As an author Petrarch must be considered from two points of view—first as a writer of Latin verse and prose, secondly as an Italian lyrist. In the former capacity he was speedily out stripped by more fortunate scholars. His eclogues and epistles and the epic of Africa, on which he set such store, exhibit a com paratively limited command of Latin metre. His treatises, ora tions and familiar letters, though remarkable for a prose style, are not distinguished by purity of diction. Much as he admired Cicero, he had not freed himself from current mediaeval Latin ity. Seneca and Augustine had been too much used by him as models of composition. He possessed a copious vocabulary, a fine ear for cadence and a complete faculty of expression.
In Italian poetry Petrarch occupies a very different position. In the Rime in Vita e Morte di Madonna Laura perfect metrical form is married to language of the choicest and the purest. It is true that even in the Canzoniere, as Italians prefer to call that collection of lyrics, Petrarch is not devoid of faults and affecta tions belonging to his age. He appealed in his odes and sonnets to a restricted audience already educated by the chivalrous love poetry of Provence and by Italian imitations of that style. He was not careful to exclude the commonplaces of the school, nor anxious to finish a work of art wholly free from fashionable graces and from contemporary conceits. There is, therefore, a certain artificiality in his treatment ; and this has been perpetu ated with wearisome monotony by versifiers who chose him for their model. But, after making due allowance for peculiarities, the abuse of which has brought the name of Petrarchist into con tempt, we can agree with Shelley that the lyrics of the Canzon iere "are as spells which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is the grief of love." Petrarch links the metaphysical lyrists of Tuscany with more realistic amorists of generations. He was the first Italian poet of love to free himself from allegory and mysticism, and yet he was far from approaching the analysis of emotion with the directness of a Heine or De Musset. Laura is not so much a woman as woman in the abstract; and perhaps on this account the poems written for her have been taken to the heart by countless lovers. The same criticism might be passed on Petrarch's descriptions of na ture. That he felt the beauties of nature keenly is certain ; yet he has written nothing so characteristic of Vaucluse as to be in applicable to any solitude where there are woods and water. The Canzoniere is therefore one long melodious monody with the indefinite form of a beautiful woman seated in a lovely landscape, a perpetual object of delightful contemplation. This disengage ment from local circumstance without the sacrifice of emotional sincerity is a merit in Petrarch, but a fault in his imitators.
Petrarch's odes to Giacomo Colonna, to Cola di Rienzi and to the princes of Italy display him in another light. They exhibit
oratorical fervour and the pleader's eloquence in its most perfect lustre. Modern literature has nothing nobler, nothing more har monious in the declamatory style than these three patriotic effu sions. Their spirit itself is epoch-making in the history of Europe, for up to this point Italy, as a nation, had scarcely begun to exist. To the high conception of Italian nationality, to the belief in that spiritual unity which underlay her many discords and divi sions, Petrarch attained partly through his disengagement from civic and local partisanship, partly through his liberal culture. The principal materials for a life of Petrarch are afforded by his letters divided into Familiar Correspondence, Correspond ence in Old Age, Divers Letters and Letters without a Title, by the autobiographical Epistle to Posterity, and by the epistles and eclogues in Latin verse, the Italian poems and the rhetorical ad dresses to popes, emperors, Cola di Rienzi and some great men of antiquity. For the comprehension of his character, the De contemptu mundi is invaluable. His erudition can be shown by a brief enumeration of his most important writings. In moral philosophy, we find De remediis utriusque fortunae, a treatise on human happiness and unhappiness; De vita solitaria, a panegyric of solitude, and De otio religiosorum, on monastic life. On his torical subjects there are Rerum memorandarum libri, a miscellany from a student's commonplace-book, De viris illustribus, an epit ome of the biographies of Roman worthies, Contra cuiusdam anonymi Galli calumnias apologia, Contra medicum quendam invectivarum libri, and De sui ipsius at multorum ignorantia- controversial compositions, which grew out of Petrarch's quarrels with the physicians of Avignon and the Averroists of Padua. In this connection may be mentioned the satires on the papal court, included in the Epistolae sine titulo. Five public orations have been preserved. Among his Latin poems Africa takes the first place. Twelve Eclogues and three books of Epistles in verse close the list. In Italian we possess the Canzoniere, including odes and sonnets for Laura during her lifetime, those written after her death, and a miscellaneous section containing the three patriotic odes and three famous poetical invectives against the papal court. Besides these lyrical compositions are the semi-epical or allegori cal Trionfi—Triumphs of Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time and Divinity, written in terza rima of smooth and limpid quality. Though these Triumphs, as a whole, are deficient in poetic in spiration, the second canto of the Trionfo della morte, in which Petrarch describes a vision of his dead love Laura, is justly famous for reserved passion and pathos tempered to a tranquil harmony. (J. A. S.; X.)