PETRARCH THE CRITIC AND READER 



knew, his desire was impossible of accomplishment. In 

 Itahan style, the rivalry of men like Cino and Dante 

 was formidable. But no one since the end of the Roman 

 Empire, in his opinion, had written really beautiful 

 Latin. If he was to be the first of the modern men, 

 what a feat it would be if he succeeded in meeting the 

 authors of antiquity upon their own ground, and, 

 working at a disadvantage, produced books which 

 would place him on an equal footing with them! He 

 made the attempt, and his success was great and legiti- 

 mate. This does not mean that he wrote perfect Latin. 

 It is easy enough for any Latin scholar of to-day to 

 expose his shortcomings. They were remarked and 

 commented upon almost immediately after his death. 

 It was well for him that he could not look forward a 

 century after his death, and see how severely posterity 

 would judge his darling achievements ! Possibly his pain 

 might have been alleviated by the spectacle of the fate 

 which awaited other Latinists, his detractors; for the 

 chief ambition of almost every hiunanist was to write 

 good Latin. As time went on, the standards were 

 raised — we may almost say, perverted; and inevitable 

 was the punishment of those who in writing had had 

 recourse to a medium not their own. If they escaped 

 the furious invectives of jealous contemporaries, they 

 encountered the indifference or the contempt of their 

 successors. Scholars of to-day, in their judgments of the 

 style of the humanists of the Renaissance, are more 

 lenient than were many of the humanists themselves, 



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