[15] See the close of the fourth canto of the "Inferno," and especially the Convito, iv., ch. 4.
[16] Carducci, Studi Letterari, 2d ed., p. 334.
[17] The best edition is that of Dr. Moore (Clarendon Press, Oxford).
[18] Fam., xxi., 15 (probably written in 1359).
[19] This refers to the poem, spoken of above, with which Boccaccio accompanied his copy of Dante.
[20] Quintilian's strictures on Seneca's style had given rise to the opinion that he not only disapproved of Seneca's works, but hated him personally. He refutes (Institutes, x., i) that "vulgatam falso de me opinionem, qua damnare eum [sc. Senecam] et invisum quoque habere sum creditus." This naturally seemed to Petrarch a very exact analogy to the charges of jealousy brought against him.
[21] Cum avo patreque meo vixit. The reader is left to conjecture how intimate Dante and Petracco may have been when they lived together in Florence. Petrarch, in a reference to his father in Sen., x., 2, would lead us to infer that he was born about 1252, twelve or thirteen years before Dante. There seems to be no means of deciding whether that statement or the one given in this letter, which makes Dante the older, is nearer the truth.
[22] This matter of plagiarism is a subject to which Petrarch often reverts in his letters. He realised the difficulty of producing anything essentially new after the great works of classical antiquity.
[23] This is probably a reference, as M. Develay suggests, to a metrical epistle addressed to Giacomo Colonna, the Bishop of Lombez, in which the following lines occur:
Nil usquam invideo, nullum ferventius odi,
Nullum despicio nisi me....