inverse proportion to the narrowness of political power, was the influence of literature in this happy age; and Petrarca, the friend of Azze Corregio, Prince of Parma, of Luchini and of Galeazzo Visconti, Princes of Milan, and of Francis di Carrara, Prince of Padua, was more known and respected than all these petty sovereigns. That universal glory which his science had conferred on him, and which he rendered useful to letters, was frequently employed in a political career. No man of learning, no poet, has been charged with so many embassies to the great potentates; viz. the Emperor, the Pope, the King of France, the Senate of Venice, and all the princes of Italy; and, which is more extraordinary, Petrarca did not perform these functions in virtue of authority from a single state, but as belonging to the whole of Europe: he received his misson from his glory; and, when he treated with princes, he did it almost always as an arbitrator who looked for the suffrages of posterity.' Though the glory of Petrarca during his life-time was principally owing to the immensity of his literary researches, yet subsequent ages have considered his book of sonnets and canzoni, with more justice than the present author appears inclined to grant, as his best title to renown. We are well aware of the defects inseparable from the sonnet; which has been ingeniously called by an Italian the bed of Procrustes. To adapt themselves to fourteen lines, the inspiration and the thought must be exactly compassed and limited; if the thought be too long, it must be barbarously lopped; and, if too short, it must be miseraby stretched to fit this exact measure. The necessity of finding a number of words which rhyme together is possibly the most trifling restraint in a language abounding, like the Italian, in similar terminations: but still it is a restraint ; and the invariable regularity of the sonnet produces a monotony which is abhorrent from the more free and graceful compositions of the antients. The body of the sonnet contains a brilliant image; while the last verse is often merely an epigram, or some unexpected sentence, or some antithesis, dazzling and in bad taste, which seizes on the mind, and leaves the heart untouched. The Italians are possibly indebted to sonnets for their concetti; that is, the affectation of wit attached rather to words than to things; and Petrarca, more than all others, has set them this dangerous example. The above objections to the sonnet are partly suggested by our own feelings, and partly collected from the objections to this style of writing which lie dispersed in M. DE SISMONDI'S notice of Petrarca. While, however, we believe in them sincerely, we dissent from M. DE S. in our estimate of this great poet. We wish that, in addition to the many objections here brought against the sonnet, a thousand others could be found and that instead of being, difficult, the composition of a sonnet were impracticable. Then had the genius of this great and tender poet been exerted to the full display of his talents; and he who so gracefully presents himself in fetters might have been doubly graceful when left to his own native energies, uncramped by laws that frown and freeze, and would kill another aspirant. M. DE SISMONDI professes to be a stranger to the beauties of Petrarca; and this is an unfortunate confession from a writer on the progressive literatures of the South, where more than half is love, and love less graceful, less musical, with less of thought and of soul, than that of this great master. We agree with the critic that Petrarca is not to be translated; and that his beauties are not merely his own, but those of the language in which he wrote. A full, open, and harmonious dialect was necessary to the developement of his genius; and, perhaps, in defiance of what has been advanced, on the supposition that a wider latitude would have been more favourable to the exhibition of his powers, a nearer consideration of his beauties, in all their peculiarities, may convince us that the sonnet was a confinement wholesome to the poet who adopted it. The canzone at all events presented greater facilities; and the triumph of tender poesy is possibly the Chiare, fresche, e dolci acque of this impassioned writer. His strength and weakness both consisted in his love; a love attributing all excellence to the object that inspired it, and resembling that which the mystics feel and express for the Divinity; - which encircles his Laura, and every place that she frequented, with something of heaven from the recollections that they excite. The originals, whence the thought and turn of the following stanzas in the English octave line are taken, afford a striking illustration of the mystic purity and beauty with which his imagination painted her person and the place where she loitered. The readers of Petrarca will recognize the Valle che de lamenti sei piena, and the S'una fede amorosa, &c. of the Italian : Fair winding vale, and thou delicious stream, Enchanting birds, and beasts that haunt the plain, And smile, as in rebuke, upon my pain; In these dim eyes, in this distemper'd mind. And all that once I languish'd to behold, If ever to complain, to weep, to sigh, Feed on my wither'd frame, the guilt is thine, M. DE SISMONDI passes from Petrarca, in the natural order of his work, to Boccaccio, the friend of Petrarca; and who, although more known by his Decamerone than by his verses, has ever held a high rank among the poets of his country. Indeed, the evening-songs attached to each day's entertainment may be numbered with the most beautiful and enchanting productions of southern poetry. Possessed of all the graces of figure and of wit, and a follower of pleasure by profession, Boccaccio was passionately attached to Maria, a natural daughter of Robert, King of Naples; and, although this lady had been married eight years to a Neapolitan nobleman, the novelist did not scruple to celebrate her under the name of Fiametta. In his writings, we must not look for that purity and tenderness which distinguished the love of Petrarca for Laura. The Princess, who was the object of his admiration, had been educated in the most corrupt court of Italy: a worthy disciple of such a school, she had adopted all its tenets; and to her depraved and vitiated taste we must attribute the indecencies of her admirer. This at least is most consonant with our wishes and our feelings, when genius permits itself to scandalize as much as it delights and instructs mankind: but perhaps it would not be too much to confess that the natural bent of the poet's mind was too prone to these licentious pictures. The Decamerone is a collection of a hundred