PETRARCH THE CRITIC AND READER 



can appreciate what is properly called literature. They 

 come from all professions, trades, and grades of society. 

 This is a change which, strangely enough, does not 

 always appeal to the author, in spite of his desire for 

 universality. Dante proposes to write his Commentary 

 in Italian, to make it accessible to his own countrjnnen, 

 and not to the paUid Latinate student of any and every 

 nationality — Italian, German, French, English. But 

 he writes for the Italian of noble heart, for the moral and 

 intellectual aristocracy of the dolce stil nuovo. Well, 

 Petrarch carries this feeling to a greater extreme. He 

 hates hoi polloi as much as Horace does, and expresses 

 his feelings even more frequently and more bitterly. 

 In a poem he describes the crowd as ^' hateful and 

 hostile to me"; in a Latin letter (Sen., viii, 7) he 

 declares that no beast is more tiresome to him than the 

 crowd. Referring to Dante, he says {Fam., xxi, 15): 

 " Who, indeed, could fill me with envy, me who do not 

 envy Virgil, unless perchance I should be envious of the 

 hoarse applause which our poet enjoys from the tavern- 

 keepers, fullers, butchers, and others of that class who 

 dishonor those they would praise ? But, far from 

 deserving such popular recognition, I congratulate 

 myself, on the contrary, that along with Virgil and 

 Homer I am free from it, inasmuch as I fully realize 

 how little the plaudits of the unschooled multitude 

 weigh with scholars.'' 



It seems extraordinary that such coarse people 

 should have been familiar with Dante; but in that age, 



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