soon afterward the unwiser, in abhorrence at the Petrarca. The good citizen and the calm reasoner come at once to the same conclusion; that philosophy can never hold many men together; that religion can; and those who without it would not let philosophy, nor law, nor humanity exist. Therefore it is our duty and interest to remove all obstruction from it; to give it air, light, space, and freedom; carrying in our hands a Scourge for fallacy, a chain for cruelty, and an irrevocable ostracism for riches that riot in the house of God. Boccaccio. Moderate wealth is quite enough to teach with. : deed, whenever a man capable of performing great and glorious actions is emerging from obscurity, it is our duty to remove, if we can, all obstruction from before him; to increase his scope and his powers, to extoll and amplify his virtues. This is always requisite, and often insufficient, to counteract the workings of malignity round about him. But finding him afterward false and cruel, and, instead of devoting himself to the commonwealth, exhausting it by his violence and sacrificing it to his vanity, then it behoves us to stamp the foot, and to call in the people to cast down the idol. For nothing is so immoral or pernicious as to keep up the illusion of greatness in wicked men. Their crimes, because they have fallen into the gulf of them, we call misfortunes; and, amid ten thousand mourners, grieve only for him who made them so. Is this reason? is this humanity? Boccaccio. Alas! it is man. Petrarca. Can we wonder then that such wretches have turned him to such purposes? The calmness, the sagacity, the sanctitude of Rienzi, in the ascent to his elevation, rendered him only the more detestable for his abuse of power. Boccaccio. Surely the man grew mad. : Petrarca. The luxury and rapacity of the church, together with the insolence of the barons, excited that discontent which emboldened Nicolo de Rienzi to assume the station of tribune. Singular was the prudence, and opportune the boldness, he manifested at first. His modesty, his piety, his calm severity, his unbiassed justice, won to him the affections of every good citizen, and struck horror into the fastnesses of every castellated felon. He might by degrees have restored the republic of Rome, had he preserved his modetion he might have become the master of Italy, had he continued the master of himself: Boccaccio. No mortal is less to be pitied, or tut he allowed the weakest of the passions to run more to be detested, than he into whose hands are away with him he fancied he could not inebriate thrown the fortunes of a nation, and who squanders himself soon enough with the intemperance of them away in the idle gratification of his pride power. He called for seven crowns, and placed and his ambition. Are not these already gratithem successively on his head. He cited Lewis of fied to the full by the confidence and deference of Bavaria and Charles of Bohemia to appear and his countrymen? Can silks, and the skins of plead their causes before him; and lastly, not animals, can hammered metals and sparkling eontent with exasperating and concentrating the stones, enhance the value of legitimate dominion bostility of barbarians, he set at defiance the best over the human heart? Can a wise man be deand highest feelings of his more instructed coun- sirous of having a less wise successor? And, of all trymen, and displayed his mockery of religion the world, would he exhibit this inferiority in a and decency by bathing in the porphyry font of son? Irrational as are all who aim at despotism, the Lateran. How my soul grieved for his defec- this is surely the most irrational of their speculation! How bitterly burst forth my complaints, tions. Vulgar men are more anxious for title and Then he ordered the imprisonment of Stefano Colonna in his ninetieth year! For these atrocities you know with what reproaches I assailed Lim, traitor as he was to the noblest cause that ever strung the energies of mankind. For this ause, under his auspices, I had abandoned all hope of favour and protection from the pontiff: I had cast into peril, almost into perdition, the friendhip, familiarity, and love of the Colonnas. Even you, Giovanni, thought me more rash than you would say you thought me, and wondered at seeing me whirled along with the tempestuous triumphs that seemed mounting toward the Capitol. It is only in politics that an actor appears greater by the magnitude of the theatre; and we readily and enthusiastically give way to the deception. In Petrarca. Men often give the hand to the mad, ness that seizes them. He yielded to pride and luxury behind them came jealousy and distrust: fear followed these, and cruelty followed fear. Then the intellects sought the subterfuge that bewildered them; and an ignoble flight was precluded by an ignominious death. decoration than for power; and notice, in their estimate, is preferable to regard. We ought as little to mind the extinction of such existences as the dying down of a favourable wind in the prosecution of a voyage. They are fitter for the calendar than for history, and it is well when we find them in last year's. Petrarca. What a year was Rienzi's last to me! What an extinction of all that had not been yet extinguished! Visionary as was the flash of his glory, there was another more truly so, which this, my second great loss and sorrow, opened again before me. Verona! loveliest of cities, but saddest to my memory! while the birds were singing in thy cypresses the earliest notes of spring, the blithest of hope, the tenderest of desire, she, my own streets) one vast immondezzaio, morally and subLaura, fresh as the dawn around her, stood be- stantially. fore me. spake.