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 torment 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 — insomuch that, at the age of seventy, Boccaccio alone remained 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 disappointments of love, were the perpetual subjects of his meditations and although the latest efforts of his muse were entitled "Triumphs," they describe rather the triumphs of fate and death over the destinies of man. Pro

:

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, Petrarch 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 experience 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 disappointments 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 character 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 eyesight, that he might comprehend and see in just proportions 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 supreme. 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: meanwhile, 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 century 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.

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CHAPTER 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 incidents 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 Posterity," 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 transactions to which I shall have occasion to revert. 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 Rome, 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.

There

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 Cæsar says of himself, was ancient. Nature gave me neither a bad nor an immodest disposition, had not the contagion of social intercourse 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 complexion was lively, half-way between fair and dusk. My eyes were sparkling, and for a long time my sight was extremely 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