verse his model is Virgil, but he keenly realises the importance of catching the spirit of the ancient poet without appropriating his actual language'. He collects classical manuscripts, as well as coins and inscriptions; he is inspired with an interest in history. and archaeology by the sight of the ruins of Rome. As a loyal Churchman, he regards the study of the Classics as the handmaid of Christianity, and not as hostile to its teaching.

His mind was mainly moulded by the study of the Latin Classics, to which he was attracted by their perfection of form. Even in his earliest youth, he had a keen ear for the melodies of Latin verse and rhetorical prose. As a student at Montpellier, he was spending on the perusal of his favourite Latin authors the time that he was supposed to be devoting to the study of law, when his father suddenly appeared on the scene, tore his son's treasures from their place of concealment, and flung them into the fire. When the son burst into tears at the grievous sight, the father relented so far as to snatch from the flames two volumes only; the one was a copy of Virgil; the other was the 'Rhetoric' of Cicero. Cicero and Virgil became the principal text-books of the Revival of Learning. Petrarch describes them in one of his poems as the 'two eyes' of his discourse. Even in his old age, he was still haunted by the mediaeval tradition of the allegorical significance of the Aeneid; but, unlike the mediaeval admirers of Virgil, he does not regard the Latin poet as a mysteriously distant and supernatural being; he finds in him a friend, and he is even candid enough to criticise him. In his 'Familiar Letters' he quotes Virgil about 120 times; his carefully annotated copy is preserved in the Ambrosian Library'; and, under his influence, the Aeneid was accepted as the sole model for the epic poetry of the succeeding age. It is the model of his own Africa.

In his appreciation of the lyrics of Horace, he marks a distinct advance on the mediaeval view. Of the quotations from Horace in the Middle Ages, less than one-fifth are from the lyrics and

1 Epp. Fam. xxiii 19 (cp. Harvard Lectures, 11f).

2 Epp. Rerum Senilium, xv 1, p. 947.

Trionfo della Fama, iii 21.

♦ De Nolhac, 118–135; Facsimile of frontispiece in Müntz, Gazette Arch. 1887, and Putrarque (1902), opp. p. 12.

more than four-fifths from the hexameter poems1; but the balance is happily redressed by Petrarch, who quotes with equal interest from both. His copy of Horace is in the Laurentian Library'. Ovid is too frivolous for his taste'. With the epics of Lucan, Statius, and Claudian he is well acquainted; and the same is true of Persius, Juvenal, and Martial, with parts of Ausonius. Of the plays of Plautus only eight were then known; Petrarch quotes from two of them, and gives an outline of a third as a proof of the poet's skill in the delineation of character. He is familiar with the comedies of Terence, and the tragedies of Seneca; he rarely refers to Catullus' or Propertius; it is apparently only in excerpts that he knows Tibullus. All his quotations from Lucretius are clearly derived second-hand from Macrobius 10.

In his boyhood, he found himself impelled to study Cicero, and, although he was only imperfectly conscious of the sense, he was charmed by the marvellous harmonies of sound". In his old age he declared that the 'eloquence of this heavenly being was absolutely inimitable". Virgil had been the favourite author of the Middle Ages; it was the influence of Petrarch that restored Cicero to a position of prominence in the Revival of Learning". Petrarch was familiar with all the philosophical books of Cicero then extant, with the mutilated text of the principal rhetorical works, and with many of the Speeches".

The lost writings of Cicero were the constant theme of his eager quest. Whenever, in his travels in foreign lands, he caught 1 Moore's Studies in Dante, i 201.

2 Facs. in Chatelain's Paléographie, pl. 87, 2; De Nolhac, 148-153.

3 De Vita Sol. ii 7, 2.

4 De Nolhac, 153, 160–7, 173.

Curculio and Cistellaria, in Fam. ix 4.

• Casina, in Fam. v 14.

7 De Nolhac, 138–140.

8 iii 32, 49f, apparently imitated in Canzoni, xii str. 7; De Nolhac, 142 f; for imitations of Propertius in Petrarch's Africa, see Prof. Phillimore in R. Ellis, Catullus in the xivth century (1905), 29.

De Nolhac, 145.

11 Epp. Rerum Senilium, xv 1, p. 946.

10 ib. 134.

12 ib. p. 948.

13 Zielinski, Cicero im Wandel der Jahrhunderte, 1897, p. 26; Harvard Lectures, 149.

14 De Nolhac, 176—223.

a distant glimpse of some secluded monastery, he hastened to the spot in the hope of finding the object of his search'. In 1333 he had his first experience of the joys of discovery, when he found two Speeches of Cicero at Liège. One of them was copied promptly by his companion, and the other by himself. The second of these was certainly the Speech pro Archia3. A far greater joy was awaiting him. The Letters of Cicero had for ages been lost to view; but at Verona, in 1345, he found a manuscript containing all the Letters to Atticus and Quintus, and the correspondence with Brutus. He immediately transcribed the whole, but his transcript has been unhappily lost. The copy in the Laurentian Library at Florence', long supposed to be Petrarch's, was really transcribed, eighteen years after Petrarch's death, for a Latin Secretary of Florence, Coluccio Salutati, who was the first in modern times to possess copies of both of the great collections of Cicero's Letters. The Epistolae ad Familiares were completely unknown to Petrarch. No sooner had he discovered the manuscript of the Letters to Atticus than he at once indited a letter to Cicero himself apprising him of the fact. This was the first of Petrarch's Letters to Dead Authors, the remainder (including a second letter to Cicero) being addressed to Homer, Virgil, and Horace, and to Livy, Seneca, and Quintilian.