* It was her transit; I knew it ere she O Giovanni! the heart that has once been bathed in love's pure fountain, retains the pulse of youth for ever. Death can only take away the sorrowful from our affections: the flower expands; the colourless film that enveloped it falls off and perishes. Boccaccio. We may well believe it: and, believing it, let us cease to be disquieted for their absence who have but retired into another chamber. We are like those who have overslept the hour: when we rejoin our friends, there is only the more joyance and congratulation. Would we break a precious vase, because it is as capable of containing the bitter as the sweet? No: the very things which touch us the most sensibly are those which we should be the most reluctant to forget. The noble mansion is most distinguished by the beautiful images it retains of beings past away; and so is the noble mind. The damps of autumn sink into the leaves and prepare them for the necessity of their fall and thus insensibly are we, as years close round us, detached from our tenacity of life by the gentle pressure of recorded sorrows. When the graceful dance and its animating music are over, and the clapping of hands (so lately linked) hath ceased; when youth and comeliness and pleasantry are departed, Who would desire to spend the following day But whether we desire it or not, we must submit. He who hath appointed our days hath placed their contents within them, and our efforts can neither cast them out nor change their quality. In our present mood we will not dwell too long on this subject, but rather walk forth into the world, and look back again on the bustle of life. Neither of us may hope to exert in future any extraordinary influence on the political movements of our country, by our presence or intervention: yet surely it is something to have set at defiance the mercenaries who assailed us, and to have stood aloof from the distribution of the public spoils. I have at all times taken less interest than you have taken in the affairs of Rome; for the people of that city neither are, nor were of old, my favourites. It appears to me that there are spots accursed, spots doomed to eternal sterility; and Rome is one of them. No gospel announces the glad tidings of resurrection to a fallen nation. Once down, and down for ever. The Babylonians, the Macedonians, the Romans, prove it. Babylon is a desart, Macedon a den of thieves, Rome (what is written as an invitation on the walls of her *This event is related by Petrarca as occurring on the sixth of April, the day of her decease. Petrarca. The argument does not hold good throughout. Persia was conquered: yet Persia long afterward sprang up again with renovated strength and courage, and Sapor mounted his war-horse from the crouching neck of Valentinian. In nearly all the campaigns with the Romans she came off victorious: none of her kings or generals was ever led in triumph to the Capitol; but several Roman emperors lay prostrate on their purple in the fields of Parthia. Formidable at home, victorious over friends and relatives, their legions had seized and subdivided the arable plains of Campania and the exuberant pastures of the Po; but the glebe that bordered the Araxes was unbroken by them. Persia, since those times, has passed through many vicissitudes, of defeat and victory, of obscurity and glory: and why may not our country? Let us take hopes where we can find them, and raise them where we find none. Boccaccio. In some places we may; in others, the fabric of hopes is too arduous an undertaking. When I was in Rome nothing there reminded me of her former state, until I saw a goose in the grass under the Capitoline hill. This perhaps was the only one of her inhabitants that had not degenerated. Even the dogs looked sleepy, mangy, suspicious, perfidious, and thievish. The goose meanwhile was making his choice of herbage about triumphal arches and monumental columns, and picking up worms; the surest descendants, the truest representatives, and enjoying the inalienable succession, of the Cæsars. This is all that goose or man can do at Rome. She, I think, will be the last city to rise from the dead. Petrarca. There is a trumpet, and on earth, that shall awaken even her. Boccaccio. I should like to live and be present. Petrarca. This can not be expected. But you may live many years, and see many things to make you happy. For you will not close the doors too early in the evening of existence against the visits of renovating and cheerful thoughts, which keep our lives long up, and help them to sink at last without pain or pressure. Boccaccio. Another year or two perhaps, with t God's permission. Fra Biagio felt my pulse on Wednesday, and cried, "Courage! ser Giovanni! there is no danger of Paradise yet: the Lord forbid !" "Faith!" said I, "Fra Biagio! I hope there is not. What with prayers and masses, I have planted a foot against my old homestead, and will tug hard to remain where I am." "A true soldier of the faith!" quoth Fra Biagio, and drank a couple of flasks to my health. No thing else, he swore to Assunta, would haver induced him to venture beyond one; he hating all excesses, they give the adversary such advant tage over us; although God is merciful and makes allowances. Petrarca. Impossible as it is to look far and. with pleasure into the future, what a privilege is | Ginevra. The appellation is now become the it, how incomparably greater than any other that generic of all men whose business it is to promote genius can confer, to