Page:Readings in European History Vol 1.djvu/563

 n The Italian Cities and the Renaissance 527 involved in other's ill fortune as well as in my own, and am hardly given time to take breath. For every day letters and poems from every corner of our land come showering down upon my devoted head. Nor does this satisfy my foreign friends. I am overwhelmed by floods of missives, no longer from France alone, but from Greece, from Ger- many, from England. I am unable to judge even my own work, and yet I am called upon to be the universal critic of others. Were I to answer the requests in detail, I should be the busiest of mortals. If I condemn the composition, I am a jealous carper at the good work of others ; if I say a good word for the thing, it is attributed to a mendacious desire to be agreeable ; if I keep silence altogether, it is because I am a rude, pert fellow. They are afraid, I infer, that my disease will not make way with me promptly enough. Between their goading and my own madness I shall doubtless gratify their wishes. But all this would be nothing if, incredible as it may seem, this subtle poison had not just now begun to show its effects in the Roman curia itself [at Avignon]. What do you think the lawyers and doctors are up to? Justinian and yEsculapius have palled upon them. The sick and the liti- gious cry in vain for their help, for they are deafened by the thunder of Homer's and Virgil's names, and wander oblivi- ous in the woody valleys of Cirrha, by the purling waters of the Aonian fountain. But it is hardly necessary to speak of these lesser prodigies. Even carpenters, fullers, and plow- men leave the implements of their calling to talk of Apollo and the Muses. I cannot say how far the plague, which lately was confined to a few, has now spread. Petrarch's enthusiasm for the classical authors, espe- 223. Pe- cially Cicero, whom he admired most ardently, is shown in the following letter. Cicero's. (From one of Your copy of Cicero has been in my possession four years letters.) and more. There is a good reason, though, for so long a delay ;