Few names in literature have been more widely and permanently distinguished than that of Petrarch. He was one of the great poets, and yet, except to those who are conversant with the Italian language, Petrarch is little more than a bright name.
Few have read his works. Doubtless, much of his fame is due, not to his writings, but to the fact that he was foremost among the great scholars who awakened the world to the knowledge and the literature of antiquity after the long sleep of the Middle Ages. He loved the Roman poets, orators, and philosophers—Virgil, Cicero, Seneca—with a perfect love.
He was indefatigable in his search for manuscripts, rummaging in libraries and archives and copying the texts with his own hand, and he discovered among other works the Institutes of Quintilian and some of the letters and orations of Cicero. Of his voluminous writings all except the Canzoniere or Song Book are in Latin, but although these constituted, during his lifetime, his chief title to distinction in scholarship and literature, they are now, with the exception of his personal letters, mostly forgotten.
It is those poems in the Italian tongue, which he at one time depreciated, that are still read and admired wherever that tongue is spoken. What is there in this collection of poems which gave to their author such widespread and lasting renown? Macaulay insists that their popularity is largely due to a curious tendency of human nature to enjoy in literature that egotism and revelation of personal characteristics and sufferings which we detest in conversation and of which the popularity of Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Lord Byron are such obvious illustrations.
The poems of Petrarch are little more than the expression of his feelings upon a subject in which the world is greatly interested—the love of a woman. He was, moreover, if we except Dante, the first distinguished writer of amatory verse in modern times, after woman had assumed that new claim to veneration and respect which had been allowed to her by Christianity, by chivalry, by the tourney, and by the courts of love.
