PETRARCH THE CRITIC AND READER 



Laura, both that soft file and the rhymes were lacking; 

 if Laura had lived, now that he is a skilled poet with a 

 mature style, he would have shattered rocks and made 

 them weep with his sweetness. In spite of this incon- 

 sistency, it would appear from both passages that 

 Petrarch, in the latter part of his life, was really very 

 much interested in the vernacular. 



But, however this may be, did he really come gradu- 

 ally to accept Dante's point of view ? I do not think 

 so. If, as he said, his largest audience was made up of 

 lovers of his Itahan verse, he loved praise too much not 

 to write for this public; and, writing, how could this 

 lover of style do anything but polish his works to the 

 very best of his ability ? Had he been as clairvoyant, 

 as prophetic, as is Dante in the Divine Comedy, he 

 would have seen that he spoke more truly than he in 

 fact realized, when he said: "From me came words 

 which I hope will make me immortal." His work as 

 pohsher of the language does indeed make him the first 

 truly modern Italian writer; for Dante, from the stand- 

 point of present usage, is somewhat archaic. That was 

 one great feat which Petrarch accompHshed, perhaps 

 unwittingly. Now, Petrarch tells us that he had thought 

 of writing in the vernacular principally because it was a 

 new medium, not as yet perfected, while Latin — the 

 nobler language — had been so polished that no one 

 could hope to rival the writers of antiquity. At the 

 same time, a reason not unlike this must have led him 

 to write in Latin, even though, more than he perhaps 



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