PETRARCH THE AUTHOR 



in the third volume, and shall bestow upon them the 

 name of my elderly years." So there is a third collec- 

 tion, the Epistolarum de Rebus Senilihus Libri ocvi, or 

 Letters of Old Age, of which there is no good modem 

 Latin edition, and only one Italian translation, now out 

 of print. Finally, a collection which certainly deserves 

 a place by itself, since it is Petrarch's contribution (of 

 course not the only one) to the literature of invective, a 

 special humanistic genre and one vigorously cultivated. 

 The collection bears the name of Epistolce sine Tittdo, 

 These contain fierce attacks upon the abuses (not the 

 dogmas) of the Catholic church. To form such collec- 

 tions of letters, it was necessary that the author should 

 have kept copies, and the existence of these proves that 

 he regarded the letters as compositions of some literary 

 value, however sHghtingly he might speak of them, and 

 also, almost certainly, that he intended to put them to 

 some use. There was nothing strange or unusual in 

 such procedure, and these volumes justify Vossler's 

 words that " the prose letter is perhaps the most im- 

 portant creation of the Renaissance." 



Now, the literary preoccupation is unmistakable if 

 one only looks at the bulk of the letters composing the 

 last, or twenty-fourth, book of the Familiar es. They are 

 letters addressed to dead authors, a species of the genus 

 of the essay, cultivated with much success in our own 

 times by Andrew Lang. But these are not the only 

 essays : many of the letters are little diatribes, treatises, 

 exercises in description. Of course this is one very 



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