Petrarch at the Banquet 77 



But there are other reasons which render an interview unUkely. 

 In the first place, Petrarch, journeying from Padua, whence he 



and compares with the greatest ever written. In it a certain French- 

 man tells his dreams to the multitude — the demands, (poscit; al. 

 possit) of Jealousy and of Love, how fire feeds the passions of the 

 young man, what sport is plied by the crone, with what arts of Venus 

 the mad lover arms himself against the plagues that stand at the door, 

 what are his distress and sorrow, what his rest knit up with labor, 

 what his alternations (reading vices) of laughter and lament, how 

 floods of tears bedew his infrequent joys. How could there be greater 

 scope for poetic eloquence? Yet the poet, in the very act of telling 

 his dream, is himself lost in a dream, and his waking can hardly be 

 distinguished from sleep. How much better did Virgil set forth the 

 passion of love in the death of Dido, and how superior are Catullus, 

 Ovid, and Propertius, not to speak of other Italians, ancient and 

 modern ! Nevertheless, since you are bound to have something in an 

 outlandish (peregrina) vernacular, do not despise this gift of mine, 

 since France and Paris proclaim it their best.' 

 Cf. Nolhac 2. 228; I. 165-172. 



The Httle book (libellus) must mean only Guillaume de Lorris' part, 

 one would think, for the following reasons: (i) the complete poem, a 

 manuscript of over 22,000 lines (in the whole of Petrarch's Italian verse 

 there are fewer than 10,000 lines, while his Latin epic, Africa, is now less 

 than one-fourth as long as the Roman, and, even had it been completed to 

 scale, would have been less than one-third as long), could hardly be 

 described as a little book; (2) Petrarch mentions one author (Gallus), 

 not two; (3) there is nothing in his description which cannot be accounted 

 for by Lorris' fragment, since the old woman, though her part is devel- 

 oped at much greater length by Jean de Meun, is introduced by Lorris 

 (ed. Michel, p. 130) ; (4) he would have been slow to despatch the work of 

 so immoral and indecent a poet as Jean de Meun (cf. Langlois, in Petit 

 de Julleville's Hist, de la Langue et de la Litt. Fr. 2. 149) to a friend, 

 since he calls Ovid's Art of Love an 'insane work, deserving to have 

 been the cause of his exile' (Nolhac 2. 179-180; Korting, p. 486) ; (5) 

 the allusion to the Roman in Petrarch's Trionfo delta Castitd is clearly 

 to the earlier part (Nolhac 2. 227-8). 



That Petrarch had no very high opinion of English scholarship in 1337 

 is clear from his statement {Fam. 3. i) that, being curious concerning the 

 location of Thule, he had asked Richard de Bury about it (this was at 

 Avignon, in 1330), who had promised to look the matter up in -his books 

 when he returned to England, but, though frequently reminded, had 

 never answered a word; 'ita,' adds Petrarch, 'mihi Tyle amicitia Britan- 

 nica nihil notior facta est.' A few years later, as he tells us in the 

 same letter, Gerald de Barri's book, The Wonders of Ireland, fell into his 

 hands, but the author, after citing the opinions of several earlier writers, 

 confesses that he thinks the island mythical, or that it is far away in the 



