Yet he is not an innovator; he does not inaugurate a new period of civilization. When he died he left no school of followers to carry on his work; he closed an epoch rather than opened one. It is true that for a hundred years or more men did imitate his Divine Comedy, but only in the outward form thereof, neglecting the poetical and æsthetical side, for which indeed Dante's contemporaries had little or no appreciation. It is only in the nineteenth century that Dante has become a power in Italy as voicing the universal desire for a united fatherland. The man who begins the mighty movement of the Renaissance, from which modern civilization takes its rise, is Francesco Petrarch. It is strange to think that he, so utterly different in mental attitude from Dante, was seventeen years old when the latter died. Yet the change which he represents was being slowly prepared by his predecessors. As we have seen, the study of the Latin language and authors had never fully died out in the Middle Ages; especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the classic writers--Vergil, Ovid, Statius, Livy--were read more and more, not, however, as examples of literary excellence, or as revealing the culture of antiquity, but as mines of practical wisdom, or as supplying quotations and examples for philosophical and theological discussions. The classic writers were made to fit in with medieval ways of thinking, and thus subordinated to the then existing state of civilization. With Petrarch, however, comes a complete change in all these respects. For him the classic writers were the _ne plus ultra_ of elegant form; he strove to penetrate into their spirit, to appreciate fully the peculiar excellence of each one; and above all to clear antiquity from its barnacle-like covering of medieval traditions and superstitions and to present Roman civilization, its learning, science, and art, as it was. To him the Middle Ages were a period of degradation, which had long hidden from view the past glories of Rome; and he now, for the first time in history, broke away from the present and immediate past, and turned his eyes back to ancient times. In so doing he founded the Renaissance in Italy, and laid down the lines along which all subsequent students of classical antiquity were to follow. In all these respects Petrarch is justly considered, not only the founder of modern classical scholarship, but the founder of modern civilization as well. He has been referred to by more than one historian as the Columbus of a new intellectual world. The life of Petrarch is intensely interesting, and, contrary to the case of Dante, the difficulty in giving an outline of it consists not in the absence of well-ascertained facts, but in an embarrassment of riches. For we know more of the details of Petrarch's life than we do of any other ancient writer.