Not much need be said of Petrarch’s character, whether as poet, scholar, or man. As a poet he deserves to be numbered among the few who have attained absolute perfection within a certain sphere; to whom within these limits nothing can be added, though much may be taken away. The subtraction of the trivial or fantastic from Petrarch’s verse leaves, nevertheless, a mass of love-poetry transcending in amount no less than in loveliness all poetry of the same class from the pen of any other man. If immortality is deservedly awarded to a single masterpiece like the _Burial of Sir John Moore_ or the _Pervigilium Veneris_, it should not be difficult to estimate his claims whose similar masterpieces are counted by scores. Perhaps the greatest of his beauties is the complete naturalness of his ceaseless succession of thoughts transcendently exquisite. If Petrarch has not the thrilling note or transparent spirituality of Dante, his perfect form represents a higher stage of artistic development--too high, indeed, to be maintained by his successors. A just parallel might be drawn between the three great sonnet-writers of the Latin peoples, Dante, Petrarch, Camoens; the three orders of architecture, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian; and the three great ancient dramatists. It is noteworthy that Petrarch does not appear as the representative poet of the mediæval or of any other period. Horace and Ovid would have admired him as much as his contemporaries did, and he is as fresh and bright in the nineteenth as in the fourteenth century. Many have pursued him, none have overtaken him. His prose works, on the contrary, bear the stamp of their age, and exist for ours mainly as curiosities and documentary illustrations of bygone manners and ways of thinking. This was inevitable; he could not have been the literary sovereign of his age had he been very greatly in advance of it. He looked down upon it sufficiently to dislike it, as he tells us, and prepare a better. As a man he had shining virtues and few faults, except such as are almost inseparable from the characters of poets, orators, and lovers, and which men like Dante only avoid at the cost of less amiable failings. His nearest parallel is perhaps with Cicero, and would appear closer if Petrarch had, or Cicero had not, been called upon to take a highly responsible part in public affairs. Of Petrarch’s vast influence upon English poetry since the time of Wyatt and Surrey, who may be justly called his disciples, it is needless to say anything, except that it is even more to be traced in the general refinement of diction than by the imitation of particular passages.