dear to her, and found so unexpectedly and so lately. Boccaccio. That is true: I will correct the oversight. Why do we never hear of our faults until everybody knows them, and until they stand in record against us? Dante, though we want it oftener. It would by difficult to form an idea of a poem, into which so many personages are introduced, containing so few delineations of character, so few touches that excite our sympathy, so few elementary signs for our instruction, so few topics for our delight, so few Petrarca. Because our ears are closed to truth | excursions for our recreation. Nevertheless, his and friendship for some time after the triumphal course of composition. We are too sensitive for the gentlest touch; and when we really have the most infirmity, we are angry to be told that we have any. Boccaccio. Ah Francesco! thou art poet from scalp to heel but what other would open his breast as thou hast done! They show ostentatiously far worse weaknesses; but the most honest of the tribe would forswear himself on this. Again, I acknowledge it, you have reason to complain of Lisabetta and Gismonda. Petrarca. They keep the soul from sinking in such dreadful cireumstances by the buoyancy of imagination. The sunshine of poetry makes the colour of blood less horrible, and draws up a shadowy and a softening haziness where the scene would otherwise be too distinct. Poems, like rivers, convey to their destination what must without their appliances be left unhandled: these to ports and arsenals, this to the human heart. Boccaccio. So it is; and what is terror in poetry is horror in prose. We may be brought too close to an object to leave any room for pleasure. Ugolino affects us like a skeleton, by dry bony verity. Petrarca. We can not be too distinct in our images; but although distinctness, on this and most other occasions, is desirable in the imitative arts, yet sometimes in painting, and sometimes in poetry, an object should not be quite precise. In your novel of Andrevola and Gabriotto, you afford me an illustration. Le pareva dal corpo di lui uscire una This is like a dream: this is a dream. Afterward, you present to us such palpable forms and pleasing colours as may relieve and soothe us. Ed avendo molte rose, bianche e vermiglie, colte, perciocche la stagione era. Boccaccio. Surely you now are mocking me. The roses, I perceive, would not have been there, had it not been the season. Petrarca. A poet often does more and better than he is aware at the time, and seems at last to know as little about it as a silkworm knows about the fineness of her thread. powers of language are prodigious; and, in the solitary places where he exerts his force rightly, the stroke is irresistible. But how greatly to be pitied must he be, who can find nothing in paradise better than sterile theology! and what an object of sadness and of consternation, he who rises up from hell like a giant refreshed! Boccaccio. Strange perversion! A pillar of smoke by day and of fire by night; to guide no one. Paradise had fewer wants for him to satisfy than hell had; all which he fed to repletion. But let us rather look to his poetry than his temper. Petrarca. We will then. A good poem is not divided into little panes like a cathedral window; which little panes themselves are broken and blurred, with a saint's coat on a dragon's tail, a doctor's head on the bosom of a virgin martyr, and having about them more lead than glass, and more gloom than colouring. A good satire or good comedy, if it does not always smile, rarely and briefly intermits it, and never rages. A good epic shows us more and more distinctly, at every book of it we open, the features and properties of heroic character, and terminates with accomplishing some momentous action. A good tragedy shows us that greater men than ourselves have suffered more severely and more unjustly; that the highest human power hath suddenly fallen helpless and extinct; or, what is better to contemplate and usefuller to know, that uncontrolled by law, unaccompanied by virtue, unfollowed by contentment, its possession is undesirable and unsafe. Sometimes we go away in triumph with Affliction proved and purified, and leave her under the smiles of heaven. In all these consummations the object is excellent; and here is the highest point to which poetry can attain. Tragedy has no bye-paths, no resting-places; there is everywhere action and passion. What do we find of this nature, or what of the epic, in the Orpheus and Judith, the Charon and Can della Scala, the Sinon and Maestro Adamo? Boccaccio. Personages strangely confounded! In this category it required a strong hand to make Pluto and Pepe Satan keep the peace, both having the same pretensions, and neither the sweetest temper. Petrarca. Then the description of Mahomet is The uncertain dream that still hangs over us in indecent and filthy. Yet Dante is scarcely more the novel, is intercepted and hindered from hurt- disgusting in this place, than he is insipid and ing us by the spell of the roses, of the white and spiritless in his allegory of the marriages, between the red; a word the less would have rendered it Saint Francesco and Poverty, Saint Dominico and incomplete. The very warmth and geniality of Faith. I speak freely and plainly to you, Giovanni, the season shed their kindly influence on us; and and the rather, as you have informed me that I have we are renovated and ourselves again by virtue | been thought invidious to the reputation of our of the clear