SOURCE: Nathan Haskell Dole, "Lyric Poetry and Petrarca," in A Teacher of Dante and Other Studies in Italian Literature, Moffat, Yard & Company, 1908, pp. 89-141.

[In the following excerpt, Dole provides an overview of Petrarch's life, focusing on the poet's adoration for Laura and the poetry he dedicated to her.]

In passing from Dante to Petrarca we come into another world. Dante closes an era: he is the Titan of Italian poetry; with him the mediæval is summed up forever.

Petrarca is as modern as Chaucer. Just as in midsummer, sometimes, a few days of genuine spring weather seem to stray like summer birds from their exile in the South, as if impatient to be at home once more, so we find simultaneously in England and Italy these two modern men centuries ahead of their day. How gay, unsentimental, free from morbidness, from provincialism is Dan Chaucer! He was of humble origin, the name signifying shoemaker, and yet he rose to be courted by kings and emperors and one of his descendants just missed inheriting the throne of England.

So Petrarca, as is proved by the name, which means Little Peter or Peterkin, sprang from the common people. His father was Ser Petracco di Ser Parenza—unable even to boast a family name—and when he was driven from Florence by that miserable squabble between the two factions that were always tearing the vitals of the city, he carried away with him on that January day in 1302 only a small part of the possessions which he had accumulated as a jurist.

The misfortune which befell Italy had been prognosticated. In September, 1301, a comet flamed in the western sky and twice that year Saturn and Mars had been in conjunction in the sign of the Lion which was the astrological symbol of Italy. Those of us who place some reliance on astrological prophecies, looking back, may perhaps see in that comet a sign of the coming poet, who should, more than any other, influence the world of letters.

Ser Patracco took refuge in Arezzo, a city of Tuscany, and found on the so-called Garden Street a house, as the poet says, haud sane ampla seu magnifica, sed qualis exsulem decuisset—"not indeed magnificent but suitable for an exile."

On Monday, July 20th, almost at the very hour when the Bianchi were making their last fruitless effort to regain the ascendancy, Francesco di Petracco was born. Here on the fifteenth of June, 1800, so nearly five exact centuries later, Napoleon, about to fight "Marengo's bloody battle," paused to grant, out of honour to Petrarca's memory, amnesty to its inhabitants.

Petrarca's life lies before us with remarkable clearness. Hundreds of letters give us an almost complete autobiography; but it has been charged against him that he was ashamed of his humble birth. He tells us little about his father's family. We know that his great-grandfather Ser Garzo, a man of considerable native wisdom, though uneducated, lived at Incisa a few miles from Florence and died at the age of 104 on his birthday, in the very room where he had been born.

Of Petrarca's mother nothing is known and the Italian biographers are still struggling over the unsolved problem—whether her name was Eletta, as seems to be indicated in his poem on her death, where he calls her Electa Dei tarn nomine quam re—in that case making her a member of the well-known family of Cino Canigiani; or Nicolosa, daughter of Vanni Cini Sizoli, or whether she was Petracco's second wife or whether she was only sixteen when she gave birth to her famous son Francesco—Ceceo as they called him. When he was six months old he went with his mother to Incisa and on the way as they crossed the Arno the horse of the servant who was carrying him stumbled and the baby was almost drowned.

At Incisa he spent the first six or seven years of his life and it is generally believed that he there acquired that perfect Tuscan speech which did him and his country such honour. The house where he dwelt is still shown, though badly ruined, and it bears an inscription to the effect that here the great poet first uttered the sweet sounds of his mother tongue. In 1312 Petracco assembled his family in Pisa but perhaps found it impossible to support them there. Like many other banished Florentines he hoped for better fortunes in France and accordingly took his family to Avignon.

The Pope, Clement V., was wandering about France—at Bordeaux, Lyons, Poitiers, Montpellier and Avignon, and in October, 1316, his successor, John XXII. established the Papal Court definitely at Avignon. Hither Petracco came in 1313 and a second time the son nearly lost his life in a shipwreck near Marseilles. Avignon, on the left bank of the Rhone, was a part of Provence and at this time Provence was the patrimony of King Robert of Naples: here the king had his court from 1318 until 1324.

The influences to which Petrarca must have submitted in this transplantation should not be disregarded. Although he detested Avignon itself with its narrow streets and vile odours, yet it was the home of Provençal song and must have given him his first leaning to poetry.

