Henry, and instigated the rebellion of that prince, with his brother Richard, against their father Henry II. of England. After the suppression of the revolt, and the death of Prince Henry, Bertrand was made prisoner by the king; who, when on the point of ordering his execution, asked him if reason had not forsaken him, "alas, it has, sire, since the death of your son Prince Henry." The parent recognised the appeal, and in the name of his dead son, awarded the criminal his life and former possessions. In each new war that he entered into," says Sismondi, "de Born animated his soldiers, encouraged his allies, and sustained his own hopes, by breathing out the passions which excited him to the contest in a sirvente." One of these warlike effusions is so finely rendered by the French author, that we will give his own text. "Que me font, les jours heureux ou malheureux? que me font les semaines ou les années ? en tout temps je veux perdre quiconque ose me nuire. Que d'autres embellissent, s'ils le veulent, leurs maisons; qu'ils se procurent les commodités de la vie; mais, pour moi, rassembler des lances, des casques, des epées, des chevaux, sera l'unique objet de mes desirs. Je suis fatigué des avis qu'on veut me donner, et par Jesus, se ne sais auquel entendre: on m'appelle imprudent, si je refuse la paix ; mais si je voulais la faire, quel est celui, qui ne m'appellerait lâche?" Geffrey de Rudel, and Bertram d'Alamanon, are among the troubadours who principally claim our author's admiration. The latter has left a ballad, which we admit contains one beautiful thought, thus translated into French by Millot,-esperer aupres d'elle vaut mieux que jouir avec tout autre.-Our author confesses the coincidence between this sentiment, and two lines of Petrarch; but to save her admired sonnetteer from the stigma of having copied. without acknowledgment, she exclaims, "it is one of those thoughts which spring in the heart, and might often be repeated without once being borrowed." It also strongly calls to mind Shenstone's exquisite inscription; Heu quanto minus est cum reliquis versari, quam tui meminisse. With all its intrinsic inferiority, we would not insinuate any thing like contempt for the poetry of the troubadours. It forms the first step of that golden ladder which has since been extended to the very heavens. The leaders of society, unacquainted with the knowledge or fancy which might dignify a common theme, yet powerless to resist its incitement, lisped in numbers; and even their lisping commanded the admiration of the people, and a respect for the efforts, however feeble, of mind. The next chapter is devoted to Guido Cavalcanti, and Cino da Pistoia, friends and associates of Dante. The former has left some ballads and songs, but is at present better known through his connexion with the great Florentine, than by his writings. "The grand work," says our author, "on which his fame long rested, is a Canzone sopra l'amore, in which the subject is so profoundly and so philosophically treated, that seven voluminous commentaries, in Latin and Italian, have not yet enabled the world to understand it." Our author informs us that Guido was betrayed into poetry and love by a Spanish girl, whom he celebrated under the name of Mandetta; we cannot but eulogise her graceful translation of the poet's finest sonnet. It is a vague, dream-like, but beautiful picture; though almost too Platonic. "Who is this, on whom all men gaze as she approacheth! who causeth the very air to tremble around her with tenderness?—who leadeth Love by her side -in whose presence men are dumb, and can only sigh? Ah Heaven! what power in every glance of those eyes! Love alone can tell; for I have neither words nor skill. She alone is the lady of all gentleness-beside her, all others seem ungracious and unkind,-who can describe her sweetness, her loveliness? to her every virtue bows, and beauty points to her as her own divinity. The mind of man cannot soar so high, nor is it sufficiently purified by divine grace to understand and appreciate all her perfections." Cino da Pistoia acquired a twofold reputation. His commentary upon the first nine books of the code, exhibits him as the first jurist of the day; and Petrarch established his poetical standing, by using him as a model in his own compositions: Ricciarda dei Selvaggia, whom he celebrates, was of a noble family of Pistoia; her father, having been leader of the faction of the Bianchi, was obliged to fly with his family from the city, and take refuge in a fortress among the Appenines. Cino, who had been secretly attached to Selvaggia, followed them to their retreat, and was received with approbation by her humbled family. The approach of winter found them happy in their rugged abode; but before it passed, the fragile being who had won the poet to her seclusion, died beneath its attendant privation and inclemency; "then," says our author, "they buried her with tears in a nook among the mountains." Cino, many years afterwards, commemorates in verse a visit, which either in imagination or person he paid to her grave; from the energy prevailing in the last stanza, our author is perfectly convinced the visit was real. "I rose up and went on my way, and passed the mountain summits, crying aloud Selvaggia! in accents of despair." We mention this as an instance of the rich colouring, which, with scarcely sufficient data, she is too prone to throw around her characters. Petrarch and Laura next succeed in our author's love calendar, and her pages have invested the old sonnetteer with a grace which he never acquired in our eyes by his popular effusions. Our want of admiration for this veteran in sentiment and sensibility, will, however, subject us to her anathema, as possessing "not only a strange want of judgment, but an extraordinary obtuseness of feeling." That Petrarch had exalted talents, that he acquired great and various learning, and was the first to lead men back to the deserted monuments of ancient literature, is unquestionable; and for this he is worthy to be honoured among mankind. It was this that made him truly illustrious with his cotemporaries, and in his own opinion formed his title to enduring fame; the world is indebted to him for the discovery of the familiar epistles of Cicero, and moreover he was the author of many philosophical and political works, highly esteemed in their day; they are indeed now cast into the shade, by the surpassing productions of later times, but he should still be reverenced as one of the pioneers of mankind, who laboured successfully to explore a forgotten, and then almost untrodden path. Yet now, by the voice of successive generations, and we must yield unwilling submission to it, his name is indissolubly associated with effusions which were regarded with distrust by himself. We offer a translation of the sonnet Voi ch' ascolti, etc. which is an example of the regret which at times visited the poet for the lavish waste of his powers. "Ye who in scattered