four years after the 
 date of Petrarch's invocation, the Emperor Charles IV. 
 entered Italy, but without an army. The poet met him 
 at Mantua in the course of the following winter, and he 
 tells us that nothing could be more affable or polite than 
 the demeanour of the prince ; but he adds significantly, 
 " Trust not in looks." Charles having asked him to whom 
 his book ' On Illustrious Men ' was to be dedicated, his 
 answer, as he records it, was in the following terms : 
 
 " ' As for thee, Caesar ! know that thou wilt be worthy of 
 the gift and inscription of this book, when thou shalt have 
 enranged thyself among the great, not by the splendour of a 
 name or the glitter of a crown alone, but by noble actions 
 and a virtuous 80111.' Which saying he was pleased to ap- 
 
 f c. IV I 
 
130 PETRARCH. 
 
 prove by a serene glance from the eyes, and an august sign 
 from his brow. So I judged that the moment was opportune 
 for me to present him with a few gold and silver medals 
 which I was myself very fond of. The features of Augustus 
 Caesar seemed almost alive, and I exclaimed : * These, 
 Emperor, are the effigies of the sovereigns whom thou must 
 study and imitate. I would not have given them to any 
 man save thee ; but to thee they were due, since thou must 
 not only know but follow them.' I then hastily recapitu- 
 lated the chief incitements to virtue which marked their lives, 
 with which he was much pleased, and he appeared never to 
 have received a more agreeable present/' Epist. Fam., x. 3. 
 
 Petrarch accompanied the Emperor to Milan, where 
 a peace was concluded with the Yisconti and the 
 monarch received the iron crown; but he declined 
 to proceed farther towards Borne. He seems to have 
 begun to suspect that these Germans were not, after all, 
 the Roman emperors of his dreams. Charles, however, 
 reached the Eternal City, and was crowned there on 
 Easter Sunday by a Papal legate; but, by a singular 
 provision, he engaged not to sleep in the city after the 
 ceremony and he, in fact, made over the supreme 
 authority to the Pope. This was exactly the reverse of 
 what Petrarch had anticipated and desired. The im- 
 perial mirage had been as short-lived as the democratic 
 revolution. "The Emperor," he bitterly exclaimed, 
 " came to Rome only to be crowned there. But he who 
 wears the tiara on the banks of the Rhone, orders him to 
 quit the city, and whilst he allows him to bear the title 
 of emperor, forbids him to exercise its rights. With 
 one hand he opens the temple where the imperial crown 
 is bestowed ; with the other he closes the gates of the 
 city, which is the seat and capital of the empire." 
 
THE EMPEROR ABANDONS ITALY. 131 
 
 In truth, the retreat of the Emperor was as ignominious 
 as his presence in Italy had been idle. He was insulted 
 in Pisa and in Milan, and was glad to save himself, % by 
 recrossing the Alps, from personal danger. Again all 
 Petrarch's hopes of the political regeneration of Italy were 
 destroyed ; and he broke out in a strain of violent objur- 
 gation against his illustrious patron : 
 
 " You renounce these glorious hopes to return to your own 
 barbarous country. Your departure has the air of a flight. 
 Go, then, if you must ; but never forget, that being master of 
 Kome, you only sighed for Bohemia. Your father and your 
 grandsire might greet you, on such a return, with some such 
 words as these : ' Much have you gained, Csesar, by your 
 long-expected journey and your hasty return. You carry off 
 a crown of iron, a crown of gold, and an empty title ! ' You 
 will be styled Emperor of the Romans, though you are, in 
 fact, only King of Bohemia. Would to God you were not 
 that. Perhaps your ambition, caged within narrower limits, 
 would make an effort to rise, and to recover your patrimony. 
 Csesar, farewell ! Compare what you have left with what you 
 are gone to seek." 
 
 The Emperor seems to have regarded these invectives 
 as the mere ebullition of a literary enthusiast ; if, indeed, 
 the epistle ever reached its destination for perhaps some 
 of Petrarch's letters, like several of Cicero's orations, were 
 never delivered to those to whom they were nominally 
 addressed. At any rate, in the following year the Em- 
 peror conferred on Petrarch the rank of a Count Palatine 
 of the Empire ; and a letter exists from the poet to the 
 Bishop of Olmiitz, then Chancellor of the Empire, in which 
 the compliment is acknowledged with his accustomed 
 fervour. 
 
