13. But from their nature will the tannen grow Tannen is the plural of tanne, a species of fir peculiar to the Alps, which only thrives in very rocky parts, where scarcely soil sufficient for its nourishment can be found. On these spots it grows to a greater height than any other mountain tree. . 14. A single star is at her side, and reigns With her o'er half the lovely heaven. The above description may seem fantastical or exaggerated to those who have never seen an Oriental or an Italian sky, yet it is but a literal and hardly sufficient delineation of an August evening (the eighteenth) as contemplated in one of many rides along the banks of the Brenta near La Mira. 15. Watering the tree which bears his lady's name Thanks to the critical acumen of a Scotchman, we now know as little of Laura as ever. The discoveries of the Abbé de Sade, his triumphs, his sneers, can no longer instruct or amuse.† We must not, however, think that these memoirs are as much a romance as Belisarius or the Incas, although we are told so by Dr. Beattie, a great name but a little authority. His "labour" has not been in vain, notwithstanding his "love" has, like most other passions, made him ridiculous. The hypothesis which overpowered the struggling Italians, and carried along less interested critics in its current, is run out. We have another proof that we can be never sure that the paradox, the most singular, and therefore having the most agreeable and authentic air, will not give place to the re-esta blished ancient prejudice. It seems, then, first, that Laura was born, lived, died, and was buried, not in Avignon, but in the country. The fountains of the Sorga, the thickets of Cabrieres, may resume their pretensions, and the exploded de la Bastie again be heard with complacency. The hypothesis of the Abbé had no stronger props than the parchment sonnet and medal found on the skeleton of the wife of Hugo de Sade, and the Manuscript note to the Virgil of Petrarch, now in the Ambrosian library. If these proofs were both incontestable. the poetry was written, the medal composed, cast, and deposited within the space of twelve hours; and these deliberate duties were See An historical and critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch: and a dissertation on an Historical Hypothesis of the Abbé de Sade: the first appeared about the year 1784; the other is inserted in the fourth volume of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and both have been incorporated into a work, published, under the first title, by Ballantyne in 1810. + Mémoires pour la Vie de Pétrarque. Life of Beattie, by Sir S. Forbes, t. ii. p. 106. Mr. Gibbon called his Memoirs "a labour of love," (see Decline and Fall, cap. Ixx. note 1.) and followed him with confidence and delight. The compiler of a very voluminous work must take much criticism upon trust; Mr. Gibbon has done so, though not so readily as some other authors. performed round the carcase of one who died, of the plague, and was hurried to her grave on the day of her death. These documents, therefore, are too decisive : they prove not the fact, but the forgery. Either the sonnet or the Virgilian note must be a falsification. The Abbé cites both as incontestably true; the consequent deduction is inevitable-they are both evidently false.* Secondly, Laura was never married, and was a haughty virgin rather than that tender and prudent wife who honoured Avignon by making that town the theatre of an honest French passion, and played off for one-and-twenty years her little machinery of alternate favours and refusalst upon the first poet of the age. It was, indeed, rather too unfair that a female should be made responsible for eleven children upon the faith of a misinterpreted abbreviation, and the decision of a librarian. It is, however, satisfactory to think that the love of Petrarch was not Platonic. The happiness which he prayed to possess but once and for a moment was surely not of the mind, and something so very real as a marriage project, with one who has been idly called a shadowy nymph, may be, perhaps, detected in at least six places of his own sonnets. The love of Petrarch was neither platonic nor poetical; and if in one passage of his works he calls "amore veementeissimo ma unico ed onesto," he confesses in a letter to a friend, that it was guilty and perverse, that it absorbed him quite and mastered his heart.