Little in the way of anecdote can be told of his childhood. An astrologer prophesied that he would win the favour of almost all the princes of his day, and this was fulfilled. Also he himself relates in one of his letters how his father showed him the picture of a double-bodied boy with twin heads, four hands and other curious prototypal anticipations of the Siamese twins, that had been born in Florence and lived two or three weeks. He relates that his father gave his ear a sharp twitch that he might the better remember the marvel.

Expenses were high in Avignon and Petracco established his family at Carpentras, the capital of a little province where were mineral-springs and a quiet easy life. Here Petrarca lived four years and first enjoyed regular schooling at the hands of a scholar named Convennole or Convenevole who had a school there. This Convennole is believed by some to be the author of a portentous Latin poem of very mediocre value. He was in perpetual pecuniary difficulties and Petrarca's father often assisted him, but the man played him a very mean trick. In later years Petrarca himself came to his aid but his generosity was likewise most shabbily acquitted: he took two priceless manuscripts by Cicero and disposed of them. The books must have been destroyed, for no trace of them was ever found and thus were lost Cicero's Libri de Gloria.

Nevertheless, when Convennole died at Prato in 1340 or 1344 his fellow-citizens placed a poet's laurel crown on his tomb and Petrarca offered to write his epitaph.

The progress which Petrarca made in his studies was not remarkable and it is to be deeply regretted that a more liberally cultured scholar had not directed his training. A large part of Petrarca's works is in Latin but he never acquired a perfect style, such as Erasmus was able to wield. His Latin is mediæval: he himself discovered Cicero's Epistles but it was too late in life to modify his habits. Only his inherent genius enabled him to invest his Latin Letters with a perennial charm. Certainly his correspondence with Boccaccio is one of the most precious possessions of literature and it is one of the strange anomalies of life that it so long has remained a sealed book to English readers.

Petrarca's principal playmate and friend in Convennole's school was Guido Settimo who became Archbishop of Genoa, their friendship enduring more than fifty years. With the future archbishop the future poet made his first visit to the source of the Sorgue at Vaucluse or Val chiusa, the Shut-in Valley which he was to immortalise.

From Carpentras Petrarca was sent to the high school at Montpellier with the idea of fitting him for his father's profession of the law. Here he spent four years but what he studied, or what his experiences were, is wholly unknown, or at least wholly a matter of conjecture mixed with imagination. One single anecdote of this time is preserved in Petrarca's correspondence. His father, thinking that general literature was too much drawing his son's attention away from the law, came unexpectedly to Montpellier, and making a thorough search for his books succeeded in finding them, carefully hidden though they had been, and flung them into the fire; moved, however, by his son's bitter tears he allowed him to rescue a copy of Vergil and Cicero's "Rhetoric."

From Montpellier he went to Bologna in 1323 with his brother Gherardo and here again he neglected the lectures on civic law to the advantage of what are called "the humanities." He also enjoyed the gaieties of a student's life and in his later days liked to recall them, especially as Bologna was at this time free from the disturbances that elsewhere were racking the Italian cities. The gates of the town were not closed till late at night, so secure felt the inhabitants, and the students had free course. With one of his instructors Petrarca made a visit to Venice and here also he found the highest tide of prosperity. Soon both cities were doomed to vail their glories.

Among his many friends at Bologna was Giacomo Colonna who afterwards became Bishop of Lombes and gave him a home.

Petracco died in 1326, leaving his family in deep poverty, and the two sons returned to Avignon. Petrarca's only legacy was a manuscript of Cicero. With this, the profession of the law, none too enticing to him in any circumstances, seemed to be out of the question and as the Church offered greater inducements and especially as his friend Colonna was already on the road to high preferment, he decided to adopt this profession.

On the sixth of April, 1327, almost a year after his father's death and not long after the probable death of his mother, Petrarca saw in the church of Santa Chiara at Avignon for the first time the lady whom he celebrated under the name of Laura.

Who was she?

This question has been a puzzle for two centuries and seems to offer no chance of satisfactory solution. Opinions have varied in the widest way. Some scholars have argued that the lady who inspired Petrarca's muse to such lofty flights of song was only a creature of his imagination; others, including Kõrting, give a certain amount of credence to the ingenious though somewhat sophisticated evidence of the clever Abbé de Sade, who elaborately argued that she was the daughter of Audibert de Noves and that she was born in 1307, that she was wedded to Hugh de Sade, the Abbé's ancestor, and bore him eleven children. A tomb at Avignon was opened in 1533 and in the coffin were found a medal and a sonnet. The sonnet was supposed to be Petrarca's though it was hardly worthy of his fame. On the medal were the initials "M. L. M. I." which were interpreted to mean Madonna Laura morta iacit—"Here lies the body of Madonna Laura."