fountain where we rest. Nothing of great poet; for such he is transcendently, in the this poetical providence comes to our relief in midst of his imperfections. Such likewise were Ennius and Lucilius in the same period of Roman | regions of Homer and Virgil. I am ignorant how literature. They were equalled, and perhaps excelled: will Dante ever be, in his native tongue? The past generations of his countrymen, the glories of old Rome, fade before him the instant he springs upward, but they impart a more constant and a more genial delight. Boccaccio. They have less hair-cloth about them, and smell less cloisterly; yet they are only choris ters. The generous man, such as you, praises and censures with equal freedom, not with equal pleasure: the freedom and the pleasure of the ungenerous are both contracted, and lie only on the left hand. Petrarca. When we point out to our friends an object in the country, do we wish to diminish it? do we wish to show it overcast? Why then should we in those nobler works of creation, God's only representatives, who have cleared our intellectual sight for us, and have displayed before us things more magnificent than Nature would without them have revealed? We poets are heated by proximity. Those who are gone, warm us by the breath they leave behind them in their course, and only warm us: those who are standing near, and just before, fever us. Solitude has kept me uninfected; unless you may hint perhaps that pride was my preservative against the malignity of a worse disease. Boccaccio. It might well be, though it were not; you having been crowned in the capital of the christian world. Petrarca. That indeed would have been something, if I had been crowned for my christianity, of which I suspect there are better judges in Rome than there are of poetry. I would rather be preferred to my rivals by the two best critics of the age than by all the others; who, if they think differently from the two wisest in these matters, must necessarily think wrong. Bocccacio. You know that not only the two first, but many more, prefer you; and that neither they, nor any who are acquainted with your character, can believe that your strictures on Dante are invidious or uncandid. much the Grecian poet invented, how much existed in the religion, how much in the songs and traditions of the people. But surely our Alighieri has taken the same idea, and even made his descent in the same part of Italy, as Æneas had done before. In the Odyssea the mind is perpetually relieved by variety of scene and character. There are vices enough in it, but rising from lofty or from powerful passions, and under the veil of mystery and poetry: there are virtues too enough, and human and definite and practicable. We have man, although a shade, in his own features, in his own dimensions: he appears before us neither cramped by systems nor jaundiced by schools; no savage, no cit, no cannibal, no doctor. Vigorous and elastic, he is such as poetry saw him first; he is such as poetry would ever see him. In Dante, the greater part of those who are not degraded, are debilitated and distorted. No heart swells here, either for overpowered valour or for unrequited love. In the shades alone, but in the shades of Homer, does Ajax rise to his full loftiness: in the shades alone, but in the shades of Virgil, is Dido the arbitress of our tears. Boccaccio. I must confess there are nowhere two whole cantos in Dante which will bear a sustained and close comparison with the very worst book of the Odyssea or the Eneid; that there is nothing of the same continued and unabated excellence, as Ovid's in the contention for the armour of Achilles; the most heroic of heroic poetry, and only censurable, if censurable at all, because the eloquence of the braver man is more animated and more persuasive than his successful rival's. I do not think Ovid the best poet that ever lived, but I think he wrote the most of good poetry, and, in proportion to its quantity, the least of bad or indifferent. The Inferno, the Purgatorio, the Paradiso, are pictures from the walls of our churches and chapels and monasteries, some painted by Giotto and Cimabue, some earlier. In several of these we detect not only the cruelty, but likewise the satire and indecency of Dante. Sometimes there is also his vigour and simplicity, but oftener his harshness and meagreness and disproportion. I am afraid the good Alighieri, like his friends the painters, was inclined to think the angels were created only to flagellate and burn us; and Paradise only for us to be driven out of it. And in truth, as we have seen it exhibited, there is but little hardship in the case. The opening of the third canto of the Inferno has always been much admired. There is indeed a great solemnity in the words of the inscription on the portal of hell: nevertheless, I do not see the necessity for three verses out of six. After Per me si va nell' eterno dolore, Petrarca. Iam borne toward him by many strong impulses. Our families were banished by the same faction: he himself and my father left Florence on the same day, and both left it for ever. This recollection would rather make me cling to him than cast him down. I fortune has many and tenacious ties: good fortune has few and fragile ones. I saw our illustrious fellow citizen once only, and when I was a child. Even the sight of such a poet, in early days, is dear to him who aspires to become one, and the memory is always in his favour. The worst I can recollect to have