 It was during the journey of the Emperor to Italy that 
 
132 PETRARCH. 
 
 events of unusual gravity occurred at Venice which must 
 have a peculiar interest to an English reader, for they 
 form the subject of one of Lord Byron's noblest dramas, 
 and they deserve to be related in the very language of 
 Petrarch. In a letter to the Archdeacon of Genoa, on 
 the 24th April 1355, after enlarging on the death of 
 Andrew Dandolo and the great sea-fight of the Genoese 
 and Venetians off Sapienza in the preceding autumn, he 
 on : 
 
 " All this is old, but I have newer intelligence to give you. 
 The late Doge was succeeded by an old man, who came late 
 to the government of the State, yet too soon for the State 
 and for himself a man whom I had long familiarly known, 
 but in whom opinion was mistaken, for he was of more 
 courage than counsel. His name was Marino Faliero. It 
 was not given to him to fulfil his life in the supreme dig- 
 nity, for he entered the palace with the wrong foot. This 
 magistrate, consecrated by the traditions of all time in that 
 city, and worshipped as antiquity worshipped its divinities, 
 has been by the Venetians, within the last three days, be- 
 headed in the vestibule of his own palace. I can ill explain the 
 cause of such an event. But no one justifies him : all say that 
 he sought to change I know not what in the constitution of 
 the republic. The strangest thing is, that he was absent on 
 a mission to the banks of the Rhone to the Roman Pontiff to 
 negotiate a peace, first attempted by myself and afterwards by 
 him, equally in vain, when the honour of election to be Doge 
 was conferred on him, without his seeking it or even knowing 
 it. On his return to Venice he seems to have thought what no 
 one had thought before, and to have suffered what no man had 
 suffered. In the most famous and beautiful spot of all those 
 which I have visited, where his ancestors had frequently 
 walked in triumph there, like a slave, stripped of the insignia 
 of his rank, and dragged by a concourse of the people, he lost 
 his head, and polluted with his blood the doors of the sanctu- 
 
MARINO FALIERO. 133 
 
 ary, the entrance to the palace, and those marble stairs, so 
 often glorified by solemn festivals or trophies torn from the 
 enemy. Such was the place. I also mark the time. It was 
 in this year 1355, on the 18th April. The excitement is so 
 great, that whoever considers the manners and discipline of 
 that city, and how great a change the death of a single man 
 may threaten to bring about (though it is said that others are 
 included in the same conspiracy), will acknowledge that no 
 greater event has occurred in our times in Italy. I absolve 
 the people, though perhaps they might have vindicated their 
 rights with less severity. I pity and am indignant with the 
 unhappy man, who was invested with an honour he had not 
 strength to bear, and who seems to have acquired in earlier 
 life a false repute for wisdom. But this event shows, as in a 
 mirror, to the chiefs and rulers of States, that they may look 
 upon themselves not as the lords, or even dukes, but as the 
 honoured servants of the commonwealth. Farewell ! and 
 as public affairs are agitated, let us endeavour to guide our 
 private life with moderation." x 
 
 1 Rawdon Brown's Preface to the Venetian State Papers. The 
 details of the conspiracy (if conspiracy it was) for which Marino 
 Faliero suffered have always remained, as they were to Petrarch, 
 obscure, for the Council of Ten took especial care to conceal them. 
 The fourth volume of the 'Misti Consiglio X.' contains its decrees 
 for the year 1355. On Friday, 17th April, of that year (not, as Pet- 
 rarch says, the 18th), Marino Faliero was beheaded. In the usual 
 course the minutes of the trial should have been entered on the 
 33d page of that volume ; but in their stead there is a blank space 
 and the words 
 
 "N SCBATUR' 
 Let it not be written. 
 
134 
 
 CHAPTEE XIV. 
 
 THE PAPAL POWER. 
 