novels, ingeniously introduced as the pass-time and recreation of a select society of young ladies and gentlemen, who had fled from the city of Florence to avoid the contagion of a pestilence. The society was formed of ten persons, each of whom had imposed on himself the necessity of contributing to the common amusement by telling a story, during the ten days which made the appointed time of their retirement. The frame of the picture is death and desolation; and neither the plague of Thucydides nor that of Lucretius presents this scourge of man in colours more sombre or fearful, than those of this facetious writer: but, within a frame thus awful, are inclosed images of the most delightful, the most sportive, and unhappily of the most licentious attraction. The description of the smiling fields, the fresh banks, and the dark and shadowy walks in the vicinity of Florence, whither these joyous hermits had retired,of their promenades, their festivals, and their banquets, has afforded to the novelist a field for the display of all his riches; and the tales, which are varied with infinite art, both Ii 3 as as to subject and to style, from the most affecting to the most trifling, and, as we have said, unhappily to the most exceptionable, develope his whole talent in every branch of the happy art of narrative. The Decamerone, published in the fourteenth century, when its author had attained the age of thirty-nine, circulated freely in Italy, and was printed from the period of the invention of printing to the sixteenth century, when it was prohibited by the Council of Trent. At the solicitation of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, however, and after two curious negociations between that prince and Pius Vth and Sixtus Vth, the Decamerone, corrected and castrated, was republished in 1573 and in 1582. It is probable that the popular stories of the day furnished Boceaccio with many of his tales. We trace the origin of several in the old fabliaux of Norman birth, others in the Italian collection of the hundred antient novels, and others in an Indian romance, which had passed into all the languages of the East, and had been translated into Latin in the twelfth century under the title of Dolopathos, or the King and the Seven Wise Men. Invention in this species of literature is not less uncommon than in other branches: the same tales which Boccaccio has in part collected in the courts of princes, or in the societies of different cities in Italy, have been transfused from him into all the modern European languages; and, when versified by La Fontaine and Dryden, they have conferred the highest reputation on his successors. The Greeks of Byzantium had invented amorous romances : but, since they were unknown to the Latins, or nearly so, in the age of the Italian novelist, Boccaccio may be considered as the father of this interesting species of narrative. The romances of French chivalry recounted few but extraordinary or super-human adventures; this poet, on the contrary, in general rejects the marvellous with disdain, and derives his whole charm from the truth and probability of his scenes. His romance of Fiametta is usually ranked next to his Decamerone: but his first homage to the Princess Mary possesses, without all question, the most merit. The events of the romance have little variety, and the speeches are, in general, long, cold, and uninviting : but the passion of love is expressed with a fire, a languor, and a seriousness that no Italian writer has ever equalled. Naples is the scene; and, from many circumstances in the conduct of the plot, we have every reason to be persuaded that, as the Decamerone was written to amuse the Princess Mary with the love-adventures of others, so the Fiametta was intended to amuse the world, and perhaps the Princess herself, with a recital of her own gallantries. A scholastic style of reasoning, prolix and dull speeches, and a whimsical mixture of antient mythology with the Christian religion, are among the faults of the Fiametta. This young lady first meets Pamphilus at mass, and is induced to listen to his suit by an apparition of Venus; an error which was the result of ignorance in the authors of the Fabliaux, but which flowed, in the instance of Boccaccio, from his perpetual study and admiration of the classics. Besides his romances in prose, Boccaccio has left two heroic poems, the Theseid and Filosostrato, neither of which obtained any reputation in his own country: both are at present forgotten; and, were they not the first essays in the antient epic school which appeared in renovated Europe, and the first attempt of the rima ottava, which has since been appropriated exclusively to every Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese epopée, they would well deserve the oblivion into which they have fallen. Boccaccio was the inventor of this noble and simple stanza. The rima terza of Dante appeared to impose a restraint too fatiguing, and kept the attention too long and invariably in suspense. Every other form of versification was appropriate to lyric poesy; and the delicacy of the Italian ear revolts at verses unconnected by a regular and defined cadence. The strophe of Boccaccio is composed of six verses, with an interchange of two rhymes, thrice repeated, and concluded by a distich. The translation, which we have given in our notice of Petrarca, (p.484.) represents the same stanza in English. The Theseid was transferred into our language by Chaucer, the father of our versification: when this version became nearly unintelligible, Dryden modernized it, and his poem of Palamon and Arcite enjoys a considerable reputation; though the improbability of its situations, the inexplicable turn of its events, the incongruity of the passions which it delineates, and its long and fatiguing descriptions, render it equally dull to the English and the Italian reader. Boccaccio was the author also of other works: but, after his Decamerone, his principal claim to glory must rest (like that of Petrarca) on his indefatigable researches for the MSS. of antiquity. These perfect models of taste and genius were buried in the archives of a few convents, scattered at great distances, incorrect, and incomplete, without notes, punctuation, or any other aid devised by the superintendants of typography. An inconceivable exertion of reasoning was necessary to discover in a work of Cicero, for instance, which was without title or beginning, all that indicated the author, the period of history at which it had been written, and the circumstances which ought to decide its origin; to correct the errors of ignorant copyists; to discover the omissions, and to engraft Ii 4 certain |