said against his poem to others, is, that the architectural fabric of the Inferno is unintelligible without a long study, and it surely is superfluous to subjoin only to be understood after distracting our attention from its inhabitants. Its locality and dimensions are at last uninteresting, and would better for, beside the perduta gente, who else can suffer have been left in their obscurity. The zealots of the eternal woe? And when the portal has told Dante compare it, for invention, with the infernal us that " Justice moved the high Maker to make it," Per me si va fra la perduta gente; surely it might have omitted the notification that | next into ferocity and fratricide, we may reasonhis "divine power” did it. Fecemi la divina potestate. The next piece of information I wish had been conveyed even in darker characters, so that they never could have been decyphered. The following line is, La somma Sapienza e 'l primo Amore. If God's first love was hell-making, we might almost wish his affections were as mutable as ours are: that is, if holy church would countenance us therein. Petrarca. Systems of poetry, of philosophy, of government, form and model us to their own proportions. As our systems want the grandeur, the light, and the symmetry of the ancient, we can not hope for poets, philosophers, or statesmen, of equal dignity. Very justly do you remark that our churches and chapels and monasteries, and even our shrines and tabernacles on the road-side, contain in painting the same punishments as Alighieri hath registered in his poem: and several of these were painted before his birth. Nor surely can you have forgotten that his master, Brunetto Latini, composed one on the same plan. The Virtues and Vices, and persons under their influence, appear to him likewise in a wood, wherein he, like Dante, is bewildered. Old walls are the tablets both copy: the arrangement is the devise of Brunetto. Our religion is too simple in its verities, and too penurious in its decorations, for poetry of high value. We can not hope or desire that a pious Italian will ever have the audacity to restore to Satan a portion of his majesty, or to remind the faithful that he is a fallen angel. Boccaccio. No, no, Francesco; let us keep as much of him down as we can, and as long. Petrarca. It might not be amiss to remember that even human power is complacent in security, and that Omnipotence is ever omnipotent, without threats and fulminations. Boccaccio. These, however, are the main springs of sacred poetry, of which I think we already have enough. Petrarca. But good enough? Boccaccio. Even much better would produce less effect than that which has occupied our ears from childhood, and comes sounding and swelling with a mysterious voice from the deep and dark recesses of antiquity. Petrarca. I see no reason why we should not revert, at times, to the first intentions of poetry. Hymns to the Creator were its earliest efforts. Boccaccio. I do not believe a word of it, unless He himself was graciously pleased to inspire the singer; of which we have received no account. I rather think it originated in pleasurable song, perhaps of drunkenness, and resembled the dithyrambic. Strong excitement alone could force and hurry men among words displaced and exaggerated ideas. ably believe that war-songs were among the earliest of his intellectual exertions. When he rested from battle he had leisure to think of love; and the skies and the fountains and the flowers reminded him of her, the coy and beautiful, who fled to a mother from the ardour of his pursuit. In after years he lost a son, his companion in the croft and in the forest: images too grew up there, and rested on the grave. A daughter, who had wondered at his strength and wisdom, looked to him in vain for succour at the approach of death. Inarticulate grief gave way to passionate and wailing words, and Elegy was awakened. We have tears in this world before we have smiles, Francesco! we have struggles before we have composure; we have strife and complaints before we have submission and gratitude. I am suspicious that if we could collect the "winged words" of the earliest hymns, we should find that they called upon the Deity for vengeance. Priests and rulers were far from insensible to private wrongs. Chryses in the Iliad is willing that his king and country should be enslaved, so that his daughter be sent back to him. David in the Psalms is no unimportunate or lukewarm applicant for the discomfiture and extermination of his adversaries: and, among the visions of felicity, none brighter is promised a fortunate warrior, than to dash the infants of his enemy against the stones. The Holy Scriptures teach us that the human race was created on the banks of the Euphrates, and where the river hath several branches. Here the climate is extremely hot; and men, like birds, in hot climates, never sing well. I doubt whether there was ever a good poet in the whole city and whole plain of Babylon. Egypt had none but such as she imported. Mountainous countries bear them as they bear the more fragrant plants and savoury game. Judæa had hers: Attica reared them among her thyme and hives: and Tuscany may lift her laurels not a span below. Never have the accents of poetry been heard on the fertile banks of the Vistula; and Ovid taught the borderers of the Danube an indigenous song in vain. Petrarca. Orpheus, we hear, sang on the banks of the Hebrus. Boccaccio. The banks of the Hebrus may be level or rocky, for what I know about