like created beings, view the soul through the false medium of outward actions, but weighs the goodness of our actions by the sincerity of our intentions, and is the only Being who can reward them."

As the Poet had, in the former part of his work, given a near and intimate view of many who had made an illustrious figure in the world, he gradually reverses the telescope, and shows both them and this earthly stage on which they appeared, diminished and distanced to the eye, and almost annihilated in the boundless regions of eternity and immensity.

The TRIUMPH OF TIME is filled with some very striking images of human vicissitude, which probably at this eventful period will be perused with some interest: certainly at no point of time in the latter ages was the emptiness of ambition more clearly shown. Some of the images in this and the subsequent part of the Poem have a re

semblance to the descriptions in Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead; but probably Petrarch was unacquainted with his works, which I believe had not been then translated. In Lucian, however, the scenes of mortality and the fate of monarchs only give rise to the cold suggestions of a proud and stubborn I might add, a sceptical philosophy. But in the Christian Poet they suggest such topics as Revelation alone can afford, and without which, often, what we fear and what we feel would be insupportable.

The translator finds himself under the necessity of apologising to the public for taking some liberties with his Author by way of amplification. He is conscious that he cannot plead the example of those who could compensate for the want of rigid exactness, by appropriate ornaments and a transfusion of the spirit rather than a servile adherence to the letter. The latter practice, however, is not without its advocates: yet on

this question he declines to give his opinion, but will beg leave to refer his reading to the authority of Dryden, who ably points out the difference between a translation and a version. Where in the original only a

name, with the addition perhaps of an epithet, is given, he has not scrupled to diversify, by a few characteristic marks, what in a less musical language than the Italian would seem a very dry catalogue.

INTRODUCTION.

THE attachment of Petrarch to Laura, so much distinguished in the annals of poetry and love, on account of its continuance and effects, seems to have owed, if not its origin, at least its modification to the peculiar train of thinking which prevailed in the romantic and chivalrous times preceding. The peculiar veneration for the fair sex, which seemed in the days of erratic adventure to give the passion of love a tincture of idolatry, had a natural tendency to introduce in process of time that dissolution of morals which make so conspicuous a figure in the famous arrêts of the courts of love (as they were called) in Provence, and other parts of France, before the time of the Charleses sixth and seventh. It is well known, that the offices of defending religion and pro