With a disingenuousness which I reprehend and deplore, I conceived the plan of changing the order of the letters, or concealing from you entirely those that I condemn. Neither subterfuge would have deceived you, since you possess the originals of these melancholy missives, and are aware of the year and day upon which each was written. Consequently I must arm myself with excuses. I have grown weary in the long and arduous battle. While courage and valour stood by me, I made a stand myself and encouraged others to resist; but when, by reason of the strength of the enemy and the fierceness of his onset, I began to lose my footing, and my spirits began to droop, that fine, bold tone promptly deserted me, and I descended to those weak laments which are so displeasing. My affection for my friends may perhaps extenuate my offence, for while they remained unharmed I never groaned on account of any wound of fortune. But when almost all of them were hurried away in a single great catastrophe, nay when the whole world seemed about to perish,[14] it would have been inhuman, rather than courageous, to remain unmoved. Before that who ever heard me complain of exile, disease, litigation, elections, or the whirl of public affairs?[15] Who ever heard a tearful regret for my father's house, for lost fortune, diminished fame, squandered money, or absent friends? Cicero, however, shows such a want of manliness in the way he writes of such grievances that his sentiments often offend as much as his style delights me. Add to this his litigious epistles, and the complaints and insults which, with the utmost fickleness, he directs against distinguished men whom he himself has but just been lauding to the skies! On reading these I was so shocked and discomposed that I could not refrain in my irritation from writing to him and pointing out what offended me in his writings, as if he were a friend and contemporary.[16] Ignoring the space of time which separates us, I addressed him with a familiarity springing from my sympathy with his genius. This letter suggested others of the kind. For instance, on re-reading, after some years, Seneca's tragedy of Octavia,[17], I felt the same impulse to write to him, and later I wrote, on various themes, to Varro, Virgil, and others.[18] A few of these, which I have inserted in the latter part of this work, might produce the utmost astonishment in the mind of the reader, were he not forewarned. The rest I burned up in that general holocaust of which I told you above.
Just as Cicero was absorbed in his trials, so was I at one time in mine. But to-day—that you may know my present temper—it would not be inappropriate to attribute to me that serenity which comes, as Seneca says, even to the most untried, the serenity of despair itself. Why indeed fear, when one has so many times striven with death itself?
Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem.
You will see me work and speak with growing courage from day to day. If I should hit upon any subject worthy of my pen, the style itself will be more vigorous. Many themes will undoubtedly offer themselves. My writing and my life I foresee will come to an end together.
But while my other works are finished, or bid fair to be, these letters, which I began in an irregular fashion in my early youth, and am now bringing together in my old age and arranging in a volume,—this work the love of my friends will never permit me to finish, since I must conscientiously reply to their messages; nor can I ever persuade them to accept the oft-repeated excuse of my other occupations. When you shall learn that I have at last begged to be freed from that duty, and have brought this work to an end, then you may know that I am dead and freed from all life's burdens. In the meantime I shall continue to follow the path which I have entered upon, not looking for its end until darkness comes upon me. Pleasant work will take the place of repose with me. Moreover, having placed the weakest of my forces in the centre, as orators and generals are wont to do, I shall take care that, as I showed a solid front in beginning my book, so my rear-guard too shall not be wanting in courage. Indeed, I may make better head against the attacks and buffets of fortune, thanks to a gradual process of hardening which has gone on through life. In short, although I dare not assert how I shall demean myself in the stress of circumstances, I am firmly resolved not to succumb to any trial hereafter. "Beneath the crash of worlds undaunted he appears." You may picture me thus armed with the good thoughts of Virgil and Horace, which I used often to read and praise in my earlier years, and which, in my latter days of calamity, stern necessity has forced me to make my own.
My communion with you has been very pleasant, and I have, in my enjoyment, been led half unconsciously to prolong it. It brought back your face over land and sea, and kept you with me until evening. I took up my pen this morning, and the day and this letter are coming to an end together.
Well, this which I dedicate to you, my brother, is a fabric, so to speak, of many coloured threads. But should I ever find a resting-place, and the leisure I have always sought in vain (and there is the promise of such a change), I intend to weave for you a more worthy and certainly more uniform web. I should be glad to think that I am among the few who can promise and confer fame; but you can lift yourself into the light without my aid, borne on the wings of your own genius. However, if I am able to rise, in spite of all the difficulties which beset me, you hereafter shall assuredly be my Idomeneus, my Atticus, and my Lucilius. Farewell.
The selection and copying of the letters, which Petrarch appears to have begun about 1359, when he was fifty-five years old, proved to be a trying task that dragged through five or six years. Writing to Boccaccio, in 1365, he describes a clever youth of Ravenna who had come to him two years before and, among other duties, had assisted him in editing the correspondence.[19] "My prose epistles to my friends,"[20] he says, "are very numerous; would that they were proportionately valuable! What with the confusion of the copies and the pressure of my other occupations I had almost despaired of editing them. Four friends had promised me their aid, but after a trial had left the task half done; yet this young man has, quite by himself, completed the collection, which does not include all indeed, but as many of them as will go into a not too huge volume. Counting this one, they amount to three hundred and fifty,[21] which, if it please God, you shall sometime behold, written in his hand. You will not find the ill-defined though sumptuous penmanship affected by our copyists, or rather painters, of to-day, which delights us at a distance, but, as if invented for any other purpose than to be read, strains and tires the eyes when we look at it intently, thus belying the saying of the prince of grammarians that the word letter comes from legere, to read. This youth's characters are, on the contrary, compressed[22] and clear, carrying the eye with them, nor will you discover any faults of orthography or grammatical errors."
It is safe to infer that the additional labour involved in duplicating from the outset all his letters, so that he might retain copies of them, was not undertaken without the expectation of ultimately bringing them together into a collection for publication, like the correspondence of Seneca and that of Abelard, with both of which he was familiar. (Of Cicero's letters he knew little if anything until he himself discovered a copy of part of them at Verona, in 1345, when he was already forty-one years old, too late for them to exercise any decisive influence upon the formation of his epistolary style.[23]) He had, moreover, long before the editing began, promised his friend "Socrates" that these prose epistles should be dedicated to him.[24] There can even be no doubt that individual letters were destined for a more or less wide circle of readers, as is shown by their careful composition and, here and there, by a naive confession, as in the repetition for the benefit of others of the earlier part of the story of the goldsmith, with which the friend to whom he was writing was already familiar.[25] Indeed he closes his collection with an explicit appeal to the "candid reader, whoever thou art," exhorting him by their common love for the same studies not to allow himself to be disturbed by the confusion and unstudied language of the work, but to recall the excuses offered in the Preface.[26]