and even they were quite exhausted, when, at the approach of night, beyond all hope, and contrary to the universal expectation, the sky cleared, the wind abated, and the sea grew calm. Thus the most infamous of the sufferers are those alone who escaped a watery grave. Alas! that the words of Lucan should have thus proved true that fortune favours the wicked,'—or that such is the pleasure of God -or that they, who in the hour of trial are most indifferent whether they live or die, are the securest from danger! This is the history of yesterday."-November the 27th, 1343. XVIII. IN the numerous letters written by Petrarch towards the decline of life, and arranged by him under the title of EPISTOLÆ SENILES, the old solitary man, while conversing with his most intimate friends, intended to be heard by the world. They are full of pathos and wisdom; of pedantry and eloquence; of christian self-denial and puerile self-complacency and there is a continual struggle between his natural frankness and the caution of age. However, his correspondents were indebted to him for a profusion of quotations, which, in the scarcity of books in that age, made them acquainted with many passages of classical writers. Possibly they indulged, almost as much as we do, in gossiping about all the concerns, great and small, public and personal, historical and fabulous, of their celebrated contemporaries; but editors of monthly and quarterly publications, of daily newspapers, and of biographical dictionaries of the dead and the living, had not as yet either the professional inducements or the means to penetrate into the privacy of domestic retirement. Petrarch, allured by the idea that his celebrity would magnify into importance all the ordinary occurrences of his life, satisfied the curiosity both of his friends and foes by seriously telling them, how He did all natural functions of a man, Ate, drank, and slept, and put his raiment on which has afforded this advantage at any rate, that our information is not apocryphal, and that we possess the materials for the most interesting of histories-the history of the mind of a man of genius, but he still requires, what he has never yet had the good fortune to find, a man of genius for his historian. In Petrarch's letters, as well as in his poems and treatises, we always identify the author with the man who felt himself irresistibly impelled to develope his own intense feelings. Being endowed with almost all the noble, and with some of the paltry passions, of our nature, and having never attempted to conceal them, he awakens us to reflection upon ourselves, while we contemplate in him a being of our own species, yet different from every other, and whose originality excites even more sympathy than admiration. |