of the court as a man broken in age. But the commission considered that this was no time for mercy. The defendants were all found guilty. Humphreys was to be imprisoned for life; Bowles, Milligan, and Horsey were sentenced to be hanged. In the case of Humphreys, the general commanding the district substituted confinement within the boundaries of two townships in his own county. The attorneys and agents of the men sentenced to death visited Mr. Lincoln, asking him to modify or revise the sentences, and he gave assurances that he would spare their lives; but before he took any action he was assassinated, and Andrew Johnson succeeded, with the full determination of "making treason odious." He approved the sentences.

Petitions for a writ of habeas corpus were prepared, addressed to the United States Circuit Court, which court certified a difference of opinion as to the jurisdiction of the commission. In the mean time, Bowles, Milligan, and Horsey were to be hanged on May 19. All efforts to secure a commutation or postponement of the sentence were unavailing. On May 1, it was announced that Bowles and Milligan were writing confessions of the conspiracy which would implicate prominent men not yet connected with it, and there was great anxiety.

Meanwhile, Judge Davis visited Indianapolis, and had a long and earnest talk with Governor Morton. The judge thought it was clear that the commission was illegal, since the courts of Indiana were open, and martial law had not been proclaimed.

Morton had hitherto taken no part in the effort to have the sentences commuted, but he now declared that he did not intend to have the blood of these men on his hands, and he recommended the President to commute their sentences. He sent several communications to Mr. Johnson: one, on May 13, by General Mansfield; another by the wife of Milligan.

Finally, John U. Pettit was dispatched to Washington, and at his solicitation, first a suspension, and finally a commutation, of the sentences were secured. This excited great indignation throughout the State. President Johnson and Governor Morton were bitterly denounced for cheating the gallows. Some of the more violent of the papers even went so far as to declare that this commutation was corrupt; that money had saved the necks of these men from the halter; and some even pointed out a house on Meridian Street which was to be transferred to Morton in consideration of his services. But a better sentiment soon prevailed, and these idle stories were silenced. The application for habeas corpus was finally decided by the Supreme Court in favor of the defendants. The war was now over. The example of the execution of these men by military authority was no longer needed. Law had resumed its sway. The court decided that the military commission had no jurisdiction, as Indiana was not in a state of war, and the courts were still open.

The accused were therefore discharged, and with their release the history of the Sons of Liberty in Indiana comes to an end.

William Dudley Foulke.

Gamaliel Bradford, Jr.

I.

THE LETTER TO POSTERITY.

"You will perhaps have heard something of me; though who can tell whether so trivial and obscure a name as mine will have penetrated to remote places and distant times? But if so, you may desire to know what manner of man I was, and the purport of my works, of those, at least, whose fame has reached you, or of which you may have heard some slight mention. From the first men will differ in their verdict about me; for it is always prejudice rather than truth which determines their judgment, and there is no measure in their distribution of praise and blame. I was one insignificant member of the great human flock, neither highly nor basely born."

Such are the opening sentences of that Letter to Posterity which the precursor of the Humanists, Francesco Petrarca,

began to write, near the close of his eventful career, and which one cannot help regretting that he should have lacked the time or the strength to complete. For, although it may argue a species of vanity for a man to write a letter to posterity at all, no man, surely, ever had better excuses for self-exaggeration than Petrarch. Yet this fragment of a last confession seems, upon the whole, to be remarkably free from any such vulgar sentiment. The life of the great idealist in friendship, in politics, in letters, and in love strikes himself, as he looks back upon it from the "windless calm" of his declining days, with a feeling akin to wonder; and well it might! But he surveys it with a passionless gaze, as something virtually concluded and already remote; and that detachment, for which the saints themselves have often agonized in vain, never perhaps attaining so long as they consciously struggled for it, had come with

its full measure of relief and healing to the spirit of the old man at Arquà before he went the way of all the earth.

The life of Petrarch, like the life of every other man who has left a mass of letters behind him, is best studied in those letters. One cannot help wishing that they had been written in the vulgar tongue, especially when one sees what a wonderful instrument of subtle and pathetic expression he made it in his poems. But the notion that letters, whether formal or familiar, could be written in anything but Latin was only just dawning on the world, and was least of all likely to have occurred to the lifelong worshiper of Cicero, and one whose burning zeal in the collection of ancient manuscripts was rewarded by the discovery of a large portion of the Roman's incomparable correspondence in the dusty library of a convent at Verona.

