PETRARCH THE CRITIC AND READER 



drew especially upon that poet's erotic verse — which 

 is rather curious, for he objected to Ovid's sensuality, 

 and his pleasure in Catullus was marred by the presence 

 of the same defect. In his later years, faithful to the 

 allegorical tendency of his age and of his own mind, he 

 tried to read into Ovid a hidden moral meaning. After 

 Virgil, he makes most of Horace, and it is due to him 

 that all the works of Horace enjoy equal esteem; for 

 up to his day the odes, the lyric verse, and the epodes 

 were not so well liked as the epistles and the satires. 

 Persius, Juvenal, and the comic poets he admired, 

 principally, perhaps, because they offered such rich 

 storehouses of maxims. It is to his credit that, while 

 possessing little real affection for Lucan, he had the 

 sense to perceive that this author should be regarded 

 as a poet rather than as an historian. For the Christian 

 Latin poets he cared little, in spite of the fact that some 

 of them were devout churchmen. Their style, his criti- 

 cal taste told him, was inferior to that of the models he 

 used, and style, after all, was his principal criterion. 



As the absence of Lucretius constituted the great gap 

 in his collection of poets, the lack of Tacitus was the 

 principal lacuna in that of the prose writers. His ideal, 

 of course, was Cicero; and Petrarch was a better 

 critic of Cicero than of Virgil, for he not only appre- 

 ciated his style but correctly judged his character. In 

 regard to his acquaintance with Cicero's works, the 

 most interesting question always has been: did he or 

 did he not possess one entitled De Gloria ? He tells us 



