Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/78

60 bereavement, nor does he suffer by the comparison. Nothing can surpass the poignancy of Dante's first grief as depicted in the Vita Nuova; but he soon forms another tie, and though the memory of Beatrice is ever with him, the human affection subUmates more and more into an abstract spiritual type. Petrarch's utterances, on the other hand, wear at first something of a conventional semblance, but constantly increase in depth and tenderness, and while he remains the humanist in his studies and the diplomatist in active life, his poetry, as of old, is all but monopolised by his one passion. As his attachment to Laura in her life had been compatible with frequent and long absences, so her death did not prevent him from discharging the public functions fitly entrusted to the most eminent scholar of his age.

Although he often expresses in his verse his delight in revisiting the banks of the Sorga, his life from this time was chiefly spent in Upper Italy, much occupied by the discharge of diplomatic commissions from the Pope, the Venetian Republic, and the Lords of Milan and Padua; constantly appealing to the Avignon Popes to terminate the "Babylonish captivity" of the Church; vexed by the undutifulness of his natural son, but finding comfort in his daughter; indefatigable in collecting and transcribing manuscripts; giving, though himself ignorant of Greek, a powerful impulse to Hellenic studies by commissioning a Latin translation of Homer; producing many of his most pleasing minor Latin writings; and throwing his last energies into the apotheosis of Laura in his Trionfi. He went to Paris to congratulate John, King of France, on his release from captivity in England; and was present at the marriage of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, at Milan, where or soon afterwards