be able to direct the back- the success of others in illicit love. Dante was ward flight of fancy and imagination to the reces- stimulated in his satirical vein, when he attributed ses they most delighted in; to be able, as the to Francesca a ludicrous expression, which she was shadows lengthen in our path, to call up before very unlikely in her own nature, and greatly more us the youth of our sympathies in all their tender- so in her state of suffering, to employ or think of, ness and purity! whirled round as she was incessantly with her lover. Neither was it requisite to say, "the book was a Galeotto, and so was the author," when she had said already that a passage in it had seduced her. Omitting this unnecessary and ungraceful line, her confusion and her delicacy are the more evident, and the following comes forth with fresh beauty. In the commencement of her speech I wish these had likewise been omitted, Boccaccio. Mine must have been very pure, I suspect, for I am sure they were very tender. But I need not call them up; they come readily enough of their own accord; and I find it perplexing at times to get entirely rid of them. Sighs are very troublesome when none meet them half-way. The worst of mine now are while I am walking uphill. Even to walk upstairs, which used occasionally to be as pleasant an exercise as any, grows sadly too much for me. For which reason I lie here below; and it is handier too for Assunta. In Petrarca. Very judicious and considerate. high situations, like Certaldo and this villetta, there is no danger from fogs or damps of any kind. The skylark yonder seems to have made it her first station in the air. Boccaccio. To welcome thee, Francesco! Petrarca. Rather say, to remind us both of our Dante. All the verses that ever were written on the nightingale are scarcely worth the beautiful triad of this divine poet on the lark. La lodoletta che in aere si spazia, In the first of them do not you see the twinkling contented. Boccaccio. I agree with you in the perfect and unrivalled beauty of the first; but in the third there is a redundance. Is not contenta quite enough, without che la sazia? The picture is before us, the sentiment within us, and behold! we kick when we are full of manna. Petrarca. I acknowledge the correctness and propriety of your remark; and yet beauties in poetry must be examined as carefully as blemishes, and even more; for we are more easily led away by them, although we do not dwell on them so long. We two should never be accused, in these days, of malevolence to Dante, if the whole world beard us. Being here alone, we may hazard our pinions even less guardedly, and set each other right as we see occasion. Boccaccio. Come on then; I will venture. I will go back to find fault; I will seek it even in Francesca. To hesitate, and waver, and turn away from the subject, was proper and befitting in her. The verse, however, in no respect satisfies me. Any Gue would imagine from it that Galeotto was really both the title of the book and the name of the author; neither of which is true. Galcotto, in the Tarla Ritonda, is the person who interchanges the correspondence between Lancilotto and E cio sa il tuo dottore; could not show it me. since he knew no more about it than anybody else. As we proceed, there are passages in which I can not find my way, and where I suspect the poet For instance, is it not strange that Briareus should be punished in the same way as Nimrod, when Nimrod sinned against the living God, and when Briareus attempted to overthrow one of the living God's worst antagonists, Jupiter? an action which our blessed Lord, and the doctors of the holy church, not only attempted, but (to their glory and praise for evermore) accomplished. Petrarca. Equally strange that Brutus and Cassius (a remark which escaped us in our mention of them yesterday) should be placed in the hottest pit of hell for slaying Cæsar, and that Cato, who would have done the same thing with less compunction, should be appointed sole guardian and governor of purgatory. Boccaccio. What interest could he have made to be promoted to so valuable a post, in preference to doctors, popes, confessors, and fathers? Wonder ful indeed! and they never seemed to take it much amiss. Petrarca. Alighieri not only throws together the most opposite and distant characters, but even makes Jupiter and our Saviour the same person. E se lecito m' è, o sommo Giove! Che fosti in terra per noi crocifisso. Boccaccio. Jesus Christ ought no more to be called Jupiter than Jupiter ought to be called Jesus Christ. Petrarca. In the whole of the Inferno I find only the descriptions of Francesca and of Ugolino at all admirable. Vigorous expressions there are many, but lost in their application to base objects; and insulated thoughts in high relief, but with everything crumbling round them. Proportionally to the extent, there is a scantiness of poetry, if delight is the purpose or indication of it. Intensity shows everywhere the powerful master: and yet intensity is not invitation. A great poet may do everything but repell us. Established laws are pliant before him: nevertheless his office hath both its duties and its limits. Boccaccio. The simile in the third canto, the satire at the close of the fourth, and the description at the commencement of the eighth, if not highly admirable, are what no ordinary poet could have produced. Petrarca. They are streaks of light in a thundercloud. You might have added the beginning of the twenty-seventh, in which the poetry of itself is good, although not excellent, and the subject of it assuages the weariness left