[319] Purgatorio, xi. 85-117. Besides ‘gloria’ we here find close together ‘grido, fama, rumore, nominanza, onore’ all different names for the same thing. Boccaccio wrote, as he admits in his letter to Joh. Pizinga (Op. Volg. xvi. 30 sqq.) ‘perpetuandi nominis desiderio’.
[320] Scardeonius, De Urb. Patav. Antiqu. (Græv. Thesaur. vi. iii. col. 260). Whether ‘cereis’ or ‘certis muneribus’ should be the reading, cannot be said. The somewhat solemn nature of Mussatus can be recognised in the tone of his history of Henry VII.
[321] Franc. Petrarca, Posteritati, or Ad Posteros, at the beginning of the editions of his works, or the only letter of Book xviii. of the Epp. Seniles; also in Fracassetti, Petr. Epistolæ Familiares, 1859, i. 1-11. Some modern critics of Petrarch’s vanity would hardly have shown as much kindness and frankness had they been in his place.
[322] Opera, ed. 1581, p. 177: ‘De celebritate nominis importuna.’ Fame among the mass of people was specially offensive to him. Epp. Fam. i. 337, 340. In Petrarch, as in many humanists of the older generation, we can observe the conflict between the desire for glory and the claims of Christian humility.
[323] ‘De Remediis Utriusque Fortunæ’ in the editions of the works. Often printed separately, e.g. Bern, 1600. Compare Petrarch’s famous dialogue, ‘De Contemptu Mundi’ or ‘De Conflictu Curarum Suarum,’ in which the interlocutor Augustinus blames the love of fame as a damnable fault.
[324] Epp. Fam. lib. xviii. (ed. Fracassetti) 2. A measure of Petrarch’s fame is given a hundred years later by the assertion of Blondus (Italia Illustrata, p. 416) that hardly even a learned man would know anything of Robert the Good if Petrarch had not spoken of him so often and so kindly.
[325] It is to be noted that even Charles IV., perhaps influenced by Petrarch, speaks in a letter to the historian Marignola of fame as the object of every striving man. H. Friedjung, Kaiser Karl IV. und sein Antheil am geistigen Leben seiner Zeit, Vienna, 1876, p. 221.
[326] Epist. Seniles, xiii. 3, to Giovanni Aretino, Sept. 9, 1370.
[327] Filippo Villani, Vite, p. 19
[328] Both together in the epitaph on Boccaccio: ‘Nacqui in Firenze al Pozzo Toscanelli; Di fuor sepolto a Certaldo giaccio,’ &c. Comp. Op. Volg. di Boccaccio, xvi. 44.