Petrarch's love for Cicero and Virgil sprang from what one may call the fundamental humanistic impulse, delight in the free play of the mind among ideas that are stimulating and beautiful. His devotion to Livy came, in part, from a different source, from a singular sort of patriotism. He felt that he, and every other Italian of his day, was descended in a certain sense from the Romans of old; that their glory was his rightful heritage; that Rome, the ancient Rome, which he found still in existence beneath the wretched mediæval stronghold, was the city of his love and allegiance. Livy's pages accordingly were to him the record of the great deeds of his forefathers. He studied them with the utmost eagerness.
Under the influence of one or the other of these two passions, the thirst for new truth and beauty and the love of the past, or of both of them in conjunction, Petrarch laboured strenuously, until he had gathered together from a hundred obscure sources all the remains of Roman literature that were obtainable in his day, and had made himself familiar with them. Greek literature, unfortunately, it was impossible for him to know. In spite of a lifelong desire, and at least one determined effort, he was unable to acquire even a rudimentary knowledge of the Greek language.[5] He read in barren Latin translations more or less of Plato and Aristotle and Homer, but this could afford him nothing like an adequate conception of the power and beauty of the literature as a whole. It is a sad pity that he was so handicapped, for if the first Humanist had known and appreciated Homer and Plato and Sophocles, as he did Cicero and Virgil and Seneca and Livy, all our modern culture would be something far finer. We should be simpler and clearer in our conceptions, and better developed æsthetically. If Hellenic influences have never played their due part in our education, if the proportion between the Greek and the Roman elements has been unnatural, this is owing mainly to the insufficient opportunities of Petrarch and his earliest disciples.
To the classical authors that he did possess he devoted a prolonged and intense study that has very rarely been equalled. He followed faithfully his own injunctions given in the De Remediis Utriusque Fortunæ: "If you would win glory from your books you must know them, and not merely have them; must stow them away, not in your library, but in your memory, not in your bookcases, but in your brain." Annotations in his hand on the manuscripts that have been traced back to him[6] show that he weighed with care every word of his favourite writers. But external evidence like this is not necessary. Every page of his letters, and of all his other Latin writings too, is proof in itself that as far as his limitations permitted he had absorbed the very spirit of his beloved classics.
A PAGE OF PETRARCH'S COPY OF THE "ILIAD."
The letters show also how eager he was to hand on to others the light that he had gained from these studies. He had as wide and varied an acquaintance as any man of his time, thanks to the fame that he had won in his youth by his verses, and to the attraction that he exercised upon everyone in later life, through his personal charm and his remarkable intellectual powers; and one of the inevitable consequences of such a connection was a correspondence that was both active and large. He wrote to the emperor and the pope, to kings and their regents, to churchmen of every degree, to scholars in almost all parts of Europe, to men of every profession, every age, every taste; and he wrote always as a Humanist, a lover of the classics, who found in them the quintessence of human wisdom. Men everywhere were ready for broader views, deeper knowledge, keener life, and he, through these letters and through personal contact, stimulated their longing and showed them where they might find that which would satisfy it. The influence that he thus exerted is incalculable. This volume is but an effort to give some comprehension of it.