Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/741

 PETRARCH 709 highly placed and favoured at one of the most wealthy courts of Europe, that he addressed epistles to the emperor Charles IV. upon the distracted state of Italy, and en treated him to resume the old Ghibelline policy of imperial interference. Charles IV. passed through Mantua in the autumn of 1354. There Petrarch made his acquaintance, and, finding him a man unfit for any noble enterprise, declined attending him to Rome. When Charles returned to Germany, after assuming the crowns in Rome and Milan, Petrarch addressed a letter of vehement invective and reproach to the emperor who was so negligent of the duties imposed on him by his high office. This did not prevent the Visconti sending him on an embassy to Charles in 1356. Petrarch found him at Prague, and, after plead ing the cause of his masters, was despatched with honour and the diploma of count palatine. His student s life at Milan was again interrupted in 1360 by a mission on which Galeazzo Visconti sent him to King John of France. The tyrants of Milan were aspiring to royal alliances ; Gian Galeazzo Visconti had been married to Isabella of France ; Violante Visconti, a few years later, was wedded to the English duke of Clarence. Petrarch was now com missioned to congratulate King John upon his liberation from captivity in England. This duty performed, he returned to Milan, where in 1361 he received news of the deaths of his son Giovanni and his old friend Socrates. Both had been carried off by plague. The remaining years of Petrarch s life, important as they Avere for the furtherance of humanistic studies, may be briefly condensed. On llth May 1362 he settled at Padua, from the neighbourhood of which he never moved again to any great distance. The same year saw him at Venice, making a donation of his library to the republic of St Mark. Here his friend Boccaccio introduced to him the Greek teacher Leontius Pilatus. Petrarch, who possessed a MS. of Homer and a portion of Plato, never acquired the Greek language, although he attempted to gain some little knowledge of it in his later years. Homer, he said, was dumb to him, while he was deaf to Homer ; and he could only approach the Iliad in Boccaccio s rude Latin version. About this period he saw his daughter Francesca happily married, and undertook the education of a young scholar from Ravenna, whose sudden disappear ance from his household caused him the deepest grief. This youth has been identified, but on insufficient grounds, with that Giovanni Malpaghini of Ravenna who was destined to form a most important link between Petrarch and the humanists of the next age of culture. The public affairs of Italy and Europe continued to interest him ; nor was he ever idle in composing letters and orations, some of which were not without political importance, while all of them contributed to form a style that had the greatest influence over successive generations of Italian chancellors and secretaries. Gradually his oldest friends dropped off. Azzo di Correggio died in 1362, and Lselius, Simonides, Bar- bato, in the following year. His own death was reported in 1365 ; but he survived another decade. Much of this last stage of his life was occupied at Padua in a contro versy with the Averroists, whom he regarded as dangerous antagonists both to sound religion and to sound culture. A curious treatise, which grew in part out of this dispute and out of a previous duel with physicians, was the book Upon his own Ignorance and that of many others. At last, in 1369, tired with the bustle of a town so big as Padua, he retired to Arqua, a village in the Euganean hills, where he continued his usual train of literary occupations, employ ing several secretaries, and studying unremittingly. All through these declining years his friendship with Boccaccio was maintained and strengthened. It rested on a solid basis of mutual affection and of common studies, the different temperaments of the two scholars securing them against the disagreements of rivalry or jealousy. One of Petrarch s last compositions was a Latin version of Boccaccio s story of Griselda. On 18th July 1374 his people found the old poet and scholar dead among his books in the library of that little house which looks across the hills and lowlands toward the Adriatic. When we attempt to estimate Petrarch s position in the history of modern culture, the first thing which strikes us is that he was even less eminent as an Italian poet than as the founder of Humanism, the inaugurator of the Renaissance in Italy. What he achieved for the modern world was not merely to bequeath to his Italian imitators masterpieces of lyrical art unrivalled for perfection of workmanship, but also, and far more, to open out for Europe a new sphere of mental activity. Standing within the threshold of the Middle Ages, he surveyed the king dom of the modern spirit, and, by his own inexhaustible industry in the field of scholarship and study, he deter mined what we call the revival of learning. By bringing the men of his own generation into sympathetic contact with antiquity, he gave a decisive impulse to that European movement which restored freedom, self-consciousness, and the faculty of progress to the human intellect. The warm recognition which he met with in his lifetime and the extra ordinary activity of his immediate successors prove indeed that the age itself was ripe for this momentous change. Yet it is none the less certain that Petrarch stamped his genius on the spirit of the time, that he was the hero of the humanistic effort. He was the first man to collect libraries, to accumulate coins, to advocate the preservation of antique monuments, and to collate MSS. Though he knew no Greek, he was the first to appreciate its vast importance ; and through his influence Boccaccio laid the earliest foundations of its study. More than this, he was the first to approach the great authors of antiquity with intelligence. It was not the extent but the lucidity of his erudition, not the matter but the spirit of his scholar ship, that placed him at an immeasurable distance of superiority above his predecessors. When we compare the use which even Dante made of classical knowledge in his De Monarchia with Petrarch s touch upon the ancients in his numerous prose works, we perceive that we have passed from the mediaeval to the modern conception of literature. For him the authors of the Greek and Latin world were living men, more real, in fact, than those with whom he corresponded ; and the rhetorical epistles he addressed to Cicero, Seneca, and Varro prove that he dwelt with them on terms of sympathetic intimacy. So far- reaching were the interests controlled by him in this capacity of humanist that his achievement as an Italian lyrist seems by comparison insignificant. Petrarch s ideal of humanism was essentially a noble one. He regarded the orator and the poet as teachers, bound to complete themselves by education, and to exhibit to the world an image of perfected personality in prose and verse of studied beauty. Self-culture and self-effectuation seemed to him the highest aims of man. Everything which contributed to the formation of a free, impassioned, liberal individuality he regarded as praiseworthy. Everything which retarded the attainment of that end was contempt ible in his eyes. The authors of antiquity, the Holy Scrip tures, and the fathers of the church were valued by him as one common source of intellectual enlightenment. Emi nently religious, and orthodox in his convictions, he did not seek to substitute a pagan for the Christian ideal. This was left for the scholars of the 15th and 16th centuries in Italy. At the same time, the Latin orators, historians, and poets were venerated by him as depositaries of a tradition only second in importance to revelation. For