¶ In this case, however, he was perhaps alarmed for the culpability of his wishes; for the Abbé de Sade himself, who certainly would not have been scrupulously delicate if he could have proved his descent from Petrarch as well as Laura, is forced into a stout defence of his virtuous grandmother. As far as relates to the poet, we have no security for the innocence, except perhaps in the constancy of his pursuit. He assures us in his epistle to posterity that, when The sonnet had before awakened the suspicions of Mr. Horace Walpole. See his letter to Wharton in 1763. Par ce petit manège, cette alternative de faveurs et de rigueurs bien ménagée, une femme tendre et sage amuse, pendant vingt et un ans, le plus grand poëte de son siècle, sans faire la moindre brêche à son honneur. Mém. pour la Vie de Pétrarque, Preface aux Francois. The Italian editor of the London edition of Petrarch, who has translated Lord Woodhouselee, renders the "femme tendre et sage" "raffinata civetta." Riflessioni intorno a madonna Laura, p. 234, vol. iii. ed. 1811. ‡ In a dialogue with St. Augustin, Petrarch has described Laura as having a body exhausted with repeated ptubs. The old editors read and printed perturbationibus; but Mr. Capperonier, librarian to the French King in 1762, who saw the MS. in the Paris library, made an attestation, that "on lit et qu'on doit lire, partubus exhaustum." De Sade joined the names of Messrs. Boudot and Be jot with Mr. Capperonier, and in the whole discussion on this ptubs, showed himself a downwright literary rogue. See Riflessioni, &c. p. 267. Thomas Aquinas is called in to settle whether Petrarch's mistress was a chaste maid or a continent wife. mi "Pigmalion, quanto lodar ti dei Dell' imagine tua, se mille volte N' avesti quel ch'i' sol una vorrei." Sonetto 58. guando giunse a Simon l'alto concetto Le Rime &c. par. i. pag. 189. edit. Ven. 1756. || See Riflessioni, &c. p. 291. "Quella rea e perversa passiono che solo tutto mi occupava e regnava nel cuore." arrived at his fortieth year, he not only had in horror, but had lostall recollection and image of any "irregularity."* But the birth of his natural daughter cannot be assigned earlier than his thirtyninth year; and either the memory or the morality of the poet must have failed him, when he forgot or was guilty of this slip.† The weakest argument for the purity of this love has been drawn from the permanence of effects, which survived the object of his passion. The reflection of Mr. de la Bastie, that virtue alone is capable of making impressions which death cannot efface, is one of those which every body applauds, and every body finds not to be true, the moment he examines his own breast or the records of human feeling. Such apothegms can do nothing for Petrarch or for the cause of morality, except with the very weak and the very young. He that has made even a little progress beyond ignorance and pupilage, cannot be edified with any thing but truth. What is called vindicating the honour of an individual or a nation, is the most futile, tedious, and uninstructive of all writing; although it will always meet with more applause than that sober criticism, which is attributed to the malicious desire of reducing a great man to the common standard of humanity. It is, after all, not unlikely, that our historian was right in retaining his favourite hypothetic salvo, which secures the author, although it scarcely saves the honour of the still unknown mistress of Petrarch.§ 16. They keep his dust in Arqua, where he died. Stanza xxxi. line 1. Petrarch retired to Arqua immediately on his return from the unsuccessful attempt to visit Urban V at Rome, in the year 1370, and with the exception of his celebrated visit to Venice in company with Francesco Novello da Carrara, he appears to have passed the four last years of his life between that charming solitude and Padua. For four months previous to his death he was in a state of continual langour, and in the morning of July the 19th, in the year 1374, was found dead in his library chair with his head resting upon a book. The chair is still shown amongst the precious relics of Arquà, which from the uninterrupted venera tion that has been attached to every thing relative to this great man from the moment of his death to the present hour, have, it may be hoped, a better chance of authenticity, than the Shakes perian memorials of Stratford upon Avon. Arquà (for the last syllable is accented in pronunciation, although the analogy of the English language has been observed in the verse) is twelve miles from Padua, and about three miles on the right of the high road to Rovigo, in the bosom of the Euga • Azion disonesta are his words. +"A questa confesssione cosi sincera diede forse occasione una nuova caduta ch' ei fece," Tiraboschi, Storia, &c. tom. v. lib. iv. par. ii. pag. 492. "Il n'y a que la vertu seule qui soit capable de faire des impressions que la mort n'efface pas." M. De Bimard, Baron de la Bastie, in the Memoires de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres for 1740 and 1751. See also Riflessioni, &c. p. 295. "And if the virtue or prudence of Laura was inexorable, he enjoyed, and might boast of enjoying the nymph of poetry." Decline and Fall, cap. lxx. p. 327. vol. xii. oct. Perhaps the if is here meant for although. nean hills. After a walk of twenty minutes across a flat well wooded meadow, you come to a little blue lake, clear, but fathomless, and to the foot of a succession of acclivities and hills, clothed with vineyards and orchards, rich with fir and pomegran ate trees, and every sunny fruit shrub. From the banks of the lake the road winds into the hills, and the church of Arquà is soon seen between a cleft where two ridges slope towards each