PETRARCH THE AUTHOR 



like the De Viris Illustribus, it is a glorification of 

 Roman history, of the valor and monuments of antiq- 

 uity. The most successful part of the poem is the 

 episode of Sophonisba and Masinissa, a story which 

 became popular to an extraordinary degree with the 

 Renaissance dramatists. 



Of considerable importance is another group of 

 poems, the Eclogues, for not even in antiquity was the 

 Pastoral so popular as it became in the Renaissance. 

 It went into an ecHpse during the Middle Ages, though 

 examples are not altogether wanting. Dante resusci- 

 tated it; and then came Petrarch with twelve eclogues 

 written during the years 1346-57. He was inspired to 

 write them by love of nature, by his affection for Vau- 

 cluse. This is what he says in his defence of Poetry, 

 contained in a letter to his brother Gherardo: " The 

 very nature of the region, the forest recesses to which the 

 coming of dawn made me wish to flee and there forget 

 my cares, and from which only the return of night 

 could bring me home, suggested that I sing in a wood- 

 land strain. Accordingly I began to compose a pas- 

 toral poem in twelve eclogues, a thing that I had long 

 had in mind.'' As both he and Gherardo figure in the 

 first one, he writes thus to his brother: " This poetry- 

 is of a kind that cannot be understood unless a key to it 

 is furnished by the person who constructed it. So, as I 

 would not have you weary yourself to no purpose, I 

 must give you a brief outline, first of what I say, then 

 of what I mean by it.'' I have quoted these two re- 



23 



