and poetry; but it has not, therefore, been counted less sincere; and Heaven forbid it should prove less lasting than if it had been told in the homeliest prose, and had never inspired one beautiful idea or one rapturous verse!

To study Petrarch in his own works, and in his own delightful language; to follow him line by line, through all the vicissitudes and contradictions of passion; to listen to his self-reproaches, his terrors, his regrets, his conflicts; to dwell on his exquisite delineations of individual character and peculiar beauty, his simple touches of profound pathos and melancholy tenderness :—and then believe all to be mere invention,--the coinage of the brain,-a tissue of visionary fancies, in which the heart had no share; to confound him with the cold metaphysical rhymesters of a later age,- -seems to argue not only a strange want of judgment, but an extraordinary obtuseness of feeling.*

* In a private letter of Petrarch to the Bishop of Lombes, occurs the following passage-(the Bishop, it appears, had rallied him on the subject of his attachment.) "Would to God VOL. I.

F

The faults of taste of which Petrarch has been accused over and over again, by those who seem to have studied him as Voltaire studied Shakspeare,-his concetti-his fanciful adoration of the laurel, as the emblem of Laura-his playing on the words Laura, L'aura, and Lauro, his freezing flames and burning ice,-I abandon to critics, and let them make the best of them, as defects in what were else perfection.

These were the fashion of the day: a great genius may outrun his times, but not without bearing about him some ineffaceable impressions of the manners and character of the age in which he lived. He is too witty-"Il a trop d'esprit," to be sincere, say the critics," he has a conceit left him in his misery,-a miserable conceit;" but we

that my Laura were indeed but an imaginary person, and my passion for her but sport!—Alas! it is rather a madness !—hard would it have been, and painful, to feign so long a time-and what extravagance to play such a farce in the world! No! we may counterfeit the action and voice of a sick man, but not the paleness and wasted looks of the sufferer; and how often have u witnessed both in me!"-SADE, vol. i. p. 281.

know at least I know-how in the very extremity of passion the soul can mock at itself-how the fancy can with a bitter and exaggerated gaiety sport with the heart!-These are faults of composition in the writer, and admitted to be such; but they prove nothing against the man, the poet, or the lover. The reproach of monotony, I confess I never could understand. It is rather matter of astonishment, how in a collection of nearly four hundred poems, all, with one or two exceptions, turning upon the same subject and sentiment, the poet has poured forth such an endless and redundant variety both of thought and feeling-how from the wide universe, the changeful face of all beautiful nature, the treasures of antique learning, and, above all, from his own overflowing heart, he has drawn those lovely pictures, allusions, situations, sentiments and reflections, which have, indeed, been stolen, borrowed, imitated, worn threadbare by succeeding poets, but in him were the fresh and spontaneous effusions of profound feeling and luxuriant fancy. Schlegel very justly observes, that the

impression of monotony may arise from our considering at one view, and bound up in one volume, a long series of poems, which were written in the course of many years, at different times, and on different occasions. Laura herself, he avers, would certainly have been ennuyée to death with her own praises, if she had been obliged to read over, at one sitting, all the verses which her lover composed on her charms; and I agree with him.

It appears to me that the very impression of Petrarch's individual character, and the circumstances of his life, on the whole mass of his poetry, are evidence of the truth of his attachment, and the reality of its object. He was by nature a poet; his love was, therefore, poetical: he loved "in numbers, for the numbers came." He was an accomplished scholar in a pedantic age,—and his love is, therefore, illustrated by such comparisons and turns of thought as were allied to his habitual studies. He had a fertile and playful fancy, and his love is adorned by all the luxuriance of his imagination. He had been educated for the pro

fession of the Civil Law, " 66

anzi mensogne," to sell disdainfully expressed it,

per vender parole

words and lies, as he

and his love is mixed

up with subtile reasonings on his own hapless state. He was a philosopher, and it is tinged with the mystic reveries of Platonism, the favourite and fashionable philosophy of the age. He was deeply religious, and the strain of devotional and moral, feeling which mingles with that of passion, or of grief, his fears lest the excess of his earthly affections should interfere with his eternal salvation, his continual allusions to his faith, to a future existence, and the nothingness and vanity of the world,-are not so many proofs of his profaneness, but of his sincerity. He was suspicious, irritable, and susceptible; subject to quick transitions of feeling; raised by a word to hope-plunged by a glance into despair; just such a finely-toned instrument as a woman loves to play on;-and all this we have set forth in the contradictions, the self-reproaches, the little daily vicissitudes which are events and revolutions in a life of passion; a life, which when