It is a long way, indeed, from the careless ease and vivacity, the sparkling rush, of Cicero's familiar epistles to the stiff, scrupulous, and conscious Latinity of Petrarch's. But the language of the latter is for the most part clear and direct, and not wanting in a certain elegance; and, at all events, they serve their purpose of self-revelation. It was a labor of love with one of the most scholarly of modern Italians - Giuseppe Fracassetti to edit, translate into the vernacular, and illustrate with copious notes the entire Latin correspondence of Francesco Petrarca, and the extracts to be made in the following studies will be taken from his text.

In the three volumes which Fracassetti has entitled Epistolæ de Rebus Familiaribus et Variæ, the fragment of autobiography already quoted stands as a sort of preface, and we cannot do better, by way of preliminary sketch, than to follow, until it fails, the clue which the poet himself has here afforded us to the influences which shaped his life.

He first sketches his own personal appearance, with what he evidently means

to be an impartial hand: "I was not very strong in my youth, but I was remarkably agile; and with no great beauty to boast of, my appearance, after I had come to years of maturity, was pleasing. My complexion was of a pale olive, my eyes were brilliant, and my sight was so strong that not until I had passed my sixtieth year was I obliged, reluctantly, to have recourse to a reading-glass. He goes on briefly to describe the sorrowful circumstances of his birth in exile at Arezzo, "at dawn on the 20th of July, in the year 1304 of this last cycle which we reckon from the birth of Christ." His parents had been banished from Florence two years before, along with six hundred other Florentine citizens, of whom Dante Alighieri was one; and their party

that of the White Guelphs, if the political nickname any longer matters — were at that moment precipitately retreating from an unsuccessful attempt to break into the forbidden city. It may well have been her anxiety for their fate which hastened the delivery of Petrarch's mother, Eletta Canigiani, - "Elect of God, both in spirit and in name,” as elsewhere he reverently says of her. He adds that his family were almost in need during the years of his infancy, which were passed upon a small Tuscan farm belonging to his father. At this point he lapses into reflection again. "I have always been a great despiser of riches," he says; "yet not so much because I should not have liked to be rich as because I hated the cares and responsibilities which are the inseparable accompaniments of wealth. I do not refer to the power of giving magnificent banquets. I have been happier on plain and rather meagre fare than the whole tribe of Apicius with their exquisite dainties. Those convivial gatherings, as they are called, orgies which outrage decency and good manners, were always offensive to my taste, and I have found it equally futile and wearisome to bid others to such, or to be bidden by them.

And yet con-vivere to live with one's friends is so pleasant that I have known no greater joy than to have mine visit me, and I never willingly sat down to table alone. Of all things I dislike display, not only because it is a bad thing and inconsistent with humility, but because it is a laborious thing, and the foe of all repose."

"All my youth long I struggled with one most fierce yet single and honest passion; and I should have struggled longer, had not death, cruel and yet kindly, suddenly extinguished an already failing flame." It is thus that Petrarch, at the age of sixty-seven, can briefly allude to Laura de Sade, and then resume, with a certain deadly candor and composure, the self-analysis which had been interrupted by the passing of her gracious phantom: "I wish I could say that I had been free from all taint of sensuality, but it would be a lie. This I can say emphatically that, though carried away sometimes by the fervor of my youthful temperament, I always loathed such baseness in myself. Let me pass to other things. I have felt the pride of other men; I have not been conscious of any in myself. When I was a child, I always thought myself inferior. I have been angry to my own hurt very often; to that of others, never. I had always a great desire to make honorable friendships, and I have cherished such most loyally. I make this boast fearlessly, for I know that I speak the truth. High-tempered I certainly was, yet prone both to forget injuries and to remember benefits."

...

Petrarch must have been thinking of the Colonna as he wrote these words, and of the heavy charge of ingratitude which those generous benefactors of his might once have brought against him, and no doubt did bring. But they were all gone now, those of that gallant house whom he had best loved, and all had long been clear between them and him. Their differences had been purely political; he could persuade himself that from

them personally he had never swerved, and only the energy of his self-justification in this and some succeeding passages would lead one to suspect a lingering sentiment of self-reproach.

