Page:Petrach, the first modern scholar and man of letters.djvu/24

4 If from the vantage-ground of to-day, we review the course of enlightenment as exhibited in Renaissance, Reformation, and Revolution, we perceive that Petrarch stands forth among his contemporaries as the cosmopolitan representative of the first great forward movement. With prophetic insight, he declared that he stood between two eras. He was the first to look back and realise all that the world had lost since the age of Augustus: he was the first to point out the way in which the lost might be retrieved. With the frank self-appreciation of genius, he wrote at the end of his life, to his dearest friend Boccaccio: "I certainly will not reject the praise which you bestow upon me for having stimulated in many instances, not only in Italy, but, perchance, beyond its confines, the pursuit of studies such as ours, which have suffered neglect for so many centuries. I am indeed one of the oldest of those among us who are engaged in the cultivation of these subjects."

In order to grasp the momentous import of the renewed interest in Latin literature to which Petrarch thus proudly refers, we must remember that it was not simply a sign of improved taste but that it involved the