No More Learning

Francesco da Carrara loved and revered Petrarch, and used to go
frequently to see him without ceremony in his small mansion at Arqua.
The Prince one day complained to him that he had written for all the
world excepting himself. Petrarch thought long and seriously about what
he should compose that might please the Carrara; but the task was
embarrassing. To praise him directly might seem sycophantish and fulsome
to the Prince himself. To censure him would be still more indelicate. To
escape the difficulty, he projected a treatise on the best mode of
governing a State, and on the qualities required in the person who has
such a charge. This subject furnished occasion for giving indirect
praises, and, at the same time, for pointing out some defects which he
had remarked in his patron's government.

It cannot be denied that there are some excellent maxims respecting
government in this treatise, and that it was a laudable work for the
fourteenth century. But since that period the subject has been so often
discussed by minds of the first order, that we should look in vain into
Petrarch's Essay for any truths that have escaped their observation.
Nature offers herself in virgin beauty to the primitive poet. But
abstract truth comes not to the philosopher, till she has been tried by
the test of time.

After his return from Venice, Petrarch only languished. A low fever,
that undermined his constitution, left him but short intervals of
health, but made no change in his mode of life; he passed the greater
part of the day in reading or writing. It does not appear, however, that
he composed any work in the course of the year 1374. A few letters to
Boccaccio are all that can be traced to his pen during that period.
Their date is not marked in them, but they were certainly written
shortly before his death. None of them possess any particular interest,
excepting that always in which he mentions the Decameron.

It seems at first sight not a little astonishing that Petrarch, who had
been on terms of the strictest friendship with Boccaccio for twenty-four
years, should never till now have read his best work. Why did not
Boccaccio send him his Decameron long before? The solution of this
question must be made by ascribing the circumstance to the author's
sensitive respect for the austerely moral character of our poet.

It is not known by what accident the Decameron fell into Petrarch's
hands, during the heat of the war between Venice and Padua. Even then
his occupations did not permit him to peruse it thoroughly; he only
slightly ran through it, after which he says in his letter to Boccaccio,
"I have not read your book with sufficient attention to pronounce an
opinion upon it; but it has given me great pleasure. That which is too
free in the work is sufficiently excusable for the age at which you
wrote it, for its elegant language, for the levity of the subject, for
the class of readers to whom it is suited. Besides, in the midst of much
gay and playful matter, several grave and pious thoughts are to be
found. Like the rest of the world, I have been particularly struck by
the beginning and the end. The description which you give of the state
of our country during the plague, appeared to me most true and most
pathetic. The story which forms the conclusion made so vivid an
impression on me, that I wished to get it by heart, in order to repeat
it to some of my friends. "

Petrarch, perceiving that this touching story of Griseldis made an
impression on all the world, had an idea of translating it into Latin,
for those who knew not the vulgar tongue. The following anecdote
respecting it is told by Petrarch himself:--"One of his friends, a man
of knowledge and intellect, undertook to read it to a company; but he
had hardly got into the midst of it, when his tears would not permit him
to continue. Again he tried to resume the reading, but with no better
success. "

Another friend from Verona having heard what had befallen the Paduan,
wished to try the same experiment; he took up the composition, and read
it aloud from beginning to end without the smallest change of voice or
countenance, and said, in returning the book, "It must be owned that
this is a touching story, and I should have wept, also, if I believed it
to be true; but it is clearly a fable.