NATIONAL 1'or.TRY. 



435 



Petrarch, ill the "Canzoni," has given us the most perfect type of the Italian 

 ode, and while he rises at times to the height of Pindar and Horace, his 

 poetical outbursts are tnnprml 1>\ an accent of sorrow and melancholy 

 peculiar to himself. He did not lack imitators, but none of them came up to 

 the original ; and his friend Boccaccio, who had perfected Italian prose, wrote 



Fig. 339. The Horse Pegasus. " Behold a Flying Horse, called Pegasus, and several Nobles, 

 some armed and some without arms, of all conditions, kings, princes, and others, which lift up 

 their hands to try and touch the said Horse, but ore not able to do so." Miniature from the 

 " Enseignemcnt de vraye Noblesse." Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century (No. 11,049). In 

 the Burgundy Library, Brussels. 



but a small number of sonnets, and his first Italian epode, the " Theseide," is 

 far inferior to his " Decamcrone." 



Almost at the same period, a Scotch poet, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, 

 composed an epic poem in the Scotch dialect upon the achievements of 

 Robert Bruce, the liberator of Scotland. Previously to this the first of the 



