very fond. But it seems strange to me that any man who could submit to sit between four such very narrow walls, for the sake of the view he was enabled to peep at from them, should not have taken up his rest where the view was more really beautiful. My theory on the subject is, that he chose not this spot with any reference whatever to its beauty; but solely because it was likely to ensure him complete retirement whenever he wished for it. And this was a privilege likely enough to be prized by a poet and a writer in all ways so voluminous, whose life was one continued series of public business and dissipation, and who, in fact, chose it not for his home till age had already made tranquillity a blessing. ... Petrarch was already sixty years old when he first took up his abode at Arquâ.

Among the great men whose stand has been too firmly taken in the Temple of Fame for any one to dream of questioning his right of being there, I think Petrarch is, perhaps, the least popularly known and really appreciated beyond his own country. Difficult as Dante is acknowledged to be, even by his countrymen, I do truly believe, that where his enormous power has once made itself felt upon the mind, there is no degree of labour that has been considered too great as the price of understanding him fully. To any one who can read the language at all Tasso must be easy .... Ariosto but little less so; and the same may be

said of many other Italian writers. other Italian writers. But not of Petrarch; it requires study for a foreigner to understand him at all, and this study (popularly speaking) has been but rarely given. Where it has, Petrarch is not considered as a love-stricken sonnetteer; but as a poet equally sublime as an observer of nature and as a deep student of the feelings of the human heart.... unequalled, perhaps, in the felicitous delicacy of expression in which his images and meditations are clothed, and more capable of giving birth to the subtle thoughts and brilliant phantasies which it is natural to suppose are conceived in the minds of many. . . . but which die before they live, because too finely delicate to take such ordinary forms as ordinary men could give them: . . . . such thoughts as these Petrarch could better clothe in words than any other with whose writings I am conversant.

How often have I heard, how often have we all heard very clever people say, that they "could not read Petrarch:" not meaning, however, to allude to the difficulties of his style, but to what they are pleased to call the insipid sameness of his compositions. . . . . I remember, many years ago, being found by really a very clever man reading Petrarch, .... and in those days I read him studiously.... He expressed something like wonder that I could so employ myself. . . . I quite forget what I said in return, or how the conversation proceeded on either side; but I remember the rare ingenuousness with

which he said at the conclusion of it, "I believe you have the advantage of knowing better what we are talking about than I do. . . . I really believe you have read Petrarch, which I confess I never did."... How many of those who pass over the mention of his name with a shrug, and with as large an ablution from Lethe as it is in their power to throw upon it, might say the same with equal truth, if they had but equal sincerity!

*

I was quite determined not to leave the spot where Petrarch had lived and wrote, had died and was buried, without some relic. . . . . But it was not so easy to find it as to obtain my bit of brick from the prison of Tasso. . . . . There we found a friendly little hammer ready at hand to help the mutilating but sentimental process; but at Arquâ every floor had been scrupulously cleaned of every possible fragment which had fallen from the walls. In the little closet I industriously sought to find something that I could bring away with me; but this activity of the collective organ was wholly in vain. Unless I had desperately scratched the whitewash from the walls with my bare nails I could have got nothing. It was to no purpose, either, that I looked out of the little square window into the garden below in the hope of finding some leaf that I might pluck in token that the pilgrimage had been made.... for though some straggling pomegranate-trees, laden with their splendid fruit, were

at no great distance, they were beyond the reach of my hand. In the court before the door of entrance, however, I had better fortune, for I had the good luck to spy the neglected boughs of a sunken passion-flower trailing its still luxuriant honours in the dust. It grew in the most remote corner of the court, and I had to make my way over much rubbish, but I succeeded in plucking half a dozen leaves, which will hold an honoured place in my museum. Query, Is the passion-flower a plant that can reproduce itself for a period of between four and five hundred years? . . . . I hope so.... for then, I may have the satisfaction of believing that the passion-flower of Petrarch (horticulturally speaking) is my passion-flower too.

We found, as is usual in all spots sacred to sentimental recollections, a huge album filled with miniature morsels of the lights and shades of human intellect. We gave not much time to the examination of it.... which would indeed have been but an injudicious expenditure of the precious material.... for the volume, such as it is, with all the littleness and positive nothingness of most of its pages, has been printed. One trifling proof this, amongst a thousand great ones, of the passionate reverence in which the Italians hold everything in any way connected with their great men. This feeling seems almost equally strong in the breast of the prince and the peasant, of the scholar in his closet and the enthusiastic reciter of verses

58

ITALIANS AND FRENCH CONTRASTED.

in a booth; and it is a fact which, if fully received, as it may very safely be, will convey a more distinctive and a more true idea of the genuine Italian character, than any other trait, perhaps, that could be mentioned.

Of all the nations with which I have yet made acquaintance the Italians and the French appear to me to be the most strikingly contrasted in all things; . . . . both, for instance, have strong feelings of attachment to their country; but in France this shows itself much in the manner that an Etonian or a Westminster might display his love for "our fellows, who are the finest fellows in the world"

while in Italy it rather takes the solemn tone of a devoted son, who clings with holy pride to the noble qualities of his father, and feeds what vanity he has from that source, and not from the oil of gladness extracted by eternal approbation of himself.

Lord Byron's name is among those we found in the album at Arquâ.

Delightedly as I follow that true poet, Milnes, in most of his thoughts and fancies, I heeded not his saying in the lines penned here. . . . and penned evidently with deep poetic feeling

"They say, thy tomb lies there below,

What want I with the marble show?
I am content I will not go."

I could not be content, while anything connect