by the hand, duck their heads, enter it together, and exclaim, "What a charming grotto!'

In poetry, as in architecture, the Rustic Order is proper only for the lower story.

They who have listened, patiently and supinely, to the catarrhal songsters of goose-grazed commons, will be loth and ill-fitted to mount up with Catullus to the highest steeps in the forests of Ida, and will shudder at the music of the Corybantes in the temple of the Great Mother of the Gods.

FRANCESCO PETRARCA.

SCARCELY on any author, of whatever age or country, has there so much been written, spoken, and thought, by both sexes, as on the subject of this criticism, Petrarca.

The compilation by Mr. Campbell is chiefly drawn together from the French. It contains no criticism on the poetry of his author, beyond a hasty remark or two in places which least require it. He might have read Sismondi and Ginguenè more profitably; the author of the Introduction to the Literature of Europe had already done so; but neither has he thrown any fresh light on the character or the writings of Petrarca, or, in addition to what had already been performed by those two judicious men, furnished us with a remark in any way worth notice. The readers of Italian, if they are suspicious, may even suspect that Mr. Campbell knows not very much of the language. Among the many apparent causes for this suspicion, we shall notice only two. Instead of Friuli, he writes the French word Frioul; and, instead of the Marca di Ancona, the Marshes. In Italian, a marsh is palude or padule: whereas marca is the origin of marchese: the one a confine; the other a defender of a conjine, or lord of such a territory.

Whoever is desirous of knowing all about Petrarca, will consult Muratori and De Sade: whoever has been waiting for a compendious and sound judgment on his works at large, will listen attentively to Ginguenè whoever can be gratified by a rapid glance at his works and character, will be directed by the clear-sighted follower of truth, Sismondi; and whoever reads only English, and is contented to fare on a small portion of recocted criticism in a long excursion, may be accommodated by Mrs. Dobson, Mr. Hallam, and Mr. Campbell.

A

It may seem fastidious and affected to write, as I have done, his Italian name in preference to his English one; but I think it better to call him as he called himself, as Laura called him, as he was called by Colonna and Rienzi and Boccaccio, and in short by all Italy: for I pretend to no vernacular familiarity with a person of his distinction, and should almost be as ready to abbreviate Francesco into Frank, as Petrarca into Petrarch. Beside, the one appellation is euphonious, the other quite the reverse.

We Englishmen take strange liberties with Italian names. Perhaps the human voice can articulate no sweeter series of sounds than the syllables which constitute Livorno: certainly the same remark is inapplicable to Leghorn. However, we are not liable to censure for this depravation: it originated with the Genoese, the ancient masters of the town, whose language is extremely barbarous, not unlike the Provensal of the Troubadours. With them the letter g, pronounced hard, as it always was among the Greeks and Romans, is common for v: thus lagoro for lavoro.

I hope to be pardoned my short excursion, which was only made to bring my fellow-labourers home from afield. At last we are beginning to call people and things by their right names. We pay a little more respect to Cicero than we did formerly, calling him no longer by the appellation of Tully: we never say Laurence, or Lal de Medici, but Lorenzo. On the same principle, I beg permission to say Petrarca and Boccaccio, instead of Petrarch and Boccace. These errors were fallen into by following French translations and we stopt and recovered our footing only when we came to Tite-live and Aulugelle. It was then indeed high time to rest and wipe our foreheads. Yet we cannot shake off the illusion that Horace was one of us at school, and we continue the friendly nickname, although with a whimsical inconsistency we continue to talk of the Horatii and Curiatii. Ovid, our earlier friend, sticks by us still. The ear informs us that Virgil and Pindar and Homer and Hesiod suffer no worse by defalcation than fruit-trees do: the sounds indeed are more euphonious than what fell from the native tongue. The great historians, the great orators, and the great tragedians of Greece, have escaped unmutilated; and among the Romans it has been the good fortune, at least as far as we are concerned, of Paterculus, Quintus Curtius, Tacitus, Catullus, Propertius, and Tibullus, to remain intact by the hand of onomaclasts. Spellings, whether of names or things, should never be

meddled with, unless where the ignorant have superseded the learned, or where analogy has been overlooked by these. The courtiers of Charles II. chalked and charcoaled the orthography of Milton. It was thought a scandal to have been educated in England, and a worse to write as a republican had written. We were the subjects of the French king, and we borrowed at a ruinous rate from French authors: but not from the best. Eloquence was extinct; a gulf of ignominy divided us from the genius of Italy; the great Master of the triple world was undiscovered by us; and the loves of Petrarca were too pure and elevated for the sojourners of Versailles.

