The Homes and Haunts of the Italian Poets, II. PETRARCH. BY FRANCES ELEANOR TROLLOPE. Di pensier in pensier, di monte in monte From thought to thought, from hill to hill, Love leads me. Two spots stand out like luminous points in the story of Petrarch's life, as we look back upon it across the long vista of five hundred years: Avignon, with its neighbouring retreat of Vaucluse, where the lover first beheld Laura and the poet first glorified her; and Arquà, the remote village amongst the Euganean Hills, where that true lover and great poet ended his earthly pilgrimage. But a long road intervenes between the two-a road leading through many stately cities, and haunts of old renown, winding across a great part of Europe; now pleasant, now painful, rough and smooth by turns, as is the manner of terrestrial roads; now populated by the noblest spirits of the time, and now infested by thieves. Few men of his generation can have travelled more than Petrarch. Besides the chief cities of Italy, he visited Paris, Ghent, Liége, Aix-la-Chapelle, Cologne, and other places. There are in his writings (Familiar Epistles,' and 'Odes,' both in Latin) some indications of his having coasted the shores of Spain, and even of his having touched England; but they are vague and obscure. Only a few, however, of the places visited in his numerous journeys can be enumerated amongst his homes and haunts. He may properly be said to have had a temporary home at Vaucluse, Parma, Padua, Milan, Venice, and Arquà. Other cities-Rome, Florence, Naples, Pavia, Verona--held him for briefer periods. We shall endeavour to trace his sojourn in the more important and interesting of these places, and to obtain some glimpses of the aspect they must have presented to those mild brown eyes which looked from under the laurel wreath of Francesco Petrarca. He was born on the night of July 19, 1304, at Arezzo, whither his father had retired after being exiled from Florence in that same year; a year memorable for the banishment of a far more illustrious exile, Dante Alighieri.' And little thought the worthy 1 Tiraboschi gives this date. But Ginguene, in his History of Italian Literature,' Florentine notary Pietro, commonly called Petracco,' and Eletta Canigiani, his wife, that the infant horn to them in those days of trouble was destined to fill the world with a poetic name and fame second only, throughout Italy, to those of their great townsman and fellow exile, the mighty Dante himself. When only seven months old, Francesco was carried from Arezzo to Ancisa or Incisa in the Val d'Arno, about fourteen miles above Florence, and there remained with his mother, on a small farm belonging to her family, until he was seven years old. Thus, then, the first impressions of external nature made on that sensitive and appreciative young mind were those of the Val d'Arno, with its classic river, its fertile fields, the varied and beautiful lines of its mountains,-near and distant,-its wealth of spring blossoms, its summer harvests of amber corn covering the rich brown soil with a golden robe, its purple vintages, and winter sunsets gorgeous with rich tints and lucid lakes of light, which might well recur to the poet's mental vision when in later years he dreamed of the celestial dwelling where his dead Laura shone in angel purity. There, too, there fell upon the quick childish ear the accents of that 'parlar Toscano'—of that Tuscan tongue, which, albeit still rude and unpolished, was the original source of Italian undefiled, and which Dante already had stamped with the eternal power of his genius-monumentum are perennius. A love for the beauties of nature, and an exquisite responsiveness to her varying aspects, are traits in Petrarch's writings very noteworthy and singular in a man of his time and of his race. Throughout his life he seems to have loved the country -not, indeed, with the profound passion of a Wordsworth, or the loving and delicate observation of a Tennyson, but still with a sentiment which is to this day very rare among his countrymen. In the exquisite sonnet, for example, which commences, Se lamentar d'augelli, o verdi fronde, (one of those written In Morte di Madonna Laura '), he expresses his sensibility to all sounds of the wood and stream, and how inextricably they are blended in his mind with the image of her whom he had lately lost. Perhaps there are few spots of civilised ground less changed in these five hundred years than the Val d'Arno. Ore exception must be made to this statement, and it is an important one, it must be owned: the rich forest which clothed the hills and mountains had not yet been destroyed by man's greed says that Petracco and Dante were both implicated in an attempt of the party of the Bianchi to re-enter Florence in 1304. This is more consonant with the date of 1302, given by other writers as that of Dante's exile from Florence. and improvidence.' But as to the general aspect of the 'poderi' (farms), the clumsy antique wooden ploughs, and the dove-coloured oxen that draw them, looking as though they were animated from some Greek or Roman frieze,-as to the sunburnt peasants toiling with heavy-handled spade among the olive