This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907 edition. Excerpt: ... born at Arezzo a poet of Florentine parentage, whose works were to hold up to posterity one of the brightest mirrors of the Latin genius. Had his fourth and fifth centenaries been celebrated after our modern fashion, it is likely that the poet of Madonna Laura would alone have been the subject of all the speeches, poems, and commemorative inscriptions. It is due to the progress of scholarship in our time that Petrarch is honoured not only as a creator of Italian poetry, but as the apostle of the renaissance of letters throughout the whole of Europe, as the humanist and the scholar, as the poet and prose-writer, of the Latin tongue, which in his day was the universal speech of the cultivated world. It even seems as if by common consent the highest rank is accorded to the humanist in him, who revived once more the worship of the Ancient World. The work of modern criticism has resulted in vindicating such of I PETRARCH AS INITIATOR OF THE RENAISSANCE * * * HE Renaissance of letters in the fourteenth century had its source in the mind of a poet of genius living in the midst of a circle of friends, whom he had formed, taught, and inspired by his example, and fed by his thought. Never has the adtion of a single man proved more successful in preparing so powerful and fruitful a movement of the human intelledl. The various researches of the last century concerning Petrarch's life and works all point to this conclusion* Modern scholarship has thrust his national glory as an Italian poet into the background. It had long been dazzling, and its brilliance, refledted again and again in imitations of the Canzoniere, penetrated nearly all the other literatures of Europe. If Petrarch is still looked on to-day as the first of Italian lyric poets, no one...