wife or child, or are suffering from toothache, a ruined reputation, the fear of lingering death, or are painfully conscious that they are growing too fat. What seems to us mere cant and cynical commonplace may well have gratified a generation that delighted in the frescos of the cemetery at Pisa, but the popularity of the book naturally waned just as Dances of Death lost their charm. Yet the essays are not entirely without interest,[16] and their variety and paradoxicalness, if nothing else, may still hold the attention.

The two works upon which Petrarch probably based his literary reputation were the long Latin epic, the Africa, and his Lives of Famous Men. These are often referred to in his correspondence, especially the Africa. This was, however, never finished, and in his later years came to be a subject which the author could not hear mentioned without a sense of irritation. The poem was printed half a dozen times in the sixteenth century.[17] The biographical work fared much worse, and was, with the exception of the Life of Cæsar, not printed until our own day.[18]

Among the lesser works, the Confessions and an essay on The Life of Solitude were each printed eight or nine times before the year 1700. The letters also found readers. We have, however, but to glance at the list of editions of the Canzoniere to see how "these trivial verses, filled with the false and offensive praise of women," rather than his Latin epic and scholarly compilations, have served to keep his memory green. Thirty-four editions of the Italian verses were printed before 1500, and one hundred and sixty-seven in the sixteenth century. Since 1600 some two hundred more have appeared.[19]

It is not, however, in his formal treatises that the source of Petrarch's influence is to be found. They may aid us better to understand their author, but they can never explain the charm which he exercised over his contemporaries. He was not only an indefatigable scholar himself, but he possessed the power of stimulating, by his example, the scholarly ambition of those with whom he came in contact. He rendered the study of the Latin classics popular among cultivated persons, and by his own untiring efforts to discover the lost or forgotten works of the great writers of antiquity he roused a new and general enthusiasm for the formation of libraries and the critical determination of the proper readings in the newly found manuscripts.

It is hard for us to imagine the obstacles which confronted the scholars of the early Renaissance. They possessed no critical editions of the classics in which the text had been established by a comparison of all the available codices. They considered themselves fortunate to discover a single copy of even well-known authors. And so corrupt was the text, Petrarch declares, by reason of careless transcriptions, that should Cicero or Livy return and stumblingly read his own writings once more, he would promptly declare them the work of another, perhaps of a barbarian.[20]

While copies of the Æneid, of Horace's Satires, and of certain of Cicero's Orations, of Ovid, Seneca, and a few other authors, were apparently by no means uncommon during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it seemed to Petrarch, who had learned through the references of Cicero, Quintilian, Saint Augustine, and others, something of the original extent of Latin literature, that treasures of inestimable value had been lost by the shameful indifference of the Middle Ages. "Each famous author of antiquity whom I recall," he indignantly exclaims, "places a new offence and another cause of dishonour to the charge of later generations, who, not satisfied with their own disgraceful barrenness, permitted the fruit of other minds and the writings that their ancestors had produced by toil and application, to perish through insufferable neglect. Although they had nothing of their own to hand down to those who were to come after, they robbed posterity of its ancestral heritage."[21] The collection of a library was, then, the first duty of one whose mission it was to re-establish the world in its literary patrimony.

A man's books are not a bad measure of the man himself, provided he be what Lowell calls a book-man, and his collections be really a genuine expression of his preferences and not those of his grandfather or his bookseller. If this is true to-day, with the all-pervading spirit of commercial enterprise which constantly imposes upon our tastes, how much more true must it have been when Petrarch, with all his self-sacrificing enthusiasm and industry, brought together during a long life only two hundred volumes.[22] Books in those days were of course laboriously produced by hand. There was no device to secure uniformity in the copies of a work as they were slowly written off by the same or different persons. Each scribe inevitably made new mistakes which could be safely corrected only by a comparison with the author's manuscript. The average copyist was apparently hardly more careful than the type-setter of to-day. A book as it came from his hands was little better than uncorrected galley proof.

In one case, Petrarch tried for years to get one of his shorter works, The Life of Solitude, satisfactorily transcribed, so that he could send a copy of it to the friend to whom he had dedicated it. He writes:

"I have tried ten times and more to have it copied in such a way that, even if the style should not please either the ears or the mind, the eyes might yet be gratified by the form of the letters. But the faithfulness and industry of the copyists, of which I am constantly complaining and with which you are familiar, have, in spite of all my earnest efforts, frustrated my wishes. These fellows are verily the plague of noble minds. What I have just said must seem incredible. A work written in a few months cannot be copied in so many years! The trouble and discouragement involved in the case of more important books is obvious. At last, after all these fruitless trials, on leaving home, I put the manuscript into the hands of a certain priest to copy. Whether he will, as a priest, perform his duty conscientiously, or, as a copyist, be ready to deceive, I cannot yet say. I learn from the letters of friends that the work is done. Of its quality, knowing the habits of this tribe of copyists, I shall continue to