 The hopes which Petrarch had cherished of the restora- 
 tion of a Eoman republic under Eienzi, or a Eoman 
 empire under Charles IV., were, as we have seen, 
 speedily blighted. Eienzi, indeed, did contrive to return 
 to Eome in 1354, but only to be put to death by the 
 people he had misled. A third element of Eoman power 
 remained that of the Church; but in the eyes of 
 Petrarch, as well as of Dante, the Papacy itself was 
 denationalised, and almost unchristianised, by the volun- 
 tary exile to Avignon, and by the successive election of 
 five French prelates to the great Italian see. The hatred 
 and contempt of the poets for the Popes, the cardinals, 
 and the clergy, as long as they lived in a French palace 
 and wore a French livery, were essentially the result of 
 national jealousy and distrust. It may be doubted 
 whether the great Catholic poet himself had in view 
 any serious reformation of the discipline or doctrine of 
 the Church, beyond the return of the Pontiff to the 
 shrine of the Apostles and the throne of the Vatican. 
 But the relations of Petrarch to the Popes differed widely 
 from those of Dante. He was no outlawed and exiled 
 
PETRARCH'S LIBERAL OPINIONS. 135 
 
 Ghibelline, who asks himself whether bread might not 
 be wanting, but a favourite and a courtier of those same 
 Pontiffs whom he accused. He accepted favours and 
 benefices at their hands. He gave them counsel; and 
 five times he refused one of the highest offices a Pope 
 could bestow. In one of his garrulous but amusing 
 letters, he relates the pressure put upon him to take 
 office by two cardinals, and by the Pope himself. He 
 pleaded his love of liberty and his contempt of money, 
 for in those days political power meant enormous wealth; 
 yet almost had the tempter prevailed, when he was 
 suddenly asked whether he could bend his grand and 
 oratorical style to the humble and subtle language be- 
 fitting the Court of Eome. " Impossible," said the poet. 
 " If my style is too good for the place, the place is not 
 good enough for me ; " and so he preserved his freedom. 
 It is extremely remarkable that in all Petrarch's polit- 
 ical writings his sympathies are ever on the side of the 
 people. One does not expect to find in a poet, a courtier, 
 and a . prebendary of the fourteenth century, raised to 
 distinction by aristocratic patronage, and to wealth by 
 Church preferment, so strong and faithful an adherence 
 to liberal opinions. He derived them, with much of 
 his philosophy, from the noble source of antiquity. The 
 republics of Greece and Eome, with their grand tradi- 
 tions, their patriots, their liberties, and their glory, in- 
 spired him with admiration for popular government, and 
 for models of virtue which nothing in his own times 
 could claim to represent. Thus, in a letter to four 
 cardinals who had asked his advice on the reform of 
 the Eoman commonwealth, he scrupled not to inveigh 
 against the baronial houses which had usurped the su- 
 
136 PETRARCH. 
 
 preme power in Home, and told them that the present 
 welfare of the people could never be secured till this 
 oppression was removed. 
 
 "Wrest, therefore," he went on, "this pestilent tyranny 
 from their grasp, in spite of them ; and not only admit the 
 common people of Rome to a share of public honours, but 
 take the ill-administered functions of the Senate from un- 
 worthy hands. These nobles, if they were citizens, and good 
 citizens, could lawfully claim but a part of this authority ; 
 but, behaving as they do, they are unworthy of the State, 
 which they destroy, and of the fellowship of the citizens, 
 whom they oppress to say nothing of honour. How vain 
 is the boast of nobility and wealth by those who have no 
 claim of virtue ! for even the old Romans, whose virtue was 
 great and excellent, failed to exclude the people from the 
 honours of the State. As often as this contest was renewed, the 
 proud nobility w T as always beaten by the humble multitude." 
 
 Whatever may have been the position of Petrarch un- 
 der John XXII. and Benedict XII., who were the Popes 
 of his earlier years, he certainly enjoyed considerable in- 
 fluence under Clement VI., who was a cultivated prelate. 
 Innocent VI. took him for a magician, because he read 
 Virgil ; and Virgil had in the middle ages the mystical 
 character of a Sibylline prophet. This, as Petrarch says 
 in a letter to Cardinal Talleyrand, was no joke, when 
 this same personage was elected Pope. If he was a 
 magician, there were two things to be done he might be 
 burnt, or he might be made a Minister of the Holy See. 
 Innocent offered to take the latter course. The poet 
 replied, rather sarcastically, " It cannot be that the man 
 who is chosen by the Pope to be his secretary should be 
 deemed a necromancer, or that one who is initiated in 
 his secret counsels, and even writes his sacred name, 
 
CHURCH PREFERMENT. 137 
 
 should be supposed to practise sorcery." To all such 
 offers Petrarch opposed his modesty, his disinterested- 
 ness, and above all, and with greater truth, his aversion 
 to responsibility and fatigue. 
 