This discovery was in accordance with an old tradition that Laura was a De Sade. The Abbé Costaing of Pusignan believed that she was Laura des Beaux, the daughter of the Seigneur de Vaucluse Adhemar de Cavaillon, on her mother's side descended from the house of Orange and that she lived with her relatives on her estates of Galas on the hills overlooking the valley, and that she died not of the plague but of a consumption.

There is no phase of this famous passion that has not been made the subject of an essay or a poem.

Was she a widow or a maiden or the mother of a patriarchal family? Was Petrarca's description of her beauty based on the reality or is it an ideal figment of his imagination? Was she a heartless coquette as was believed by Macaulay? Would Petrarca have written a fuller and more perfect book of songs had she been perfectly complacent? So the learned Professor Zendrini argues. Was Laura an ambitious woman caring for nothing but her own praise and cold to Petrarca not by reason of virtue but because of her insensibility?

A hundred similar questions arise, and how idle they are! Only one of them we may answer and that in the poet's own words. Some one of his friends had evidently suggested that his complaints were imaginary and his Laura a being of air, as the name implies. He answered as follows:

"What dost thou mean by saying that I have invented the specious name of L'Aura as if I wished to have something to talk about; that Laura is in reality nothing but a poetic fiction of my mind to which long and unremitting study proves that I have been aspiring; but that of this breathing Laura by whose form and beauty I seem to be a captive taken is all manufactured, verses fictitious, sighs simulated? Would that in this respect thou wert jesting in earnest! Would that it were simulatio and not furor. But believe me, no one without great effort can long use simulations but to struggle vainly to appear mad is the height of madness [summa insania]. Moreover while we may succeed in counterfeiting illness by our actions, we can not imitate pallor"—tibi pallor tibi labor meus notus est.

There are several passages in Petrarca's Latin writings where he makes it evident that Laura was an actual person. One is in the treatise concerning Scorn of this World in which he represents himself at the instigation of Truth, who appears to him in the form of a stately virgin, as holding a three days' conversation with his beloved instructor Saint Augustine. In the third dialogue Saint Augustine points out that Petrarca is held in the chains of two passions which keep him from the true contemplation of life and of death: these are love and Glory. Augustine expresses his surprise that a man of Petrarca's talent should spend so large a part of his life in praise of an earthly love; and he predicts that the time will come when he will feel ashamed of himself and of this passion.

Petrarca replies that he has already, even during her life time, written a sonnet on her approaching death, having seen her once beautiful body exhausted by illnesses and frequent—what? Here is one of the mysteries; in the manuscript the word is, as usual, contracted and reads ptbus, which De Sade thinks stands for partubus—frequent child-bearing; while other manuscripts have the word spelled out:—pertubationibus. If she was the mother of eleven children, De Sade would seem to have reason on his side.

Petrarca goes on to assure Saint Augustine that in his Laura he had worshipped not the mortal body but the immortal soul and that even if she should die before he did, he would still love her virtue and her spirit. Saint Augustine objects that though she be perfect as a goddess, yet even that which is most beautiful may be loved shamefully—turpiter; but Petrarca asseverates the purity of his passion and declares that in nothing but its impetuosity was he guilty before her: that she was the source and origin of all his glory; she had nurtured the feeble germ of virtue in his breast; she was the mirror of perfection and love has the power to transmute the lover into the standard of the object loved.

But Saint Augustine is not satisfied: he points out the danger of deception and thinks that the fact that he has loved his love so exclusively has caused him to scorn other human beings and human interests. Earthly love has turned Petrarca from the heavenly and into the straight road to death.

In the course of the conversation Saint Augustine brings Petrarca to confess that he has carried next his heart a portrait of his Laura and that even the laurel wreath is dear to him only because it brings the echo of her name. And when Petrarca asks Saint Augustine what he can do to be saved from such a dangerous passion, the Saint recommends change of scene.

"Alas," replies the poet, "in vain have I wandered West and North, far and long, even to the shores of the Deep, and like the wounded stag carried my wound with me wherever I went." Augustine recommends Italy and here occurs his justly famed magnificent eulogium of that beauteous land. This leads naturally to the other chain—glory.