verse the sighs discern With which from wayward youth my heart was fed ; But your forgiveness, whensoe'er ye turn To these vain hopes and sorrows, which mislead And the sure truth, that all which now may seem It has been a point of controversy, whether Laura, the object of the bard's passion, had a real existence, or was rather a personification of his fancy. "There are some," says our author, "who doubt the reality of Petrarch's love, because it is expressed in numbers; and others, refining on this doubt, profess even to question whether his Laura ever existed, except in the imagination and the poetry of her lover." The allegorical interpretation prevailed in the fifteenth century, but we believe at present, to use the language of a celebrated writer, "the world are not so deeply interested in a metaphysical passion for a nymph so shadowy that her existence has been questioned; for a matron so prolific, that she was delivered of eleven legitimate children, while her amorous swain sighed and sung at the fountain of Vaucluse." According to the most received authorities, Laura was the progenitor, in the eleventh degree, of the Abbe de Sade; who, by his research, has proved that her maiden name was Laura de Noves, and that she was maaried in 1325, at the age of nineteen, to Huges de Sade, a noble, and certainly a very meek citizen of Avignon. We should hold the matron and the mother in but slight estimation, who, though immaculate in deed, could descend to the petty artifice necessary to keep alive. the illicit passion of twenty-one years; but the grave might hide her enticements and follies, were she not still held up as an object for our admiration. If Laura had been correct and chaste, one species of licentiousness would want much of its present romantic attraction; and a being who was capable of as bright conceptions as genius ever inspired, might have left other relics of his powers than the monotonous and polished units which now survive him. Hear his own bitter exclamation in the 48th Canzone:-"I have not only forsaken the path of ambition and useful exertion, but even of pleasure and happiness; I, who was born, if I do not deceive myself, for far higher purposes than to be a mere amorous slave. What have availed me all the high and precious gifts of Heaven, the talents, the genius, which raised me above other men?" Who that realizes the waste of intellect which Laura's vanity demanded and obtained, can honour her me mory? Petrarch was born at Arezzo in Tuscany, in 1304. At eight years of age he was removed to Avignon, and afterwards passed four years at Montpelier, and two at Bologna, in the study of the civil law, which he abandoned, because, in his own language, he could not bring himself "to sell lies and words." In the twenty-second year of his age he returned to Avignon, and enrolled himself in the clerical order, but received only the tonsure. At this place he contracted an intimacy with Jacopo Colonna, bishop of Lombes, which appears to have been the origin of that attachment to the house of Colonna, which lasted until his death. He might unquestionably have obtained ecclesiastical preferment through a patron so influential, had it been his desire; but his devotion to Laura, which commenced soon after, peculiarly unfitted him for the profession. He travelled much through Europe, and in 1337, on the death of a favourite natural son, "for," says a biographer, "his love to Laura was not of a kind to exclude transitory amours," he retired to Vaucluse, a romantic solitude where the river Sorgue bursts out from a rocky cavern. At this retreat he composed the greater number of his sonnets, and many of his Latin epistles in prose and verse. In the year 1347, he was gratified with a message from the Roman senate, inviting him to receive a laurel crown in the capitol. Gibbon has given a stately account of this event, which took place the succeeding year. From Rome the poet went to Parma, and it was probably at this period, and through the influence of the Correggio family, that he was created arch-deacon in the church of Parma. Three years after he composed his dia logue with St. Augustine; in it he alludes to his devoted and sentimental attachment to Laura, but totally forgets to mention another liason, by which he had become for the second time a father. The remainder of his life was dignified with many embassies between the different governments of Italy, and his name is from this period constantly associated with the rulers and princes of the nation. At length, in the night of the 18th of July 1374, he was attacked with an apoplectic fit, and was found the next morning in his library, lifeless, with his head resting on a book. They keep his dust in Arqua, where he died. Our author's estimate of Petrarch may be collected from the following extract. "The faults of taste of which Petrarch has been accused, over and over again, by those who seem to have studied him as Voltaire studied Shakspeare,-his concetti,-his fanciful adoration of the laurel, as the emblem of Laura,-his playing on the words Laura, L'aura and Lauro, his freezing flames and burning ice, -I abandon to critics, and let them make the best of them, as defects in what were else perfection." Although sceptical as to his poetical perfection, we must coincide in the succeeding very happy sketch. "He was suspicious, irritable, and susceptible; subject to quick transitions of feeling; raised by a word to hope, plunged by a glance into despair; just such a finely toned instrument as a woman loves to play upon; and all this we have set forth in the contradictions, the self reproaches, the little daily vicissitudes, which are events and revolutions in a life of passion." Our author has, with nice tact, delineated the charms of Laura from the rhapsodies of her lover; the picture is beautiful, but may not be trusted for resemblance; fiction and deep colouring are the undeniable prerogatives of a bard. The next very pleasing article upon Dante is in her best style; and he well deserves it of the sex; through his genius Beatrice has won an immortality such as woman never before attained, and may scarcely hope for in the future: and she must have been worthy of his devotion. Petrarch, crowned with fame, the guest of kings and patricians, might lose himself in the reveries of affected sentiment, and adorn his leisure with a passion which in his better moments he despised. But Dante was a being of a nobler caste; stern and gloomy, stung to madness by persecution; thrown out from "the sweet bosom of Florence, the fairest and most renowned daughter of Rome;" and in his own bold metaphor, like a vessel without sail, and without steerage, hurried on to different shores, by the dry wind that springs out of poverty; it was not for him to be wrought upon by a common fascination. His attachment to Beatrice commenced with their first interview, at a feast given by her father, Folco de Portinari, when they were children; it gathered strength with |