The conditions were, indeed, very untoward in those days for regular correspondence between friends, and it is natural that the modern note, lightly dashed off and despatched for the most trifling sum, with almost unfailing security, to any part of the globe, should have had no analogy in the fourteenth century. There was in Petrarch's time no regular postal system. Letters were intrusted to a special messenger, or to someone going in the proper direction, pilgrim or merchant. Sometimes a long period might elapse without any opportunity of forwarding a letter, for the scarcity of messengers was as familiar an evil to those living in a great city like Milan as to the solitary sojourner in the wilderness.[42] Once Petrarch resorted to his cook as a messenger. When once under way, there was no assurance that the letter would reach its destination. Many are Petrarch's laments, over the loss of his own and his friends' messages. They were often intercepted and opened, sometimes apparently by autograph-mongers; they might then be returned or not as it pleased those who violated them. Once, as he was returning to Padua, Petrarch came upon two letters from his friend Nelli, in the hands of certain fellows—"not bad men indeed," but those whom he was as much surprised to find interested in such things as if he had discovered "a mole amusing itself with a mirror."
At last Petrarch's patience was quite exhausted and he resolved to give up writing letters altogether. About a year before his death he imparted his purpose to Boccaccio, as follows:
"I know now that neither of two long letters that I wrote to you have reached you. But what can we do?—nothing but submit. We may wax indignant, but we cannot avenge ourselves. A most insupportable set of fellows has appeared in northern Italy, who nominally guard the passes, but are really the bane of messengers. They not only glance over the letters that they open, but they read them with the utmost curiosity. They may, perhaps, have for an excuse the orders of their masters, who, conscious of being subject to every reproach in their restless careers of insolence, imagine that everyone must be writing about and against them; hence their anxiety to know everything. But it is certainly inexcusable, when they find something in the letters that tickles their asinine ears, that instead of detaining the messengers while they take time to copy the contents, as they used to do, they should now, with ever increasing audacity, spare their fingers the fatigue, and order the messengers off without their letters. And, to make this procedure the more disgusting, those who carry on this trade are complete ignoramuses, suggesting those unfortunates who possess a capacious and imperious appetite together with a weak digestion, which keeps them always on the verge of illness. I find nothing more irritating and vexatious than the interference of these scoundrels. It has often kept me from writing, and often caused me to repent after I had written. There is nothing more to be done against these letter-thieves, for everything is upside down, and the liberty of the state is entirely destroyed.
"To this obstacle to correspondence I may add my age, my flagging interest in almost everything, and not merely satiety of writing but an actual repugnance to it. These reasons taken together have induced me to give up writing to you, my friend, and to those others with whom I have been wont to correspond. I utter this farewell, not so much that these frivolous letters shall, at last, cease to interfere, as they so long have done, with more serious work, but rather to prevent my writings from falling into the hands of these paltry wretches. I shall, in this way, at least escape their insolence, and when I am forced to write to you or to others I shall write to be understood and not to please.[43] I remember already to have promised, in a letter of this kind, that I would thereafter be more concise in my correspondence, in order to economise the brief time which remained to me. But I have not been able to keep this engagement. It seems to me much easier to remain silent altogether with one's friends than to be brief, for when one has once begun, the desire to continue the conversation is so great that it were easier not to begin than to check the flow."[44]
If the letters of Erasmus can, as Mr. Froude suggested, be properly regarded as the most important single source for the history of the Reformation, those of Petrarch must, by reason of the scantiness of other material, be looked upon as indispensable to an understanding of the intellectual life of Italy at the opening of the Renaissance. Still his entire correspondence is by no means available as yet in even a tolerable Latin edition, and, except for an Italian translation, his letters are quite out of the reach of those who cannot read them in the original.[45] The editors of the present volume therefore feel no hesitation in offering to the English-reading public a version of some of the more characteristic examples of a correspondence possessing such exceptional interest. They were unfortunately forced to select, since the letters that have been preserved would, if reproduced in extenso, fill no less than eight volumes of the size of this. The choice has been determined by a desire to shed all possible light upon the historical rôle of Petrarch and upon the times in which he lived. Some explanations have necessarily been added to the text, but a constant effort has been made to exclude all that was mere erudition or interesting only to the special student. The letters selected have nearly always been given in their entirety and with all possible literalness, for condensation would inevitably have interfered with the true impression which the original produces, even if it served at times to render the book more readable. We can but hope that the choice that we have made will, so far as is possible in so brief a compass, give a correct notion, at first hand, of the extraordinary character with whom we have to do.
[1] The writer has ventured to suggest that the thought of the Renaissance is much more akin to that of the Middle Ages than with that of to-day. See The New History pp. 101 sqq.
[2] Ep. de Rebus Sen., xvi., 2.
[3] Sen., xiii., 10; Opera (1581), p. 923.
[4] For Petrarch's attitude toward the Italian language the reader is referred to [Part II.], below.