PETRARCH THE MAN 



ancients cegritudoJ^ Petrarch: "The mere mention 

 of this malady causes me to shudder. '^ " Doubtless 

 because you have suffered from it a long time/' " Yes, 

 and while in all the other troubles which torment me 

 there is a certain sweetness (though it be false by 

 nature), in this sadness all is bitter and lugubrious. 

 The road is always open to despair, and everything 

 urges on the unhappy souls to suicide. Add that while 

 the other passions make frequent assaults upon me, 

 their duration is short; this scourge, however, takes 

 absolute possession of me and tortures me for entire 

 days and nights. During this time I take no pleasure 

 in the light. I do not live. I am, as it were, plunged in 

 the night of Tartarus, and I suffer the crudest of deaths. 

 The worst of my misery is that I actually feed upon 

 my suffering and my tears with a bitter pleasure, from 

 which I have no will to be torn away.'' 



Petrarch calls his trouble accidie. The definition 

 given in Webster is " sloth, torpor," and that was 

 Aristotle's idea; Dante, too, means sloth when he uses 

 the word in the Purgatorio. In the Inferno he means 

 something more. In Canto vii, Virgil utters the fol- 

 lowing words: " I would have thee believe for certain 

 that there are people under the water who sob and 

 make it bubble at the surface, as thy eye may tell thee, 

 whichever way it turn. Fixed in the shme, they say, 

 ^Sullen were we in the sweet air that is gladdened by the 

 sun, carrying sluggish smoke within our hearts; now 

 lie we sullen here in the black mire.' This hymn they 



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