PETRARCH THE MAN 



ideas and his work. So far as abundance of sources is 

 concerned, there should be no difficulty in arriving at a 

 correct appreciation of his character. The amount of 

 material that we can draw upon is really enormous, and 

 this material is of all kinds, directly or indirectly auto- 

 biographical. He wrote a short autobiographical 

 sketch. In his letters written during mature life, he 

 constantly refers back, in some detail, to events in his 

 youth. His Secretum is a fourteenth century contribu- 

 tion to the genre of the literary confession. His love 

 poetry, of course, is confessional as well. When one 

 becomes acquainted with him, there is a constant 

 temptation to feel that he never wrote a Une that was 

 not intended to be a presentation of self before the eyes 

 of a contemporary public. This is one of the things 

 which distinguish his display of individuality from that 

 of Dante. Like Horace, he is dehberately raising a 

 monument to himself, more durable than brass. He had 

 a perfect right to do this; but unfortunately an un- 

 pleasant impression is almost inevitably left upon the 

 reader by his intense self-consciousness. You too often 

 feel, while he is making his confidences, that he is re- 

 garding you out of the comer of his eye to see how you 

 take them. 



Again, the nature which he lays bare before you does 

 not at first seem to be essentially a very noble one. 

 Dante is far from perfect; at times he is harsh and vin- 

 dictive; yet he always compels respect. But in 

 Petrarch's case (and the same is true of Cicero, St. 



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