Francesco Petrarca, if far from the greatest, yet certainly the most celebrated of poets, was born in the night between the nineteenth and twentieth day of July, 1304. His father's name was Petracco, his mother's Eletta Canigiani. Petracco left Florence under the same sentence of banishment as his friend Dante Alighieri, and joined with him and the other exiles of the Bianchi army in the unsuccessful attack on that city, the very night when, on his return to Arezzo, he found a son born to him: it was his first. To this son, afterward so illustrious, was given the name of Francesco di Petracco. In after life the sound had something in it which he thought ignoble; and he converted it into Petrarca. The wise and virtuous Gravina, patron of one who has written much good poetry, and less of bad than Petrarca, changed in like manner the name of Trapasso to Metastasio. I can not agree with him that the sound of the Hellenized name is more harmonious: the reduplication of the syllable tas is painful: but I do agree with Petrarca, whose adopted form has only one fault, which is, that there is no meaning in it.

When he was seven months old he was taken by his mother from Arezzo to Incisa, in the Val-d'Arno, where the life so lately given was nearly lost. The infant was dropt into the river, which is always rapid in that part of its course, and was then swollen by rain into a torrent. At Incisa he remained with her seven years. The father had retired to Pisa; and now his wife and Francesco, and another son born after, named Gherardo, joined him there. In a short time however he took them to Avignon, where he hoped for employment under Pope Clement V. In that crowded city lodgings and provisions were so dear, that he soon found it requisite to send his wife and children to the small episcopal town of Carpentras, where he often went to visit them. In this place Francesco met Convenole, who

had taught him his letters, and who now undertook to teach him what he knew of rhetoric and logic. He had attained his tenth year when the father took him with a party of friends to the fountain of Vaucluse. Even at that early age his enthusiasm was excited by the beauty and solitude of the scene. The waters then flowed freely: habitations there were none but the most rustic and indeed one only near the rivulet. Such was then Vaucluse; and such it remained all his lifetime, and long after. The tender heart is often moulded by localities. Perhaps the purity and singleness of Petrarca's, his communion with it on one only altar, his exclusion of all images but one, result from this early visit to the gushing springs, the eddying torrents, the insurmountable rocks, the profound and inviolate solitudes, of Vaucluse.

The time was now come when his father saw the necessity of beginning to educate him for a profession: and he thought the canon law was likely to be the most advantageous. Consequently he was sent to Montpelier, the nearest university, where he resided four years; not engaged, as he ought to have been, among the jurisconsults, but among the classics. Information of this perversity soon reached Petracco, who hastened to the place, found the noxious books, and threw them into the fire: but, affected by the lamentations of his son, he recovered the Cicero and the Virgil, and restored them to him, partially consumed. At the age of eighteen he was sent from Montpelier to Bologna, where he found Cino da Pistoja, to whom he applied himself in good earnest, not indeed for his knowledge as a jurisconsult, in which he had acquired the highest reputation, but for his celebrity as a poet. After two more years he lost his father and the guardians, it is said, were unfaithful to their trust. Probably there was little for them to administer. He now returned to Avignon, where, after the decease of Clement V., John XXII. occupied the popedom. Here his Latin poetry soon raised him into notice, for nobody in Avignon wrote so good; but happily, both for himself and many thousand sensitive hearts in every age and nation, he soon desired his verses to be received and understood by one to whom the Latin was unknown.

Benedetto sia il giorno, e 'l mese, e l'anno!

Blest be the day, and month, and year!

LAURA, daughter of Audibert de Noves, was married to Hugh de Sade; persons of distinction. She was younger by three years than