 Yet this same Pontiff, Innocent VI., not only con- 
 ferred two benefices on Petrarch, and offered several 
 more, but repeatedly pressed on him the political office 
 the poet had so often declined. Pope Clement VI., as 
 we learn from a letter written nearly at the close of 
 his life from Arqua, had intended to make him a bishop ; 
 but the poet declares that he never would consent to be 
 a prelate, or to hold a benefice with cure of souls, how- 
 ever rich. In fact, he never was in priest's orders ; and 
 the appointments he held in the Church, though suffi- 
 ciently lucrative, were stalls and canonries in several 
 chapters. Even at Arqua, he says 
 
 " I have here a prebend which gives me bread and wine, 
 not only for my own use, but to sell. Residence would 
 increase my income : but I detest the life of cities ; and I 
 had rather hunger in the solitude of the country than live 
 in abundance in towns, though I never can escape from the 
 people who flock about me. I have some servants, whom I 
 cannot do without ; a few horses that is, at present, two ; and 
 generally five or six amanuenses, though at present only three, 
 for they are not easily to be met with, and I like to have 
 illuminators (pictores) who are not blockheads. Then I 
 have one old priest, who does duty for me in church ; and 
 just as I am sitting down to dine alone with him, down 
 comes a host of guests to be entertained with meat and good 
 stories. The thing cannot be avoided, without my appearing 
 either prouder or poorer than I really am. My chief desire 
 is to build a little oratory to the Blessed Virgin here. I am 
 setting about it, though I should have to pawn or sell my 
 books for it." 
 
138 PETRARCH. 
 
 The drift of all this seems to be that he wanted to dip 
 a little deeper into the treasures of Mother Church, who 
 had certainly been a bountiful mother to him; but though 
 these glimpses of real life sometimes disclose the less 
 dignified side of his character, there is a freshness and 
 truth about them which have a peculiar charm. 
 
 The debt of gratitude for substantial favours which 
 Petrarch owed to the Church, and indeed personally to 
 the Pontiffs, did not prevent him from inveighing with 
 extreme virulence against the Papal Court. The work 
 called by him the " Epistola sine Titulo," which appears 
 to have been a clandestine production, abounds in this 
 declamation. The " Eclogues," in Latin hexameters, are 
 really satires in a bucolic form, but sometimes as coarse in 
 language as the Satires of Juvenal. Three of his sonnets, 
 directed against the Eoman Court and clergy, were for 
 centuries proscribed by the Church as impious. Bene- 
 dict XII. he described as a drunkard, Clement YI. as a 
 profligate, Innocent YI. as a fool. Upon the death of 
 this Pope in 1362, the Sacred College proceeded to elect, 
 by a most unusual departure from precedent, not a cardi- 
 nal, but a simple priest, Guillaume de Grimoard, then 
 Abbot of St Yictor at Marseilles, to the highest office in 
 the Church. The new Pope assumed the name of Urban 
 Y., and soon gave signs of intelligence and independence. 
 Petrarch, who was then living at Yenice, hailed this re- 
 markable election as a proof that Providence had great 
 designs to be accomplished by the new Pope ; and Car- 
 dinal Talleyrand, the experienced Minister of the Holy 
 See, exclaimed, "Now we have a Pope indeed." The 
 poet therefore addressed Urban in a congratulatory let- 
 ter; but he declined an invitation to return to the Court 
 
EXHORTATION TO URBAN V. 139 
 
 of Avignon, partly from the dread of having an office 
 forced upon him unsuited to his years, and partly from his 
 firm determination to live free and without care. It was 
 not till the 29th June 1366 that Petrarch addressed the 
 Pope in one of those powerful hortatory letters which on 
 great occasions he hurled, like the prophet of the age, at 
 the rulers of Eome or of the world. He had exhorted 
 Eienzi ; he had exhorted the Emperor ; he had urged 
 each successive Pope to return to Eome : but the most 
 eloquent of those appeals was that made to Urban Y. 
 It fills an entire book of the "Senile Letters" (the 7th), 
 and but a small portion of it can be inserted here : 
 
