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Others maintain that he was the identical Phemius whose life Ulysses spared. This propensity of the human mind explains, I think, in a great degree, the extensive popularity of a poet whose works are little else than the expression of his personal feelings. In the second place, Petrarch was not only an egotist, but an amatory egotist.
The loss of priceless treasures, such as the manuscript of Virgil which had belonged to Petrarch, and the masterpieces of Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, might perhaps have been borne: it concerned only the cultured few, and their effervescence was soon quelled by patrols of French cavalry. Far different was it with the peasants between Milan and Pavia.
It should generally be distinguished from them by greater simplicity of expression; as we recognise Napoleon in the pictures of his battles, amidst a crowd of embroidered coats and plumes, by his grey cloak and his hat without a feather. In the verses of Petrarch it is generally impossible to say what thought is meant to be prominent. All is equally elaborate.
This love was a kind of religious and enthusiastic passion, such as mystics imagine they feel towards the Deity, or such as Plato believes to be the bond of union between elevated minds. There is no poet in any language more perfectly pure than Petrarch more completely above all reproach of laxity or immorality.
HUME and ROBERTSON were engaged in the same studies, but with very opposite principles; yet Robertson declined writing the English history, which he aspired to do, lest it should injure the plans of Hume; a noble sacrifice! Politics once divided Boccaccio and Petrarch. The poet of Valchiusa had never forgiven the Florentines for their persecution of his father.
Scott's life naturally produced his earlier novels; in the 'Corsair, the 'Childe, and the 'Don, no one can mistake the hero-author; Southey's works, Shelley's, and Wordsworth's, are full of adventure, feeling, and fancy, personal to the writers, at least equally with the sonnets of Petrarch or of Shakspeare.
Of himself he confessed that when he had seen the illuminations of Nicolas Jany, the snow-white 'Petrarch, the 'Virgil' on vellum, life had no more to offer: 'after having seen only these three books I hope to descend to my obscure grave in perfect peace and happiness. The Livre d'Heures printed for Francis I., which had belonged to the Duc de la Vallière, was bought by Sir Mark Sykes, and became one of his principal treasures at Sledmere.
We wished before we left Chambéry and the valley we so much loved to visit together the humble dwelling of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Madame de Warens, at Les Charmettes. A landscape is but a man or a woman. What is Vaucluse without Petrarch? Sorrento without Tasso? What is Sicily without Theocritus, or the Paraclet without Heloise? What is Annecy without Madame de Warens?
Like Petrarch he seems more a discoverer of Beauty than an imparter of it. But these discoveries, these devotions to aims, these struggles toward the absolute, do not these in themselves, impart something, if not all, of their own unity and coherence which is not received, as such, at first, nor is foremost in their expression.
From Petrarch they have borrowed the form and mystic robe of Death herself . Uguccione della Faggiuola has sat for the portrait of the Captain who must quail before the terrors of the tomb, and Castruccio Castracane is the strong man cut off in the blossom of his age.
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