The second passage occurs in a poetic epistle to Giacomo Colonna, written probably in August 1337, two days after returning to Avignon after a long journey:

"Beloved beyond measure is a woman known by her virtue and her ancient lineage—sanguine vetusto. And my songs have given her glory and spread her fame far and wide. Ever does my heart turn back to her and with renewed pangs of love she overcomes me nor does it seem likely that she will ever renounce her conquest."

She had conquered him he says not by any arts of coquetry but by the rare beauty of her form. After enduring the chain for ten years, after wasting to a shadow and becoming another man, the fever of love so penetrating the very marrow of his bones that he could hardly drag one leg after another and he yearned for death, suddenly he determined to strike for freedom and shake off the yoke. God gave him strength to win the battle; but even then the mistress of his heart pursued him as if he were an escaped slave.

"I fly," he says, "I wander over the whole circle of the world, I dare to plough the stormy billows of the Adriatic and the Tyrrhene seas and I entrust my life, rescued from the toils of love, to a tossing vessel: for why should I, wearied by the torments of the soul, and sick of life, fear a premature death? I turn my steps toward the West and behold the lofty summits of the Pyrenees from my couch in the sunny grass. I behold the ocean from where the weary God of Day, after his long journey, dips his chariot of fire in the Hesperian flood and where looking up to Atlas turned to stone at sight of Medusa, he causes the steep mountain precipices to throw long shadows, and hides the moors with hastening shades of night. Hence I turn to the North and Boreas, and, lonely, wander through those lands that are filled with the harsh accents of barbarians' tongues, where the gloomy waves of the British sea splash with changeful foam the shores of half-known coasts and where the icy soil denies obedience to the friendly plough and keeps the vine-stock alien to the hills. Little by little as I journeyed, the billows of my passion grew calm: pain, wrath and fear began to vanish; now and then peaceful slumber closed my eyelids moist with tears, and an unaccustomed smile played over my face; and already in my recollection with less of threat and less of authority arose the image of my deserted love."

Alas, he goes on, he was deceived; he thought he might disregard the sting of passion; the wound was not healed, the anguish was not allayed. He returned, but no sooner was he within the walls of the beloved city than his breast was again laden with the burden of cares. And then follows that superb description not dimmed even in the Latin in which it is couched:

"The sailor fears not with such terror the reefs as he sails through the night, as I now fear my love's face and her heart-stirring words, her head crowned with golden tresses and her snowy neck encircled with a chain and her eyes dealing sweet death."

Even in the secluded vale of Vaucluse he finds no relief: Useless to bewail the vanished years. Waking he sees her and at night her image seems to come through the triple-locked doors of his chamber at midnight and claim him as her slave. Then before the morning paints with crimson the eastern sky, he arises and leaves the house and wanders over mountain and through forest, ever on the watch to see if she is not there.

"Oft," he says, "when I think I am alone in the pathless woods, the bushes waving in the breeze present her figure and I see her face in the bole of the lonely oak; her image rises from the waters of the spring; I seem to see her in the clouds, in the empty air and even in the adamantine stone."

To the celebration of this love he consecrates 291 sonnets, twenty-four canzoni, nine sestini, seven ballata and four madrigals, besides the semi-epic poem written in terza rima like the "Divina Commedia." In these sonnets—which are curious in this respect that they are not a sequence, they mark no progression: they are like a placid lake, not a river—Petrarca celebrates his love in every way. Every little event inspires a poem. Once he sees her about to cross a stream and the removal of her white shoes and red stockings leads to a sonnet. Her beauty is ever the thought in his mind: both in Italian and Latin he tells us:

  Una donna più bella che 'l sole,forman parem non ulla videbunt saecula—

"A woman lovelier than the sun, whose form no century will ever see equalled."

And again of her gait and voice:

  non era l'andar suo cosa mortale,ma d'angelica forma e le parolesonavan altro che pur voce umana—

"Her gait was not a mortal thing but of an angelic form and her words sounded different from any human voice:"

cuius nec vox nec oculorum vigornec incessus hominem repraesentat.

A few of the lovely passages—which alas! even in a paraphrase must lose much of their charm—must furnish a hint of the richness of this collection of poems which Guiseppe Jacopo Ferrazzi calls the bible of poets and which is by most critics considered "the most perfect monument of love-poetry among modern nations."