 "Hearken then to me, Roman Pontiff! hear me, O 
 Christian prince ! Rome invokes you as her spouse, Christ- 
 endom as its chief, calling you to action, not to repose ; to 
 war, not to peace but to a war of short duration, to give 
 lasting peace to the soul, salvation to many, immortal glory 
 to yourself. Choose by what death you would die; for 
 whether you fulfil your glorious office, or whether you basely 
 betray it, death is alike inevitable. Raise yourself, therefore, 
 to this magnanimous enterprise, and turn your back on that 
 which is unworthy of you. God has done great things for 
 you ; neither can that be small which you have to do for 
 Him. The lives of men are short the lives of Popes especi- 
 ally so. When you shall shortly appear before the judgment- 
 seat of Christ, in whose presence you stand not as a master, and 
 we as slaves, but He only as Master, and you, like ourselves, 
 a slave, what if these words are addressed to you, * Poor and 
 humble, I raised thee from the ground, not merely as the 
 equal of princes, but as one above them all. Thou, then, 
 where hast thou left the Church I trusted to your faith ? 
 Por so many gifts vouchsafed to thee, what is thy return? To 
 have kept on the rock of Avignon the seat placed by my 
 hand upon the capitol ' ? 
 
140 PETRARCH. 
 
 " Whatever be your final decision, one prayer at least your 
 Rome addresses to you. May it seem just to you at least to 
 restore to her her other consort, the Emperor, whom your 
 predecessor Innocent VI. succeeded by a rash engagement in 
 divorcing from her. Deign to remove that impediment, and 
 to command that Cresar should return to Rome. As long as 
 Rome remains deprived of both her chiefs, human affairs 
 can never go right, nor can the Christian republic enjoy 
 peace. If either of them return, all will go well ; if both, 
 perfectly, and in the plenitude of glory and success. May 
 Christ our Lord prolong your days, and open your heart to 
 counsels, not smooth or flattering, but just, sincere, and, as I 
 believe, acceptable to God ! " 
 
 These emphatic lines, which I have condensed, ex- 
 press the last political dream of Petrarch's life ; and he 
 had the happiness of thinking that his prayer and ex- 
 hortation had been heard. Urban was not averse to 
 visit Rome. In April 1367 he embarked at Marseilles 
 on a Venetian galley, and, accompanied by a fleet of 
 twenty vessels, sailed for the shores of Italy. He landed 
 at Genoa, received the homage of the Italian princes at 
 Viterbo, and in October entered Rome, where he re- 
 mained three years, encouraged and applauded by the 
 poet. But the effort was made in vain. The peace of 
 Italy, the tranquillity of Rome, were not secured. Urban, 
 in failing health, longed to return to his native country, 
 and arrived there in the autumn of 1370, a few weeks 
 before his death. Petrarch, exasperated at this last 
 disappointment, addressed the dying Pontiff in the stern- 
 est language. "Did you not, like St Peter, when you 
 fled from Rome, meet Christ upon your way? 'Domine, 
 quo vadis V 1 1 go to be crucified there again, since you 
 are departing from it.' " 
 
m 
 
 CHAPTEE XV. 
 
 PETRARCH AT VENICE AND ARQUA. 
 
 Petrarch never resorted to the Court of Urban V., 
 either at Avignon or at Eome, nor does he appear in the 
 last twenty years of his life to have resided at Vaucluse. 
 He started, indeed, for Home in 1370, and made his 
 will before he undertook the journey ; but falling ill at 
 Perrara, he never reached his destination. He had 
 become, he says, not so much a visitor as a denizen of 
 the cities of Northern Italy, Milan, 1 Yerona, then Parma 
 and Perrara, and lastly Padua. No doubt the favour of 
 the reigning princes of these cities first attracted him to 
 them. In 1361, the Emperor, the Pope, and the King 
 of Prance, had all invited him to their respective Courts ; 
 but he preferred to remain at Milan. Although he once 
 set out to visit the Emperor at Prague, I believe he 
 crossed the Alps no more. But as his friends died off, 2 and 
 
 1 Petrarch had a small country-house at Garignano, on the Adda, 
 about three miles from Milan, and mentions that he had already- 
 spent an Olympiad at Milan, and was beginning a lustre. His 
 house in the town, as has been already mentioned, was near St 
 Ambrose. 
 