and mulberry trees, or pruning the tangled vine, what time they chant in cadence an oldworld ditty, half savage, wholly sad,—as to the massive stone houses where they dwell, the stone fountains carved with rude device of leaf or ornament, where the women wash their household linen, or stand, pitcher on head, to gossip in the summer twilight,- as to the very phrase and idiom of their speech, Petrarch would find but little changed of all these things to eye or ear, could he return and stand once more embodied where his earliest years were passed. From Ancisa, Notary Petracco and his wife removed to Pisa with their family-there was now a second son, Gherardo, Petrarch's only brother; but after a stay there of about a year, the exile was obliged to relinquish all hope of being restored to his rights and property in Florence, and went to settle in Avignon, where Pope Clement V. had established his court, and where many proscribed Italians found a refuge (A.D. 1313). Here Petracco had some hopes of obtaining employment. And, in fact, he must have found some means of gaining a livelihood; but what they were, and whether he continued to follow the legal profession to which he properly belonged, does not clearly appear. This much is certain; that whilst he, for purposes of business, remained in Avignon, he was obliged by reason of the dearness of living and lodging in that city-crowded as it was by the members of a luxurious and wealthy court, and all they brought in their train-to send his wife and children to Carpentras, a little city about four leagues distant from Avignon. Petracco made frequent journeys to visit his family at Carpentras, and on one of these occasions he went to see the fountain of Vaucluse. A very unimportant matter, one would say, that an obscure notary should chance to light upon a picturesque and secluded spot in Provence! and yet it was a circumstance which has given to the world of letters certain masterpieces to whose author men do homage still, after five centuries. For little Francesco, then ten years old, obtained leave to accompany his father to Vaucluse, and the view of that umbrageous solitude made an ineffaceable impression on his ardent imagination. 1 For our present purpose it were useless to follow the young They have been less destroyed in the neighbouring Casentino than in any other part of the Tuscan Apennine. YOL. XXXII. NO. CXXVII. U Francesco to Montpellier and Bologna, in both of which universities he studied, for neither of them can be said to have been a home or haunt of his; rather were they the scenes of an enforced sojourn which held him merely in the bonds of dry and disagreeable duty. Not that he was ever a sluggard at his studies. On the contrary, his thirst for knowledge and his love of books were singularly intense even from his earliest youth. But the innate bent of his mind was towards philosophy and poetry; it had no affinity with the pedantic minutiae of the canon and civil law as taught in those seats of learning in the fourteenth century! He, indeed, gives another than a purely intellectual ground for this repugnance. Here are his own words taken from the famous Epistle to Posterity,'-a work, as has been shrewdly remarked by one of his critics, more fortunate then some others bearing that address, inasmuch as it has succeeded in reaching its destination: 'Thence' (from Carpentras) I passed to the study of the law in Montpellier, and afterwards in Bologna. I spent four years in the first-named city, and three in the second, and went through the entire course of civil law. Many persons said that I might have made no small advancement in that study, had I continued to follow it. But no sooner had I lost my parents, than I abandoned it altogether; not because I do not love the authority of the laws, which is most high, and full of Roman antiquity, in which I much delight; but because the iniquity of men has corrupted the practice of law. And I could not bear to study a science of which I would not make an infamous use, and could scarcely make an honest one: and even had I tried to do so, my honesty would have been held to be but ignorance.' At Bologna, however, Petrarca enjoyed the society of some congenial spirits; and, if he did not study law to any practical purpose, he doubtless enriched his mind with the varied culture which, according to the measure of the times, was to be found in that ancient and learned city. Cino da Pistoia, himself no mean poet, was at that time professor of jurisprudence in Bologna; and Petrarch sympathised with him in his worship of the Muses. The university of Bologna was at this period (about 1325) numerously frequented, and celebrated throughout Europe. Scholars from many lands thronged its lecture halls and populated its streets, having for a common medium of communication the corrupt medieval Latin which it was at a later period one of our poet's glories to have purified and corrected. Under the shade of the quaint arcades which still make Bologna picturesque, walked many noteworthy figures: some cowled and robed in the staid garments of professors: others gay in the parti-coloured costumes of the time; many, probably, |