Her name, he says in the fifth sonnet, which is devoted to an elaborate pun upon it—Laure-ta and Laure—was written on his heart by love. He sends her some fruit in spring and the thought that the sun has ripened it causes him to call her "a sun among women"—tra le donne un sole—which shedding the rays of her bright eyes upon him wakes into life the thoughts, acts and words of love. But he concludes sadly that though spring may shine on earth again there will never be spring again for him. Most beautiful is the beginning of the second canzone

Verdi panni, sanguini, oscuri o persi—

excellently translated by Miss Louise Winslow Kidder:

Green robes, blood-coloured, dark or reddish
 black
Or golden hair in shining tresses heaped,
Ne'er clothed a woman beautiful as she
Who robs me of my will, and with herself
Allures me from the path of liberty,
So that no other servitude less grave
Do I endure.

In this canzone there are eight stanzas of seven lines each and a sort of coda of two lines, there being only seven rhymes in the whole poem. In the sestine are no rhymes, but each stanza of six lines has the same word endings. In the third canzone he speaks of her beautiful soft eyes which carry the keys to his sweet thoughts:

Que' begli occhi soaviChe portaron le chiaviDe' miei dolci pensier.

And further on he speaks of the golden tresses which should make the sun full of deep envy and her beautiful calm look—bel guardo sereno—where the rays of Love are so warm, and still recalling her graces, her white delicate hands and lovely arms—

le man bianchi sottilie le braccia gentili.

All very well translated by Macgregor:

The soft hands, snowy charm,
The finely rounded arm,
The winning way, by turns, that quiet scorn.

He renders the lines

I dolci sdegni alteramente umilie 'l bel giovenil pettotorre d'alto intelletto

Chaste anger, proud humility adorn
The fair young breast that shrined
Intellect pure and high.

Wotton translates the lines:

L'oro e le perle e i fior vermigli e i  bianchiChe 'l verno devria far languidi e secchi:

Those golden tresses, teeth of pearly white,
Those cheeks' fair roses blooming to decay.

But it very well illustrates the danger one runs in reading translations: the gold and pearls and red and white flowers are the adornments which Laura wears and which are reflected in the mirror against which he complains because in seeing herself reflected there she cares more for herself than for him.

Particularly beautiful is the sonnet in which he blesses all the circumstances of his passion:

Benedetto sia'l giorno, e 'l mese e 'l anno  E la stagione e 'l tempo e l 'ora e 'l    punto  E 'l bel paese e 'l loco ov' io fui giuntoDa duo begli occhi.

This translated literally reads:

"Blest be the day and the month and the year and the season and the time and the hour and the instant and the fair country and the place where I was captured by two lovely eyes that enchained me fast." And the sonnet proceeds: "And blest be the first sweet inquietude [affanno] that I felt at being joined with love, and the bow and arrows whereby I was wounded and the wounds that came into my heart. Blest be the voices which calling out the name of my lady, I scattered; and the sighs and the desire; and blest be all the writings whereby I won my fame and my thought which is wholly of her, so that no other has a share in it."

After eleven years of perduti giorni, since that "fierce passion's strong entanglement" (as Dacre translates the line) he calls upon the Father of Heaven to vouchsafe unto him power to turn to a different life and to finer achievements

ad altra vita ed a più belle imprese.

But still the charm holds: even if he would forget her the sight of the green laurel-tree brings her so vividly before him that amid the oaks and pines on the shore of the Tuscan sea where the waves broken by the winds complain, he falls as it were dead; even after fourteen years have passed he still sings her golden locks flowing in mazy ringlets to the breeze—capelli d'oro a l'aura sparsi.

Leigh Hunt has a good translation of the canzone to the Fountain of Vaucluse beginning: Chiare, fresche e dolci acque—

Clear, fresh and dulcet streams
Which the fair shape who seems
To me sole woman haunted at noon-tide.

Fair bough, so gently fit
(I sigh to think of it)
Which lent a pillar to her lovely side
And turf and flowers bright-eyed
O'er which her folded gown
Flowed like an angel's down,
Give ear, give ear with one consenting
To my last words, my last and my
  lamenting.

Of Petrarca's later life there are a thousand fascinating details to be found in his letters: his travels, friendships, with all the great men of his day, his relations with popes and prelates, princes and emperors, his clever intrigues to obtain the poet's laurel crown, his studies, his efforts to collect the first private library of modern times, his residences, as for instance in the Magician's house at Selva Piana, or at Venice at the house of Arrigo Molin, from one of the turrets of which he used to watch the ships, or again on the beautiful Euganean Hills.