 2 His friend Socrates died at Avignon in 1361 ; Azo di Correggio in 
 1362 ; and in 1363 his three friends, LaeKus, Francesco Neldi, whom 
 he called Simonides, and Barbato. 
 
142 PETRARCH. 
 
 the favour of princes cooled, the spot which he found most 
 attractive to those who would lead a life of tranquillity 
 and repose was Venice, and there he remained from 1362 
 to 1368. Petrarch had first visited Venice in 1352, 
 when he went there to negotiate the peace ; and he had 
 formed an acquaintance which ripened into friendship 
 with Benintendi da' Ravegnani, Chancellor of the Re- 
 public. In later years Petrarch wrote to Boccaccio a 
 charming description of this Venetian society : 
 
 " Of my old friends, indeed, scarcely one remains except 
 yourself. I know not what has become of our Barbato per- 
 haps he is in the Abruzzi. [Both Lselius and Socrates were 
 recently dead.] Come, then, to my call. Nay, you are in- 
 vited by the mild season of the year by the absence of every 
 care but those of the pleasant and joyous Muse to a most 
 salubrious house, which I do not describe to you, because 
 you know it so well. A choice group of friends awaits you ; 
 I know not which of them is the best company. There is 
 Benintendi, the Chancellor of this famous city, whose disposi- 
 tion agrees with his name, and who, after giving the day to 
 public affairs, reserves the evening for private friendship and 
 polished study. He comes with his cheerful friendly voice 
 in his gondola to refresh himself with pleasant talk, and you 
 already know how delightful are those nocturnal voyages in 
 such company. Then there is our Donato Appeninigena, 
 who has come down from his Tuscan hills to fix himself on 
 this shore of the Adriatic. Or if you are tired of this place, 
 though the conversation of friends makes the sky more blue 
 than any wind that blows, it would be delightful to go with 
 you to Capo d'Istria or Trieste, where I am told the climate 
 is perfect. Or we might go in search of the source of the 
 Timavus, as I have long meant to do ; but it is not in the 
 neighbourhood of Padua or the Euganean hills. The true 
 site is in the territory of Aquileia." 
 
 Boccaccio, driven out of Florence by the plague, joined 
 
petearch's opinion OF DANTE. 143 
 
 the party, and was no doubt a great addition to it. He 
 brought with him Leontius Pilatus, one of the fugitive 
 Greeks who attempted, with ill success, to teach Petrarch 
 Greek. He never learnt it could barely make out the 
 letters and read what he knew of Homer in a Latin 
 translation. Perhaps, too, Boccaccio brought with him, 
 on some such occasion, the ' Divina Commedia/ which 
 Petrarch had never sufficiently appreciated and ad- 
 mired, perhaps from jealousy, and the sense that there 
 had been a greater poet than himself in Italy. Boccaccio 
 gave Petrarch a copy, made with his own hand, of that 
 immortal work, of which he was (as is well known) an 
 enthusiastic admirer. A letter exists from Petrarch to Boc- 
 caccio (Ep. Earn., xxi. 15), in which the poet defends him- 
 self against the charge of envy ; but it is certain that he 
 never did justice to his greater countryman. For a long 
 time he refused to read his poem, lest it should affect his 
 own style. He would not write his name. But he dis- 
 claims all feeling of personal hostility. The passage is 
 curious, especially from the covert allusion to his own 
 supposed superiority in the use of words and rhythm : 
 
 " There really is no cause at all of enmity towards a man 
 whom I never saw but once, and that in my earliest child- 
 hood. He lived with my grandfather and my father, being 
 younger than the one and older than the other. They were 
 banished from their country on the same day ; and griefs 
 shared with others are wont to beget strong friendships, and 
 this the more, as there was between them a similarity not 
 only of fortune but of tastes and mind. But while my 
 father, being in exile, was drawn aside by other cares for his 
 family, he persevered, and devoted himself the more intently 
 to his enterprise, laying all other things aside, eager for fame 
 alone. Nor can I sufficiently admire and applaud a man 
 