on us, after passing through so many holes and furnaces, and undergoing the dialogue between Simon and master Adam. Boccaccio. I am sorry to be reminded of this. It is like the brawl of the two fellows in Horace's Journey to Brundusium. They are the straitest parallels of bad wit and bad poetry that ancient and modern times exhibit. Ought I to speak so sharply of poets who elsewhere have given me so great delight? Petrarca. Surely you ought. No criticism is less beneficial to an author or his reader than one tagged with favour and tricked with courtesy. The gratification of our humours is not the intent and scope of criticism, and those who indulge in it on such occasions are neither wise nor honest. Boccaccio. I never could see why we should designedly and prepensely give to one writer more than his due, to another less. If we offer an honest man ten crowns when we owe him only five, he is apt to be offended. The perfumer and druggist weigh out the commodity before them to a single grain. If they do it with odours and powders, should not we attempt it likewise, in what is either the nutriment or the medicine of the mind? I do not wonder that Criticism has never yet been clear-sighted and expert among us: I do, that she has never been dispassionate and unprejudiced. There are critics who, lying under no fear of a future state in literature, and all whose hope is for the present day, commit injustice without compunction. Every one of these people has some favourite object for the embraces of his hatred, and a figure of straw will never serve the purpose. He must throw his stone at what stands out; he must twitch the skirt of him who is ascending. Do you imagine that the worst writers of any age were treated with as much asperity as you and I? No, Francesco! give the good folks their due: they are humaner to their fellow-creatures. Petrarca. Disregarding the ignorant and presumptuous, we have strengthened our language by dipping it afresh in its purer and higher source, and have called the Graces back to it. We never have heeded how Jupiter would have spoken, but only how the wisest men would, and how words follow the movements of the mind. There are rich and copious veins of mineral in regions far remote from commerce and habitations these veins are useless: so are those writings of which the style is uninviting and inaccessible, through its ruggedness, its chasms, its points, its perplexities, its obscurity. There are scarcely three authors, beside yourself, who : appear to heed whether any guest will enter the gate, quite satisfied with the consciousness that they have stores within. Such wealth, in another generation, may be curious, but can not be current. When a language grows up all into stalk, and its flowers begin to lose somewhat of their character, we must go forth into the open fields, through the dingles, and among the mountains, for fresh seed. Our ancestors did this, no very long time ago. Foremost in zeal, in vigour and authority, Alighieri took on himself the same patronage and guardianship of our adolescent dialect, as Homer of the Greek and my Giovanni hath since endowed it so handsomely, that additional bequests, we may apprehend, will only corrupt its principles, and render it lax and lavish. Boccaccio. Beware of violating those canons of criticism you have just laid down. We have no right to gratify one by misleading another, nor, when we undertake to show the road, to bandage the eyes of him who trusts us for his conductor. In regard to censure, those only speak ill who speak untruly, unless a truth be barbed by malice and aimed by passion. To be useful to as many as possible is the especial duty of a critic, and his utility can only be attained by rectitude and precision. He walks in a garden which is not his own; and he neither must gather the blossoms to embellish his discourse, nor break the branches to display his strength. Rather let him point to what is out of order, and help to raise what is lying on the ground. Petrarca. Auditors, and readers in general, come to hear or read, not your opinion delivered, but their own repeated. Fresh notions are as disagreeable to some as fresh air to others; and this inability to bear them is equally a symptom of disease. Impatience and intolerance are sure to be excited at any check to admiration in the narratives of Ugolino and of Francesca: nothing is to be abated: they are not only to be admirable, but entirely faultless. Boccaccio. You have proved to me that, in blaming our betters, we ourselves may sometimes be unblamed. When authors are removed by death beyond the reach of irritation at the touch of an infirmity, we best consult their glory by handling their works comprehensively and unsparingly. Vague and indefinite criticism suits only slight merit, and presupposes it. Lineaments irregular and profound as Dante's are worthy of being traced with patience and fidelity. In the charts of our globe we find distinctly marked the promontories and indentations, and oftentimes the direction of unprofitable marshes and impassable sands and wildernesses : level surfaces are unnoted. I would not detract one atom from the worth of Dante; which can not be done by summing it up exactly, but may be by negli gence in the computation. Petrarca. Your business, in the lectures, is not to show his merits, but his meaning; and to give only so much information as may be given without offence to the factious. Whatever you do beyond, is for yourself, your friends, and futurity. Petrarca. With a careful politician and diplomatist all things find their places but men and yet he thinks