[510] Cf. the letter to Petrarch's son-in-law (Corazzini, op. cit., p. 382).
[511] As we have seen, Petrarch had been in Naples in 1341, and was there again in 1343. See supra, pp. [60] and [111.]
[512] See supra, [p. 152] et seq.
[513] Cf. Epistol. Fam., XXI, 15. Petrarch's first letter to Boccaccio is Fam., XI, 1, of November 2, 1350. See supra,[ p. 156.]
[517] Epist. Fam., XVIII, 4. He also copied Terence with his own hand, lest copyists should mutilate the text. The MS. exists in the Laurentian Library. Cf. Novati in Giornale St. della Lett. It., X, p. 424. The thought of comparing ancient MSS. to form a text was Boccaccio's.
[518] See Senil., XVII, 3, under date "In the Enganean Hills, June 8 [1374]." Petrarch there says: "The book you have composed in our maternal tongue, probably during your youth, has fallen into my hands, I do not know by what chance. I have seen it, but if I should say I had read it I should lie. The work is very long, and it is written for the vulgar, that is to say in prose. Besides, I have been overwhelmed with occupations, and I have had only very little time, for as you know, one was then at the mercy of all the troubles of the war, and although I was not interested in them, I could not be insensible to the troubles of the republic. I have, then, run through this volume like a hurried traveller who just looks but does not stop.... I have had much pleasure in turning its leaves. Certain passages, a little free, are excused by the age at which you wrote it—the style, the idiom, the lightness of the subject and of the readers you had in view. It is essential to know for whom one is writing, and the difference in the characters of people justifies a difference in style. Besides a crowd of things light and pleasant, I have found there others both edifying and serious; but not having read the complete work, I cannot give you a definite judgment on it." We shall consider this letter again later in my chapter on the Decameron (see infra, [p. 311]).
[519] As for Petrarch's contempt for Italian, see Senil., V, 2. Petrarch there says to Boccaccio, that Donato degli Albanzani "tells me that in your youth you were singularly pleased to write in the vulgar, and that you spent much time on it." He adds that Boccaccio had then composed the same kind of work as he himself had done, apparently referring to the Rime. He seems to refuse to consider the prose works in the vulgar as being literature at all. It is probable even that the accusation that he disliked and envied Dante, from which he so warmly defends him (cf. Fam., XXI, 15), had this much truth, that he disliked the language of the Divine Comedy in his absurd worship of Latin. But though he could not see it, the Divine Comedy is the first work of the Renaissance just because it is written not in Latin, the language of the Church, but in Italian, the language of the people. There lay the destruction of the Middle Age and the tyranny of the Ecclesiastic. For with the rise of the vulgar rose Nationalism, which, with the invention of printing, eventually destroyed the real power of the Church. It was a question of knowledge, of education, of the power of development and life.