144 PETRARCH. 
 
 whom neither the injustice of his country, nor exile, nor 
 poverty, nor the stings of dissension, nor love for his wife, nor 
 affection for his children, could divert from his chosen path, 
 though many men of a great and sensitive genius are distracted 
 by the lightest murmur : indeed this happens more com- 
 monly to those who pay great attention to style as well as 
 sense, and apply themselves to words and rhythm, for they 
 need silence and quiet. I confess, that in all my eagerness 
 for books, it was long before I cared to read this one ; for, 
 as I was myself endeavouring to write in the vulgar tongue, I 
 was afraid lest, at a flexible age, disposed to admiration, I 
 might consciously or unconsciously have become an imitator. 
 That indeed, as I grew in confidence, I scorned ; and I felt 
 so much reliance on myself that, without the aid of any 
 mortal, I thought I could accomplish what I had undertaken 
 in my own manner." 
 
 It is probably to these later years of Petrarch's life 
 that we may assign the composition of the poems which, 
 under the name of the Triumphs of Love, Chastity, 
 Death, Fame, and Deity, form the third part of the 
 Canzoniere. They are the reminiscences of his life, be- 
 ginning with the last emotions of his youthful passion, 
 illustrated by his art, and tending to the final consum- 
 mation of piety and faith. Some critics have regarded 
 these poems as the most perfect of Petrarch's works. 
 They are written in terza-rima, the metre of Dante ; and 
 it is hard to believe that they were not in some degree 
 inspired by rivalry of the great master. But they want 
 that lyrical flow which lends its greatest charm to 
 Petrarch's versification. They are didactic in form and 
 heavy in structure. To the force and originality of 
 Dante, Petrarch could never attain ; and even the visions 
 of eternal life and Almighty power on which he fixed his 
 eyes, are immeasurably below the glories of the " Para- 
 
GIFT OF HIS LIBRARY TO ST MARK. 145 
 
 diso." It might be said of these illustrious men, that 
 if the one raised a mortal to the skies, the other drew an 
 angel down. These five Triumphs, he writes, ere he 
 lays down his pen for ever, are the triumphs of earth ; 
 the sixth, he humbly hopes, may await him in heaven, 
 when Time shall be no more. 
 
 ]So greater proof of affection and esteem could be given 
 to Venice by Petrarch than the donation of his library, 
 for he had been all his life, as we have seen, a collector 
 of MSS. The art of printing was still in the womb of 
 time. He proposed, therefore, to make " the blessed St 
 Mark " heir of his books, on condition that they should 
 be kept together in a suitable building, and " preserved 
 for ever for the amusement and benefit of noble and 
 literate persons in that city." And he expressed a hope 
 that his example would be followed by others, which 
 was the case. 
 
 The proctors of St Mark having reported in favour of 
 the project, the Eepublic decreed that 
 
 " Considering the offer made by Messer Francis Petrarch, 
 whose reputation is so great that no moral philosopher and 
 poet has been known in Christendom to compare with him ; 
 and seeing that this offer may contribute to the glory of God 
 and St Mark, and of our city, we decree that it be accepted 
 in the terms set forth by him, and we order that a sum be 
 appropriated to the purchase of a suitable house for him as 
 long as he shall live." 
 
 The result was that the poet and his library were 
 lodged at the public expense in the Molina Palace an 
 enormous edifice with two towers overlooking the har- 
 bour; and on the 10th September 1362, the date of the 
 foregoing decree, the Bibliotheca Marciana, or Library of 
 St Mark, was thus founded by the munificence of Pet- 
 
 f.c. IV. k 
 
146 PETRARCH. 
 
 rarch and the Signoiy. This noble institution flourishes 
 to the present day, for it is one of the guardians of the 
 archives of Venice, and although but few of the MSS. 
 which belonged to Petrarch are now to be found there, 
 some of them are still said to exist, and the Library was 
 an object of special care to the Signory of Venice. Its 
 keepers have always been men distinguished for learning 
 amongst them John Dempster in the sixteenth, and 
 the Abbate Leith in the seventeenth century, both 
 Scotchmen ; and the Library itself ranks amongst the 
 most important in Europe. 
 
