This enthusiasm was felt by Petrarch, not only for distinguished men, but for everything that is great in nature, for religion, for philosophy, for patriotism, and for freedom. He was the friend and patron of the unfortunate Rienzi, who, in the fourteenth century, awakened for a moment the ancient spirit and fortunes of Rome. He appreciated the fine arts as well as poetry, and he contributed to make the Romans acquainted with the rich monuments of antiquity, as well as with the manuscripts which they possessed. His passions were tinctured with a sense of religion which induced him to worship all the glorious works of the Deity, with which the earth abounds; and he believed that, in the woman he loved, he saw the messenger of that heaven which thus revealed to him its beauty. He enabled his contemporaries to estimate the full value of the purity of a passion so modest and so religious as his own; while to his countrymen he gave a language worthy of rivalling those of Greece and Rome, with which, by his means, they had become familiar. Softening and ornamenting his own language by the adoption of proper rules, he suited it to the expression of every feeling, and changed, in some degree, its essence. He inspired his age with that enthusiastic love for the beauty, and that veneration for the study of antiquity, which gave it a new character, and which determined that of succeeding times. It was, it may be said, in the name of grateful Europe that Petrarch, on the 8th of April, 1341, was crowned by the senator of Rome, in the Capitol; and this triumph, the most glorious which was ever decreed to man, was not disproportioned to the authority which this great poet was destined to maintain over future ages.[e] EARLY ITALIAN PROSE Already, for half a century, Italian poetry had been cultivated with ardour and with success, and in Dante’s time there was scarcely a well-educated Florentine who could not at need rhyme a sonnet or write a short song in the vulgar tongue. It was not so easy to write in prose; for if the poet had a language and rules of style, there had not yet been a learned time for the prose writer; he had no fixed rules, the form in short which allows a writer to express his thought in the logical order necessary to convey all its shades of meaning, to show up its striking points, artistically to subordinate the less important or purely expletive parts. The poet, on the contrary, at his first attempt met with metrical forms, long adopted and practised in Provençal, a parent idiom, whose rules could, without any difficulty, be applied to Italian. He found moreover that the Provençal poetry, whose prosody he borrowed, had taken with slight differences the same subjects which he wished to sing in Italian; so that he found a poetical storehouse, if the expression may be allowed, of comparisons, epithets, connecting links, phrases, and permissible inversions.