them: but the river is represented by the poets as rapid and abounding in whirlpools; hence, I presume, it' runs among rocks and inequalities. Be this as it may do you imagine that Thrace in those early days produced a philosophical poet? Petrarca. We have the authority of history for it. Boccaccio. Bad authority too, unless we sift and cross-examine it. Undoubtedly there were narrow paths of commerce, in very ancient times, from the Euxine to the Caspian, and from the *Aptaque sunt nostris barbara verba modis.' What are all the other losses of literature in comparison Believing that man fell, first into disobedience, with this? Caspian to the kingdoms of the remoter East. | ments through which a greater magnitude was Merchants in those days were not only the most given to the stars. adventurous, but the most intelligent men and there were ardent minds, uninfluenced by a spirit of lucre, which were impelled by the ardour of imagination into untravelled regions. Scythia was a land of fable, not only to the Greeks, but equally to the Romans. Thrace was a land of fable, we may well believe, to the nearest towns of northern India. I imagine that Orpheus, whoever he was, brought his knowledge from that quarter. We are too apt to fancy that Greece owed every thing to the Phoenicians and Egyptians. The elasticity of her mind threw off, or the warmth of her imagination transmuted, the greater part of her earlier acquisitions. She was indebted to Phoenicia for nothing but her alphabet; and even these signs she modified, and endowed them with a portion of her flexibility and grace. Petrarca. I will remain no longer with you among the Thracians or the Hyperboreans. But in regard to low and level countries, as unproductive of poetry, I entreat you not to be too fanciful nor too exclusive. Virgil was born on the Mincio, and has rendered the city of his birth too celebrated to be mistaken. Petrarca. There are those who tell us that Homer lived before the age of letters in Greece. Boccaccio. I wish they knew the use of them as well as he did. Will they not also tell us that the commerce of the two nations was carried on without the numerals (and such were letters) by which traders cast up accounts? The Phoenicians traded largely with every coast of the Ægean sea; and among their earliest correspondents were the inhabitants of the Greek maritime cities, insular and continental. Is it credible that Cyprus, that Crete, that Attica, should be ignorant of the most obvious means by which commerce was maintained? or that such means should be restricted to commerce, among a people so peculiarly fitted for social intercourse, so inquisitive, so imaginative, as the Greeks? Petrarca. Certainly it is not. Boccaccio. The Greeks were the most creative, the Romans the least creative, of mankind. No Roman ever invented anything. Whence then are derived the only two works of imagination we find among them; the story of the Ephesian* Matron, and the story of Psyche ? Doubtless from some country farther eastward than Phoenicia and Egypt. The authors in which we find these insertions are of little intrinsic worth. When the Thracians became better known to the Greeks they turned their backs upon them as worn-out wonders, and looked toward the inexhaustible Hyperboreans. Among these too she placed wisdom and the arts, and mounted instru * One similar, and better conceived, is given by Du Halde from the Chinese. If the fiction of Psyche had reached Greece so early as the time of Plato, it would have caught his attention, and he would have delivered it 1 down to us, however altered. Boccaccio. He was born in the territory of Mantua, not in the city. He sang his first child's song on the shoulders of the Apennines; his first man's under the shadow of Vesuvius. I would not assert that a great poet must necessarily be born on a high mountain: no indeed, no such absurdity: but where the climate is hot, the plains have never shown themselves friendly to the imaginative faculties. We surely have more buoyant spirits on the mountain than below, but it is not requisite for this effect that our cradles should have been placed on it. Petrarca. What will you say about Pindar? Boccaccio. I think it more probable that he was reared in the vicinity of Thebes than within the walls. For Boeotia, like our Tuscany, has one large plain, but has also many eminences, and is bounded on two sides by hills. Look at the vale of Capua! Scarcely so much as a sonnet was ever heard from one end of it to the other; perhaps the most spirited thing was some Carthaginian glee, from a soldier in the camp of Hannibal. Nature seems to contain in her breast the same milk for all, but feeding one for one aptitude, another for another; and, as if she would teach him a lesson as soon as he I could look about him, she has placed the poet where the air is unladen with the exhalations of luxuriance. after Petrarca. In my delight to listen to you so long an absence, I have been too unwary; and you have been speaking too much for one infirm. Greatly am I to blame, not to have moderated my pleasure and your vivacity. You must rest now: to-morrow we will renew our conversation. Boccaccio. God bless thee, Francesco! I shall be talking with thee all night in my slumbers. Never have I seen thee with such pleasure as today, excepting when I was deemed worthy by our fellow-citizens of bearing to thee, and of placing within this dear hand of thine, the sentence of recall from banishment, and when my tears