other, and nearly inclose the village. The houses are scattered at intervals on the steep sides of these summits; and that of the poet is on the edge of a little knoll overlooking two descents, and commanding a view not only of the glowing gardens in the dales immediately beneath, but of the wide plains, above whose low woods of mulberry and willow thickened into a dark mask by festoons of vines, tall single cypresses, and the spires of towns are seen in the distance, which stretches to the mouths of the Po and the shores of the Adriatic. The climate of these volcanic hills is warmer, and the vintage begins a week sooner than in the plains of Padua. Petrarch is laid, for he cannot be said to be buried, in a sarcophagus of red marble, raised on four pilasters on an elevated base, and preserved from an association with meaner tombs. It stands conspicuously alone, but will be soon overshadowed by four lately planted laurels. Petrarch's fountain, for here every thing is Petrarch's, springs and expands itself beneath an artificial arch, a little below the church, and abounds plentifully, in the driest season, with that soft water which was the ancient wealth of the Euganean hills. It would be more attractive, were it not, in some seasons, beset with hornets and wasps. No other coincidence could assimilate the tombs of Petrarch and Archilochus. The revolutions of centuries have spared these sequestered valleys, and the only violence which has been offered to the ashes of Petrarch was prompted, not by hate, but veneration. An attempt was made to rob the sarcophagus of its treasure, and one of the arms was stolen by a Florentine through a rent which is still visible. The injury is not forgotten, but has served to identify the poet with the country where he was born, but where he would not live. A peasant boy of Arquà being asked who Petrarch was, replied, "that the people of the parsonage knew all about him, but that he only knew that he was a Florentine." Mr. Forsyth was not quite correct in saying that Petrarch never returned to Tuscany after he had once quitted it when a boy. It appears he did pass through Florence on his way from Parma to Rome, and on his return in the year 1350, and remained there long enough to form some acquaintance with its most distinguished inhabitants. A Florentine gentleman, ashamed of the aversion of the poet for his native country, was eager to point out this trivial error in our accomplished traveller, whom he knew and respected for an extraordinary capacity, extensive erudition, and refined taste, joined to that engaging simplicity of manners which has been so frequently recognised as the surest, though it is certainly not an indispensable, trait of superior genius. Every footstep of Laura's lover has been anxiously traced and recorded. The house in which he lodged is shown in Venice. The inhabitants of Arezzo, in order to decide the ancient controversy between their city and the neighbouring Ancisa, where Petrarch was carried when seven months old, and remained until his seventh year, have designated by a long inscription the spot where their great fellow citizen was born. A tablet has been * Remarks, &c. on Italy, p. 95, note, 2d edit. raised to him at Parma, in the chapel of St. Agatha, at the cathedral, because he was archdeacon of that society, and was only snatched from his intended sepulture in their church by a foreign death. Another tablet with a bust has been erected to him at Pavia, on account of his having passed the autumn of 1368 in that city, with his son-in-law Brossano. The political condition which has for ages precluded the Italians from the criticism of the living, has concentrated their attention to the iilustration of the dead. 17. Or, it may be, with deamons. Stanza xxxiv. line 1. The struggle is to the full as likely to be with dæmons as with our better thoughts. Satan chose the wilderness for the temptstion of our Saviour. And our unsullied John Locke preferred the presence of a child to complete solitude. 18. In face of all his foes, the Cruscan quire ; And Boileau, whose rash envy, &c. Stanza xxxviii. lines 6 and 7. Perhaps the couplet in which Boileau deprecates Tasso, may serve as well as any other specimen to justify the opinion given of the harmony of French verse, A Malerbe, à Racan, préférer Theophile, Et le clinquant du Tasse à tout l'or de Virgile. Sat. ix. vers. 176. The biographer Serassi,† out of tenderness to the reputation either of the Italian or the French poet, is eager to observe that the satirest recanted or explained away this censure, and subsequently allowed the author of the Jerusalem to be a "geaius, sublime, vast, and happily born for the higher flights of poetry." To this we will add, that the recantation is far from satisfactory, * D. O. M. Parentibus præclaris genere perantiquo Africæ ob carmen hâc in urbe peractum regibus accito Juvenilium juvenis senilium senex Comes Nicolaus Cononicus Cicognarus Divæ Januariæ cruento corpore Sed infra meritum Francisci sepulchro La vita del Tasso, lib. iii. p. 284. tom. ii. edit. Bergamo 1790. |