Petrarch

Early in 1353 he left Avignon for the last time, and made his way to Milan, where the archbishop Giovanni Visconti was vir tually despot. He employed Petrarch on various diplomatic mis sions, notably as a mediator betwen Genoa and Venice in 1353. On Nov. 8 he delivered a studied oration before the doge Andrea Dandolo and the great Venetian council. His eloquence had no effect ; but the orator entered into relations with the aristocracy which were afterwards extended. After Giovanni's death he re mained at Milan in the court of Bernabo and Galeazzo Visconti, closing his eyes to their cruelties and exactions, serving them as diplomatist and orator. In their interest he addressed epistles to the emperor Charles IV. upon the distracted state of Italy, and entreated him to resume the old Ghibelline policy of imperial interference. Charles IV. passed through Mantua in 1354 and there Petrarch made his acquaintance but, finding him unfit for any noble enterprise, declined attending him to Rome. When Charles returned to Germany, after assuming the crowns in Rome and Milan, Petrarch addressed to him a letter of vehement invective and reproach. Yet the Visconti sent him on an embassy to Charles at Prague in 1356. In 1361, on his return to Milan from one of his embassies to France, he received news of the deaths of his son Giovanni and his old friend Socrates, carried off by plague.

Soon afterwards, in May 1362, he settled at Padua. In 1363 he visited Venice, making a donation of his library to the republic of St. Mark. Here his friend Boccaccio introduced to him the Greek teacher Leontius Pilatus. Petrarch, who possessed a ms. of Homer and a portion of Plato, never acquired the Greek language, and he could only approach the Iliad in Boccaccio's rude Latin version. About this period he saw his daughter Francesca happily married, and undertook the education of a young scholar from Ravenna, whose sudden disappearance from his household caused him the deepest grief. This youth has been identified, on insuffi cient grounds, with that Giovanni Malpaghini of Ravenna who was destined to form an important link between Petrarch and the humanists of the next age of culture. Much of this last stage of his life was occupied in a controversy with the Averroists, whom he regarded as dangerous antagonists of sound religion and culture. A curious treatise, which grew in part out of this dispute and out of a previous duel with physicians, was the book De sui ipsius et multorurn ignorantia.

At last, in 1369, he retired to Arqua, a village in the Euganean hills, where he continued his unremitting study. All through these declining years his friendship with Boccaccio was maintained. It rested on a solid basis of mutual affection and of common studies, the different temperaments of the two scholars securing them against rivalry. One of Petrarch's last compositions was a Latin

version of Boccaccio's story of Griselda. On July 18, 1374, his people found the old poet and scholar dead among his books in that little house which looks across the hills towards the Adriatic.

The Founder of Humanism.

Petrarch was the inaugurator of the Renaissance in Italy. What he achieved for the modern world was not merely to bequeath to his Italian imitators master pieces of lyrical art unrivalled for perfection of workmanship, but also to open out for Europe a new sphere of mental activity. Standing within the threshold of the middle ages, he surveyed the kingdom of the modern spirit, and, by his own inexhaustible scholarship and study, he determined what we call the revival of learning. He was the first to collect libraries. to accumulate coins, to advocate the preservation of mss. His friends knew that the most acceptable of all gifts to him was an addition to his collection of manuscripts. For him the authors of the Greek and Latin world were living men, and the rhetorical epistles he addressed to Cicero, Seneca and Varro prove that he dwelt with them on terms of sympathetic intimacy.

Eminently religious and orthodox, he did not seek to substitute a pagan for the Christian ideal. This was left for the scholars of the 15th and 16th centuries in Italy. But he venerated the Latin orators, historians and poets as depositories of a tradition only second to revelation. For him there was no schism between Rome and Galilee, between classical genius and sacred inspiration. The latter concerned man's eternal welfare, the former the perfection of his intellect and the civilization of his manners. Whatever in literature revealed the hearts of men was infinitely precious to him; and for this reason he professed almost a cult for 'St. Augustine. It was to Augustine, as to a friend, that he poured forth his soul in the De contemptu mundi. Much as Petrarch effected by restoring a sound conception of learning, he did more by impressing on the age his own striking personality. Whether we regard him as a priest who published poem after poem in praise of an adored mistress, as a plebeian man of letters who conversed on equal terms with kings and princes, as a solitary dedicated to the love of nature, as an amateur diplomatist treating affairs of state with pompous eloquence in missives sent to popes and emperors, or again as a traveller eager for change of scene, ready to climb mountains for the enjoyment of broad prospects; in all these divers manifestations of his peculiar genius we trace some contrast with the manners of the 14th century, some emphatic anticipation of the i6th.