Nor must we forget his cat which, as Tasoni says, still unburied—un' insepolta gatta—"conquers in glory the tombs of haughty kings." A whole chapter should be devoted to his beautiful friendship with Boccaccio and how one of his last works was to translate into Latin the story of the Patient Griselda which Chaucer put into verse.

A few cardinal dates will serve on which to hang the more important events of the latter half of his life: In 1339 he began his Latin poem "Africa," the hero of which was Scipio: it waited more than half a millennium to be published. The next two years he was busy with his growing glory and waiting to be crowned at the Capitol.

After several years' residence at Parma he was made canon and in 1348 while residing at Verona came the sad news of Laura's death. Henceforth his sonnets, though retrospective and often inspired by memory of her beauty become an ascending scale until in the "Trionfi" they rival the more spiritualised poems of Dante, Laura being personified as Chastity triumphant.

In 1350 he was appointed archdeacon of Parma and the following year the Florentines decreed the restoration of his property, but when he refused to live there they confiscated it again. In 1360 he was sent as an ambassador to King Jean of France and then settled in Venice, where he lived another decade and then retired to Arqua among the Euganean Hills, where, in 1374, on the eighteenth of July, he was found dead at his table. A magnificent funeral was decreed in his honour as became so great an ornament to Italy. In 1873 his tomb was opened. His skull and bones were at first intact but on exposure to the air speedily fell to dust.

This great man becomes even greater on close study: he is chiefly known as the author of love-poems which in a dissolute age are absolutely pure and in such perfect Italian that the taste of the most refined and exacting would change scarcely a word. Although these graceful lavorietti composed of equal parts of serenity, brightness of touch and absolute perfection of imagery, are so spontaneous in Italian and so impossible to translate into English—wilting (as has been well said by an Italian scholar) when transferred into alien soil—yet all poets who know Italian have tried their hand at them. The latest attempt, by a California lady who published her version¹ in London, is sheer paraphrase: the simplicity and directness of the original appear in an extraordinarily imaginative overlaying of filagree and arabesque. A word or a hint is enlarged to an elaborate comparison; a thousand poetic images and conceits which Petrarca never dreamed of are introduced, and yet the work has been widely heralded as a masterpiece of translation. It was certainly inspired by Petrarca, but if one compares the version with the original, the enormous gulf between them will become at once apparent.

They were turned into Polish by Ian Grotkowski as early as 1465. Spanish, German and French poets—all have drunk at the fountain of this Parnassus. In 1520 there was a Petrarca Academy at Venice. Ioost van Vondel, the greatest of the classic Dutch poets and the master of Milton, made a pilgrimage to Arqua and set Petrarca above all other poets. Boccaccio in 1374 two hundred years earlier had predicted that Arqua, a village scarcely known even in Padua, would rise famous in the whole world: men in days to come would make pilgrimages to it. His prediction was amply verified.

There are at least two score commentaries on Petrarca's Italian poems which he himself regretted and repented having written. According to Crescenbini there were more than six hundred sonnetteers in the sixteenth century all imitating Petrarca: no less than twelve at once in Venice. Marco Foscarini prepared for the press the Rime of sixty Venetian gentlemen, all disciples of Laura's lover.

On the fifth centenary of his birth, prizes being offered, more than six hundred responses in French and Provençal were submitted.

But he was not merely a poet, he was also great as an orator, as a scholar, as a philosopher. The more we study his career the more we must marvel at its richness in accomplishment. Ugo Foscolo calls him the restorer of letters. He was the promoter of classic literature. "For us and for all Europe," says Carducci, "Petrarca was above all the recreator of glorious antiquity and the leader who through the desert of the Middle Ages freed our people from the slavery of barbarous peoples."

Professor Domenico Berti calls him at once poet, historian, philosopher, scholar and cultivator of the fine arts and speaks of his fine, exquisite, full, robust genius and his noble soul.

He was also the prophet of United Italy. When Cola di Rienzi engaged in his great but futile struggle to restore to Rome her ancient liberty Petrarca actively sympathised with him and wrote to him one of his noblest canzoni beginning

Spirto gentil che quelli membra reggi,

and that which begins "Italia mia" praised by all critics and commentators and called the Marseillaise of Italy, as fresh and animated and full of sparkling enthusiasm to-day as if written only yesterday. It may be read in Lady Dacre's spirited version. No wonder the Austrian authorities, when they were making their desperate efforts to keep Italy dismembered and enslaved, forbade its use in the gymnasia, for it well might kindle generous souls to patriotic hatred of tyranny.

Notes

1. "Madonna Laura." Agnes Tobin, 1907.