Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/102

84 quite a new light, as a trusty diplomatist, the author of various manuals (Genealogiæ deorum gentilium, De casibus virorum illustrium, &c.) of the information most sought for in the age, and, under Petrarch's direction, a chief agent in the promotion of humanistic studies. Copies of Terence and Apuleius are extant in his handwriting.

One of Boccaccio's first duties after he had settled himself in his native city was to entertain Petrarch upon his visit in 1350, and one of his first public missions, performed in the following year, was to solicit him to fix his residence at Florence and enter the service of the Republic. Petrarch declined to entrust his repose to so unstable a community, but his acquaintance with Boccaccio ripened into an intimacy which might have been compared to that of Goethe and Schiller if Boccaccio had not gracefully and judiciously assumed a tone of deference to the acknowledged sovereign of contemporary literature. He is indefatigable in literary suit and service. His piety towards Dante as well as Petrarch leads him to transcribe for the latter the Divine Comedy. His equal affection for Petrarch and classical studies made him at Petrarch's instigation entertain an erudite but uncomfortable Greek, Leontius Pilatus, who rendered Homer for him into very lame Latin; but still it was Homer that he read; while the mediæval epicist of the Trojan war, Josephus Iscanus, had known his theme only in Dares Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis.

Landor has delightfully depicted a supposed visit of Petrarch to Boccaccio at Certaldo; one only regrets that the conversation of the poets should turn so exclusively on Dante. Petrarch rendered his friend one inestimable service in dissuading him from the renunciation of the world, into which he had been almost scared