he may possibly have encountered Chaucer. Boccaccio followed him with respectful homage, and almost his last literary labour was the Latin translation of the Florentine's tale of Patient Griselda, The last four years of his life, though with many intervals of public business, were chiefly spent in his retirement at Arquá, a village in the Euganean Hills, where death overtook him as he bent over a book, July 20, 1374. He had virtually finished the Trionfi about three months previously.
We have devoted more space to the biography of Petrarch than to that of Dante, because, although Dante towers above him as a poet, Petrarch is the more important figure in Italian literary history. Dante stands alone: venerated as he was by his countrymen, and not wholly destitute of imitators, he yet founded no school, and his influence on the development of the Italian intellect is slight in comparison with Petrarch's. Together with the great schoolman who quitted the world as he entered it, he sums up the Middle Age, which in him and Aquinas attains its highest development. Petrarch, on the other hand, is the representative Italian. He does not, like Dante, deliver, but is himself a prophecy: the future of Italian culture is prefigured in him. He was also the first to bestow on Italy an unquestioned supremacy in the world of literature, and was the earliest restorer of the republic of letters, a conception extinct in the ages of barbarism. In this restoration, transcending the limits of his own country, his Latin writings were necessarily more influential than his Italian,[1] and although they do not properly belong to
- ↑ "It is pleasing," says Coleridge, in a note to his little-known Maximian, "to contemplate in this illustrious man at once the benefactor of his own times
