Page:Petrach, the first modern scholar and man of letters.djvu/251

 So it was quite impossible that he should follow him in matters of fashion and form. But in spirit and intention, in all their deeper affinities, the letters are distinctly Ciceronian, akin to Cicero's essays and treatises. Cicero's style is plainly Petrarch's ideal, although he is too wise to imitate it slavishly. And he falls, at his best, not very far short of Cicero's clearness and animation, his variety, his aptness of quotation and illustration. A clearer case of sympathetic comprehension of another, and of reproduction without imitation, it would be hard to find.

Next to Cicero, Petrarch cared most among Roman writers for Virgil. One would have expected to find this order reversed, to find the poet of the Africa far more devoted to his great forerunner than to one who was essentially unpoetical, a rhetorician and prosaist. The explanation of the seeming anomaly is twofold. In the first place, it was in temperament only that Petrarch was a poet, and not, after the splendid lyrical outburst of the Canzoniere, in the whole compass of his thought and feeling. He could not have done the work which he did if it had been otherwise. It was necessary that the first Humanist should combine with the poet's