[184] Tiraboschi, v. 20, et post. Ten universities were founded in Italy during the fourteenth century, some of which did not last long. Rome and Fermo in 1303; Perugia in 1307; Treviso about 1320; Pisa in 1339; Pavia not long after; Florence in 1348; Siena in 1357; Lucca in 1369, and Ferrara in 1391. [185] Heeren, 270. [186] Et illa quidem ætate nihil intelligere poteram, sola me verborum dulcedo quædam et sonoritas detinebat ut quicquid aliud vel legerem vel audirem, raucum mihi dissonumque videretur. Epist. Seniles, lib. xv., apud de Sade, i. 36. [187] Ciceronianus. [188] Paulus Cortesius de hominibus doctis. I take the translations from Roscoe’s Lorenzo de’ Medici, c. vii. [189] Vergleichung der Sitten, iii. 126. Meiners has expatiated for fifty pages, pp. 94-147, on the merits of Petrarch in the restoration of classical literature; he seems unable to leave the subject. Heeren, though less diffuse, is not less panegyrical. De Sade’s three quartos are certainly a little tedious. |His Latin poetry.| 93. Petrarch was more proud of his Latin poem called Africa, the subject of which is the termination of the second Punic war, than of the sonnets and odes, which have made his name immortal, though they were not the chief sources of his immediate renown. It is indeed written with elaborate elegance, and perhaps superior to any preceding specimen of Latin versification in the middle ages, unless we should think Joseph Iscanus his equal. But it is more to be praised for taste than correctness; and though in the Basle edition of 1554, which I have used, the printer has been excessively negligent, there can be no doubt that the Latin poetry of Petrarch abounds with faults of metre. His eclogues, many of which are covert satires on the court of Avignon, appear to me more poetical than the Africa, and are sometimes very beautifully expressed. The eclogues of Boccaccio, though by no means indifferent, do not equal those of Petrarch. |John of Ravenna.| |Gasparin of Barziza.|