Before discovering Cicero's Letters he had already formed his style on that of Cicero's philosophical works; after the discovery of the Letters, he makes them the model of his own, and, in the preface to his Epistolae de Rebus Familiaribus, declares that he will follow Cicero rather than Seneca. Nevertheless, in those letters, he has as many as sixty citations from Seneca, and this is far from the only proof of his familiarity with that author'. His favourite Roman historian is Livy; he bitterly regrets the loss of the books of the second decade, and, writing to the historian

1 Epp. Rerum Senilium, xv 1, p. 948. Fam. xiii 6 (11 238 Fracassetti).

ibid.

4 xlix 18.

Fam. xxiv 3; cp. xxi 10 (11 87 Fr.) and Var. 25 (11 367 Fr.). Cp. Viertel, Die Wiederauffindung von Ciceros Briefen durch Petrarcha, Königsberg program, 1879.

6

p. 21 Fr.

8 Rer. Mem. i 2.

7 De Nolhac, 308 f.

himself, exclaims:-O si mihi totus contingeres'. He is familiar with Caesar, Sallust, Justin, Suetonius, Florus, Curtius, the Historia Augusta, Valerius Maximus, Vegetius, Frontinus, and Orosius; but he knows nothing of Nepos or of Tacitus. He has only an imperfect copy of Quintilian'. He is unhappily unacquainted with the Letters of the younger Pliny; but he is fortunate in possessing the encyclopaedia of Pliny the elder. His copy is now in the Paris Library, and, in the margin of the passage describing the fountain of the Sorgue', Petrarch has drawn from memory a dainty little sketch of the valley of Vaucluse".

Under the influence of Cicero, Petrarch had been led to believe that the Latin literature was far superior to the Greek'; but he was ignorant of the Greek language. The first opportunity for learning it presented itself in 1339, when Barlaam, the Calabrian monk of Seminara, arrived at Avignon as an envoy from Constantinople. He was sent once more to the West in 1342, and Petrarch's attempts to learn the language are best assigned to that date. But he had barely learned to read and write the capital letters, when he unselfishly recommended his preceptor for a bishopric in S. Italy. Another envoy, Nicolaus Sigeros, who visited the West about 1350, sent Petrarch a мMS of Homer about 1354. To Petrarch it was a sealed book, but, as he gazed on it, he was transported with delight. He even wrote an enthusiastic letter to Homer himself, and also asked his friend in the East to send him copies of Hesiod and Euripides1o. Besides possessing a translation of the first four books of the Iliad", he acquired in 1369 a transcript of the rendering of the whole of Homer by a pupil of Barlaam, named Leontius Pilatus,

4 xviii § 190.

• De Fin. i 10, iii 5.

7 Sen. xii, p. 913, Graecos et ingenio et stilo frequenter vicimus et frequenter aequavimus, imo, si quid credimus Ciceroni, semper vicimus, ubi adnisi sumus (De Nolhac, 318).

De Nolhac, 324-6. Cp. G. Mandorli, Fra Barlaamo Calabrese, 1888.

Fam. xxiv 12.

11 De Nolhac, 353 f.

10 Fam. xviii 2.

whom he had entertained in Venice for three months in 13631. Though the baldness of this rendering led to an abatement in his enthusiasm for the old Greek poet, his subsequent writings give proof of his study of its pages. There is a well-attested tradition that he died while 'illuminating' (that is, annotating) his copy of a Latin translation of Homer'. This copy is now in the National Library of France, and the trembling hand that marks the close of the notes on the Odyssey confirms the tradition that they were his latest work. A Latin rendering of Homer's description of Bellerophon's wanderings on the Aleian plain, which appears in Petrarch's Secretum, has caused needless perplexity to two of his most learned exponents in Germany and France, who hazard the conjecture that the rendering is due to Petrarch himself. Had they been as familiar as Petrarch with the pages of Cicero, they would have found it in the Tusculan Disputations®.

Petrarch possessed a мs of the Greek text of sixteen of the dialogues of Plato, and, on receiving the MS of Homer, placed it beside his Plato and wrote to assure the donor of his pride at having under his roof at Milan two guests of such distinction'. He also possessed a copy of part of the translation of the Timaeus by Chalcidius. Leontius Pilatus, the only person from whom he might possibly have obtained a rendering of the rest, had met with a sudden and singular end. On his voyage from Constantinople in the spring of 1367, he was struck dead by a flash of lightning while standing against the mast, and Petrarch hurried down to the quay in the vain hope of finding, in the unhappy man's possessions, some precious manuscript of Euripides or of Sophocles'. Petrarch knows of the Phaedo solely in connexion with the story of the death of Cato". He mentions the otiosa

1 The passages on Leontius Pilatus are quoted in full by Hody, 2—10; cp. Gibbon, vii 20 Bury; and De Nolhac, 339–349..

2 Decembrio, quoted by De Nolhac, 348.