Page:Petrach, the first modern scholar and man of letters.djvu/248

 the narrow conceptions of the Middle Ages. And this return was largely Petrarch's work.

Men had conversed with the classics before his day. They were by no means unstudied in mediæval times. John of Salisbury, for example, in the twelfth century, had known almost as many of the Roman poets and moralists and historians as Petrarch himself. He had known them, however, and used them, in a very different fashion. He had read them with no surrender to their charm, and no response to their views concerning life and its uses. We wonder at his knowledge of the text of his classical authors, and at the aptness with which he cites them in illustration of his thought; but we wonder still more at his utter inability to understand their attitude, to find their point of view. Lifelong intercourse with them failed to widen his range of vision. Despite their influence he remained mediæval in all his thought.

But with Petrarch it was otherwise. He first, among the men of the Middle Ages, was endowed with a passionate love for the beauty of ancient literature, and an entire sympathy with its ruling ideas, and at the same time, it must be observed, with a saving incapacity to foresee the disintegration of thought and