His Latin poetry. 93. Petrarch was more proud of his Latin poem called Africa, the subject of which is the termination of the second Punic war, than of the sonnets and odes, which have made his name immortal, though they were not the chief sources of his immediate renown. It is indeed written with elaborate elegance, and perhaps superior to any preceding specimen of Latin versification in the middle ages, unless we should think Joseph Iscanus his equal. But it is more to be praised for taste than correctness; and though in the Basle edition of 1554, which I have used, the printer has been excessively negligent, there can be no doubt that the Latin poetry of Petrarch abounds with faults of metre. His eclogues, many of which are covert satires on the court of Avignon, appear to me more poetical than the Africa, and are sometimes very beautifully expressed. The eclogues of Boccaccio, though by no means indifferent, do not equal those of Petrarch.
John of Ravenna. 94. Mehus, whom Tiraboschi avowedly copies, has diligently collected the names, though little more than the names, of Latin teachers at Florence in the fourteenth century.[190] But among the earlier of these there was no good method of instruction, no elegance of language. The first who revealed the mysteries of a pure and graceful style, was John Malpaghino, commonly called John of Ravenna, one whom in his youth Petrarch had loved as a son, and who not very long before the end of the century taught Latin at Padua and Florence.[191] The best scholars of the ensuing age were his disciples, and among them was Gasparin of Barziza, |Gasparin of Barziza.| or, as generally called of Bergamo, justly characterised by Eichhorn as the father of a pure and elegant Latinity.[192] The distinction between the genuine Latin language and that of the lower empire was from this generally recognised; and the writers who had been regarded as standards were thrown away with contempt. This is the proper æra of the revival of letters, and nearly coincides with the beginning of the fifteenth century.
[190] Vita Traversari, p. 348.
[191] A life of John Malpaghino of Ravenna is the first in Meiner’s Lebensbeschreibungen berühmter männer, 3 vols., Zurich, 1795, but it is wholly taken from Petrarch’s Letters, and from Mehus’s Life of Traversari, p. 348. See also Tiraboschi, v. 554.
[192] Geschichte der Litteratur, ii. 241.
95. A few subjects, affording less extensive observation, we have postponed to the next chapter, which will contain the literature of Europe in the first part of the fifteenth century. Notwithstanding our wish to preserve in general a strict regard to chronology, it has been impossible to avoid some interruptions of it without introducing a multiplicity of transitions incompatible with any comprehensive views; and which, even as it must inevitably exist in a work of this nature, is likely to diminish the pleasure, and perhaps the advantage, that the reader might derive from it.
CHAPTER II.
ON THE LITERATURE OF EUROPE FROM 1400 TO 1440.
Cultivation of Latin in Italy—Revival of Greek Literature—Vestiges of it during the Middle Ages—It is taught by Chrysoloras—his Disciples—and by learned Greeks—State of Classical Learning in other Parts of Europe—Physical Sciences—Mathematics—Medicine and Anatomy—Poetry in Spain, France, and England—Formation of New Laws of Taste in Middle Ages—Their Principles—Romances—Religious Opinions.
Zeal for classical literature in Italy.