streamed over the ordinance as I read it, whereby thy paternal lands were redeemed from the public treasury. Again God bless thee! Those tears were not quite exhausted: take the last of them. SECOND DAY'S INTERVIEW. Petrarca. How have you slept, Giovanni? Boccaccio. Pleasantly, soundly, and quite long enough. You too methinks have enjoyed the benefit of riding; for you either slept well or began late. Do you rise in general three hours after the sun? Petrarca. No indeed. Boccaccio. As for me, since you would not indulge me with your company an hour ago, I could do nothing more delightful than to look over some of your old letters. Petrarca. Ours are commemorative of no reproaches, and laden with no regrets. Far from us With drooping wing the spell-bound spirit moves O'er flickering friendships and extinguisht loves. Boccaccio. Ay, but as I want no record of your kindness now you are with me, I have been looking over those to other persons, on past occasions. In the latin one to the tribune, whom the people at Rome usually call Rienzi, I find you address him by the denomination of Nicolaus Laurentii. Is this the right one? Petrarca. As we Florentines are fond of omitting the first syllable in proper names, calling Luigi Gigi, Giovanni Nanni, Francesco Cecco, in like manner at Rome they say Renzi for Lorenzi, and by another corruption it has been pronounced and written Rienzi. Believe me, I should never have ventured to address the personage who held and supported the highest dignity on earth, until I had ascertained his appellation: for nobody ever quite forgave, unless in the low and ignorant, a wrong pronunciation of his name; the humblest being of opinion that they have one of their own, and one both worth having and worth knowing. Even dogs, they observe, are not miscalled. It would have been as latin in sound, if not in structure, to write Rientius as Laurentius: but it would certainly have been offensive to a dignitary of his station, as being founded on a sportive and somewhat childish familiarity. Boccaccio. Ah Francesco! we were a good deal younger in those days; and hopes sprang up before us like mushrooms: the sun produced them, the shade produced them, every hill, every valley, every busy and every idle hour. Petrarca. The season of hope precedes but little the season of disappointment. Where the ground is unprepared, what harvest can be expected? Men bear wrongs more easily than irritations; and the Romans, who had sunk under worse degradation than any other people on record, rose up against the deliverer who ceased to consult their ignorance. I speak advisedly and without rhetoric on the foul depths of their debasement. The Jews, led captive into Egypt and into Babylon, were left as little corrupted as they were found; and per haps some of their vices were corrected by the labours that were imposed on them. But the subjugation of the Romans was effected by the depra vation of their morals, which the priesthood took away, giving them ceremonies and promises instead. God had indulged them in the exercise of power: first the kings abused it, then the consuls, then the tribunes. One only magistrate was remaining who never had violated it, farther than in petty frauds and fallacies suited to the occasion, not having at present more within his reach. It was now his turn to exercise his functions, and no less grievously and despotically than the preceding had done. For this purpose the Pontifex Maximus needed some slight alterations in the popular belief; and he collected them from that Pantheon which Roman policy had enlarged at every conquest. The priests of Isis had acquired the highest influence in the city: those of Jupiter were jealous that foreign gods should become more than supplementary and subordinate: but as the women in general leaned toward Isis, it was in vain to contest the point, and prudent to adopt a little at a time from the discipline of the shaven brotherhood. The names and titles of the ancient gods had received many additions, and they were often asked which they liked best. Different ones were now given them; and gradually, here and there, the older dropped into desuetude. Then arose the star in the east; and all was manifested. Boccaccio. Ay, ay, but the second company of shepherds sang to a different tune from the first, and put them out. Trumpeters ran in among them, horses neighed, tents waved their pennons, and commanders of armies sought to raise themselves to supreme authority, some by leading the faction of the ancient faith, and some by supporting the recenter. At last the priesthood succeeded to the power of the pretorian guard, and elected, or procured the election of, an emperor. Every man who loved peace and quiet took refuge in a sanctuary, now so efficient to protect him; and nearly all who had attained a preponderance in wisdom and erudition, brought them to bear against the worn-out and tottering institutions, and finally to raise up the coping-stone of an edifice which overtopped them all. Petrarca. At present we fly to princes as we fly to caves and arches, and other things of the mere earth, for shelter and protection. Boccaccio. And when they afford it at all, they afford it with as little care and knowledge. Like Egyptian embalmers, they cast aside the brains as useless or worse, but carefully swathe up all that is viler and heavier, and place it in their painted catacombs. Petrarca. What Dante saw in his day, we see in ours. The danger is, lest first the wiser, and 1 |