"I was loved and courted," he says, a little further on, "by the very greatest monarchs of my time, why, I know not. They must have seen some reason. With certain of these I associated upon terms almost of equality, reaping no discomfort from their greatness, but rather many advantages. Yet I have voluntarily withdrawn myself from many whom I truly loved, because my passion for independence was such as to repel me from men whose reputation seemed to contradict the bare idea of liberty."

The reader instinctively runs over in his mind the names of the principal potentates by whom Petrarch was highly distinguished, — King Robert of Naples, the Emperor Charles IV., five or six successive Popes at Avignon, the Visconti at Milan, the Correggio at Parma, the contemporary Doges of Genoa and Venice; and it seems as if a good many of these, and notably of the Italian tyrants, must have come under the condemnation expressed in the last paragraph, and as if, upon the whole, the poet showed himself rather tolerant of association with these uncongenial spirits. We rather wish that he had named those particular magnates whose society he forsook for conscience' sake. Yet while it is probably true, as one of the keenest of Petrarch's critics has observed, that the sovereigns who patronized him never took the poet's political opinions very seriously, it is true no less that he did move about among these great ones of the earth encompassed by what the author of the Imitation calls " a certain prerogative of the free spirit." He was, as has been said, an idealist in all things, and his fixed ideal in politics, lofty but impossible, or at least pathetically premature, was that of a united Italy under a dual government, which should have

its seat at Rome, with the Emperor for its temporal and the Pope for its spiritual head. Nor did he ever, at any time, lack the courage to uphold and proclaim this ideal, and bitterly to reproach those who had outraged it too deeply, or deceived him, as he thought, with false hopes of its realization.

From this brief allusion to his almost unparalleled social triumphs Petrarch digresses to an analysis of his own mental qualities. "My mind," he says, "was rather well balanced than brilliant; apt for all manner of good and wholesome study, but inclining more especially to moral philosophy and to poetry. As time went on, however, I came to neglect the latter, and to find a hidden sweetness in that sacred lore which I had once despised. I kept my poetry," he quaintly adds, "for ornamental purposes, and I was extraordinarily interested in the records of antiquity. For I do not love this age of ours, and but for the men whom I have loved in it I would rather have been born in any other; and indeed, I have made great efforts to forget the present, and to transfer myself, in imagination, to other times. But though delighting in the historians, I have been annoyed at the way in which they contradict one another, and I have dubiously followed, now the authority of the writer, and anon what seemed to me the likelihood of things.

"Some said I had the gift of a clear, persuasive eloquence; to me, my own speech always seemed both feeble and obscure. Not that in my ordinary intercourse with friends and acquaintances I ever troubled myself about fine talking, and it is a great wonder to me that a man like Augustus Cæsar should have done so. But when the place, or the circumstances, or the auditor seemed to require it, I have made a certain effort,

If I could only feel that I had lived well, I should care little whether I had talked well."

Resuming for a moment the thread of his devious and dreamy narrative, the poet tells us how, when he was nine years old, the whole family removed permanently "to the left bank of the river Rhone in transalpine Gaul, to that city whose name is Avignon,1 where the Roman pontiff holds, and has long held, the Church of Christ in shameful exile; though it did seem, a few years ago, as if Urban V. would have restored her to her own true seat. But it all came to nothing, as we know, and, worse yet, he voluntarily abandoned his purpose in his own lifetime, like a man who repents him of a good work. . . . But that long and miserable story is by the way. So, then, beside the windiest of streams, I passed my boyhood under the rule of my parents, my youth under that of my own vanities, yet not without some important exceptions. For during four years of this time I was at school in Carpentras, a small town lying a little to the east of Avignon; and in these two places I got about as much of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic as a boy can learn, or as it is customary to teach in the schools. You know, dear reader, how little that is! Afterwards I went to Montpellier to study jurisprudence, and had four more years there, and thence to Bologna, where I passed three years, and went through a complete course of civil law. I was thought by many to be a young man of much promise, if only I would persevere in that line, which, however, after I lost my parents, I soon abandoned altogether. It was not," he strikingly adds, "that I did not respect the authority of law, which is great beyond question, and replete with that Roman antiquity in which I delight, but because the practice of it has been depraved by the iniquity of men; and I loathed the labor of acquirtime earlier, but on conditions which the latter was unwilling to accept.