United States or Greece ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The former, as is well known, owned and kept with religious care a Greek Homer, which he was unable to read. A complete Latin translation of the Iliad and Odyssey, though a very bad one, vas made at Petrarch's suggestion, and with Boccaccio's help, by a Calabrian Greek, Leonzio Pilato.
Ugo Foscolo, an excellent critic where his own temper and violence did not interfere, sees nothing but jealousy in Petrarch's dislike of Dante, and nothing but Jesuitism in similar feelings entertained by such men as Tiraboschi. Such men, with all their acuteness, are incapable of seeing what can be effected by nobler and serener times, and the progress of civilisation.
The laurel meant glory; the ivy signified the lasting fame which should attend his work; the myrtle was the lawful right of Laura's poet. The Italian princes vied with each other in trying to get Petrarch to their courts, and in heaping favors upon him. He visited nearly all of them in turn. The life of a palace was perhaps not much more to Petrarch's taste than the life of a great city.
He merely offered to guide us to Petrarch's house, and was silent, except when spoken to, from that instant.
Petrarch's house stands below the promenade which I have just mentioned, and within hearing of the reverberations between the strokes of the cathedral bell. It is two stories high, covered with a light-colored stucco, and has not the slightest appearance of antiquity, no more than many a modern and modest dwelling-house in an American city.
The statement of the "Clerk" in the "Canterbury Tales" that he learnt the story of patient Griseldis "at Padua of a worthy clerk...now dead," who was called "Francis Petrarch, the laureate poet," may of course merely imply that Chaucer borrowed the "Clerk's Tale" from Petrarch's Latin version of the original by Boccaccio.
Many of these works have been, or will be mentioned on account of their contents; we here refer to them as a class. From the time of Petrarch's letters and treatises down to near the end of the fifteenth century, the heaping up of learned quotations, as in the case of the orators, is the main business of most of these writers.
By the close of the fourteenth century, the love-lorn wailings of Petrarch's sonnets and others of the same kind were taken off by caricaturists; and the solemn air of this form of verse was parodied in lines of mystic twaddle.
But she kept her skill in this respect very secret, and was always very angry if any one by chance saw one of her poems. After her death there were found among her papers many translations, especially of Petrarch's Sonnets, which were the work of her earliest youth. "The queen!" exclaimed Elizabeth with delight. "Have you come to me at such an early morning hour?"
"They touch an air of Petrarch's sonatas! How indiscreet, and yet how noble!" "More noble than wise," said the Donna Florinda, who entered the balcony and looked intently on the water beneath. "Here are musicians in the color of a noble in one gondola," she continued, "and a single cavalier in another." "Hath he no servitor? Doth he ply the oar himself?"
Word Of The Day