he has niched it nicely, when, as the gardener is left in the garden, the tailor on his board at the casement, he leaves the author at his desk: to remove him would put the world in confusion. Boccaccio. Acciaioli knew me too well to suppose we could serve each other and his own capacity was amply sufficient for all the exigencies of the state. Generous,* kind, constant soul! the emblazoned window throws now its rich mantle over him, moved gently by the vernal air of Ma some visiter of distinction, by the fresh eastern breeze from the valley of the Elsa. We too (mayhap) shall be visited in the same condition; but in a homelier edifice, but in a humbler sepulchre, but by other and far different guests! While they are discussing and sorting out our merits, which are usually first discovered among the nettles in the church-yard, we will carry this volume with us, and show Dante what we have been doing. Boccaccio. I may write more lectures, but never shall deliver them in person, as the first. Probably, so near as I am to Florence, and so dear as Florence hath always been to me, I shall see that city no more. The last time I saw it, I only passed through. Four years ago, you remember, I lost my friend Acciaioli. Early in the summer of the preceding, his kindness had induced him to invite me again to Naples, and I undertook a journey to the place where my life had been too happy. There are many who pay dearly for sun-rignole, or, as the great chapel-door is opened to shine early in the season: many, for pleasure in the prime of life. After one day lost in idleness at Naples, if intense and incessant thoughts (however fruitless) may be called so, I proceeded by water to Sorento, and thence over the mountains to Amalfi. Here, amid whatever is most beautiful and most wonderful in scenery, I found the Senisealco. His palace, his gardens, his terraces, his woods, abstracted his mind entirely from the solicitudes of state; and I was gratified at finding in the absolute ruler of a kingdom, the absolute master of his time. Rare felicity! and he enjoyed it the more after the toils of business and the intricacies of policy. His reception of me was most cordial. He showed me his long avenues of oranges and eitrons he helped me to mount the banks of slippery short herbage, whence we could look down on their dark masses, and their broad irregular belts, gemmed with golden fruit and sparkling flowers. We stood high above them, but not above their fragrance, and sometimes we wished the breeze to bring us it, and sometimes to carry a part of it away and the breeze came and went as if obedient to our volition. Another day he conducted me farther from the palace, and showed me, with greater pride than I had ever seen in him before, the pale-green olives, on little smooth plants, the first year of their bearing. "I will teach my people here," said he, "to make as delicate oil as any of our Tuscans." We had feasts among the caverns: we had dances by day under the shade of the mulberries, by night under the lamps of the arcade: we had music on the shore and on the water. When next I stood before him, it was afar from these. Torches flamed through the pine-forest of the Certosa priests and monks led the procession: the sound of the brook alone filled up the intervals of the dirge: and other plumes than the daneers' waved round what was Acciaioli. Petrarca. Since in his family there was nobody who, from education or pursuits or consanguinity, wald greatly interest him; nobody to whom so large an accumulation of riches would not rather be injurious than beneficial, and place rather in the way of scoffs and carpings than exalt to respectability; I regret that he omitted to provide for the Comforts of your advancing years. Petrarca. We have each of us had our warnings: indeed all men have them and not only at our time of life, but almost every day of their existence. They come to us even in youth; although, like the lightnings that are said to play incessantly, in the noon and in the morning and throughout the year, we seldom see and never look for them. Come, as you proposed, let us now continue with our Dante. Ugolino relates to him his terrible dream, in which he fancied that he had seen Gualando, Sismondi, and Lanfranco, killing his children: and he says that, when he awakened, he heard them moan in their sleep. In such circumstances, his awakening ought rather to have removed the impression he laboured under; since it showed him the vanity of the dream, and afforded him the consolation that the children were alive. Yet he adds immediately, what, if he were to speak it at all, he should have deferred, "You are very cruel if you do not begin to grieve, considering what my heart presaged to me; and, if you do not weep at it, what is it you are wont to weep at?" Boccaccio. Certainly this is ill-timed; and the conference would indeed be better without it anywhere. Petrarca. Farther on, in whatever way we interpret Poscia più che 'l dolor potè 'l digiuno, the poet falls sadly from his sublimity. should have suppressed it, since we had already seen the most pathetic in the features, and the most horrible in the stride, of Famine. Gnawing, bishop's scull, is, in the opinion of many, rather not in hunger, but in rage and revenge, the arch Boccaccio. If the fact were as he mentions, he ludicrous than tremendous. *This sentiment must be attributed to the gratitude of Boccaccio. The friend would not spoil the philosopher. Our judgment grows the stronger by the Boccaccio, not to the merits of Acciaioli, who treated him dying-down of our affections. unworthily. VOL. II. Y |