 But neither Venice nor Padua were to be Petrarch's 
 last abode. In September 1372 he writes to Pandolfo 
 Malatesta from Arqua : " These cities please me no 
 longer. But I have found a secluded and pleasant re- 
 treat among the Euganean hills, in a delightful and 
 salubrious position, where often enough, attracted by the 
 beauty of the spot or by his affection for me, the noble 
 lord of Padua comes to see me." His literary life was 
 not ended, for in this solitude he wrote the dialogue 
 " On the Ignorance of Himself and Others " as pungent 
 and spirited as any of his philosophical compositions. 
 He also prepared an essay for Erancesco di Carrara on 
 the art of government ; and his last work was the final 
 correction of the " Triumph of Deity," which completes 
 his poems. The tale of " Griseldis," which moved him 
 to tears, was the last piece read to him ; it was told in 
 the touching language of Boccaccio ; and the letter in 
 which he acknowledged the charm of those matchless 
 fictions, was perhaps the last he dictated to his friend. 
 But his physical strength was now greatly impaired. 
 A journey to Pesaro was beyond his strength. 
 
THE TOMB OF PETRARCH. 147 
 
 The threescore years and ten allotted to man were 
 counted out. Life was ebbing smoothly away ; and on 
 the 20th July 1374, he was found dead in his study over 
 an unfinished page. . 
 
 He who would seek, as I have done, the last memorials 
 of the life and death of Petrarch in that sequestered 
 Euganean village, will still find them there. A modest 
 house, apparently of great antiquity, passes for his last 
 habitation. A chair in which he is said to have died 
 is shown there. And if these details are uncertain; 
 there is no doubt that the sarcophagus of red marble, 
 supported on pillars, in the churchyard of Arqua, con- 
 tains, or once contained, his mortal remains. Lord 
 Byron and Mr Hobhouse visited the spot more than sixty 
 years ago in a sceptical frame of mind ; for doubts had 
 at that time been thrown on the very existence of Laura; 
 and the varied details of the poet's life, which are pre- 
 served with so much fidelity in his correspondence, 
 were almost forgotten. 
 
 But Arqua tells its own touching story, and is even 
 more consecrated to the memory of Petrarch than Vau- 
 cluse. It inspired some of the most graceful stanzas of 
 " Childe Harold," which may form an appropriate termi- 
 nation to these pages : 
 
 " There is a tomb in Arqua reared in air, 
 Pillared in their sarcophagus, repose 
 The bones of Laura's lover ; here repair 
 Many familiar with his well-sung woes, 
 The pilgrims of his genius. He arose 
 To raise a language, and his land reclaim 
 From the dull yoke of her barbaric foes ; 
 Watering the tree which bears his lady's name 
 
 With his melodious tears, he gave himself to fame. 
 
148 PETRARCH. 
 
 They keep his dust in Arqua, where he died, 
 The mountain-village where his latter days 
 "Went down the vale of years ; and 'tis their pride 
 An honest pride and let it be their praise, 
 To offer to the passing stranger's gaze 
 His mansion and his sepulchre ; both plain 
 And venerably simple, such as raise 
 A feeling more accordant with his strain, 
 Than if a pyramid formed his monumental fane." 
 
 END OF PETRARCH. 
 
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 OPINIONS OF DR MACKAY'S GEOGRAPHICAL SERIES. 
 
 Annual Address of the President of the Royal Geographical Society. 
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 Saturday Review. It contains a prodigious array of geographical facts, and 
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 A. KEITH JOHNSTON, LL.D., F.R.S.E., F.R.G.S., H.M. Geographer 
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 statement, it is without a rival; and knowing, as I do, the vast amount of 
 labour and research you bestowed on its production, I trust it will be so appre- 
 ciated as to ensure, by an extensive sale, a well-merited reward. 
 
 G. BICKERTON, Esq., Edinburgh Institution. I have been led to form a 
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 to the student of geography. 
 
 RICHARD D. GRAHAM, English Master, College for Daughters of 
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 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
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