Page:The Oxford book of Italian verse.djvu/11

Rh and inspired his enthusiasm for Cola di Rienzi's luckless efforts to revive the traditions of the Republic; it was humanism that made him hate the Papal secession to Avignon, for he realized that this miserable anticlimax to the rejoicings of the Jubilee must inevitably prolong the barbarous dissensions of his epoch and blind men's eyes to the new light. But though humanism made a patriot of this citizen of the world, it was love that made him a meditative poet, and the two aspects of his genius are revealed respectively in his Latin and vernacular writings: in the first, the scholarly enthusiast, the calm and self-confident king of learning who was crowned laureate on the Capitol; in the second, the man of a hundred moods, the victim of a restless melancholy which makes him oscillate perpetually between solitude and the city, and finds expression in that splendid sequence of sonnets and canzoni—nugae vulgares, accoiding to Petrarch the scholar—the intimate history of a troubled soul narrated in language of unsurpassable beauty.

The renaissance of civilization in Italy began with the first years of the Trecento. The eager flame of humanistic enthusiasm pierced through the old mist of scholastic learning, the dissensions between Pope and Emperor lost much of their importance, a literary language was formed, and the long-divided cities began to recognize a common bond in their descent from the Romans. Florence was the metropolis of this revival, but in all parts of the country—in the suzerainties of the north, the republics of the centre, and the monarchy of the south—life, for the moment, became fairer and more tranquil, and Guelfs and Ghibellines ceased to rage furiously together. The