which are, "Adieu, my friends! adieu my correspondence." Soon afterward he was found dead in his library, with his arm leaning on a book. In the whole of this composition, what a carefulness and solicitude to say everything that could gratify his friend; with what ingenuity are those faults not palliated but excused (his own expression) which must nevertheless have appeared very grievous ones to the purity of Petrarca.

err at all, they would openly avow a disparaging Here was the termination of Petrarca's literary opinion. This baseness was reserved for days life: he closed it with the last words of this letter; when the study opens into the market-place, when letters are commodities, and authors chapmen. Yet even upon their stalls, where an antique vase would stand little chance with a noticeable piece of blue-and-white crockery, and shepherds and sailors and sunflowers in its circumference, it might be heartily and honestly derided; but less probably by the fellow-villager of the vendor, with whom he had been playing at quoits every day of his life. When an ill-natured story is once launched upon the world, there are many who are careful that it shall not soon founder. Thus the idle and inconsiderate rumour, which has floated through ages, about the mutual jealousy of Boccaccio and Petrarca, finds at this day a mooring in all quarters. Never were two men so perfectly formed for friendship; never were two who fulfilled so completely that happy destination. True it is, the studious and exact Petrarca had not elaborated so entirely to his own satisfaction his poem, Africa, as to submit it yet to the inspection of Boccaccio, to whom unquestionably he would have been delighted to show it the moment he had finished it. He died, and left it incomplete. We have, it must be acknowledged, the authority of Petrarca himself, that he never had read the Decameron through, even to the last year of his life, when he had been intimate with Boccaccio four-and-twenty. How easy would it have been for him to dissemble this fact! how certainly would any man have dissembled it who doubted of his own heart or of his friend's! I must request the liberty of adducing his whole letter, as already translated.

"I have only run over your Decameron, and therefore I am not capable of forming a true judgment of its merit: but upon the whole it has given me a great deal of pleasure. The freedoms in it are excusable; from having been written in youth, from the subjects it treats of, and from the persons for whom it was designed. Among a great number of gay and witty jokes, there are however many grave and serious sentiments. I did as most people do: I paid most attention to the beginning and the end. Your description of the people in the Plague is very true and pathetic and the touching story of Griseldis has been ever since laid up in my memory, that I may relate it in my conversations with my friends. A friend of mine at Padua, a man of wit and knowledge, undertook to read it aloud; but he had scarcely got through half of it, when his tears prevented him going on. He attempted it a second time; but his sobs and sighs obliged him to desist. Another of my friends determined on the same venture; and, having read it from beginning to end, without the least alteration of voice or gesture, he said, on returning the book,

"It must be owned this is an affecting history, and I should have wept could I have believed it true; but there never was and never will be a woman like Griseldis."'"

But why did not Boccaccio send him his Decameron long before? Because there never was a more perfect gentleman, a man more fearful of giving offence, a man more sensitive to the delicacy of friendship, or more deferential to sanctity of character. He knew that the lover of Laura could not amuse his hours with mischievous or idle passions; he knew that he rose at midnight to repeat his matins, and never intermitted them. On what succeeding hour could he venture to seize? with what countenance could he charge it with the levities of the world? Perhaps the Recluse of Arqua, the visitor of old Certaldo, read at last the Decameron, only that he might be able the better to defend it. And how admirably has the final stroke of his indefatigable pen effected the purpose! Is this the jealous rival? Boccaccio received the last testimony of unaltered friendship in the month of October, 1373, a few days after the writer's death. December was not over when they met in heaven and never were two gentler spirits united there.

:

The character of Petrarca shows itself in almost every one of his various works. Unsuspicious, generous, ardent in study, in liberty, in love, with a self-complacence which in less men would be vanity, but arising in him from the general admiration of a noble presence, from his place in the interior of a heart which no other could approach or merit, and from the homage of all who held the principalities of Learning in every part of Europe.

Boccaccio is only reflected in full from a larger mass of compositions: yet one letter is quite sufficient to display the beauty and purity of his mind. It was written from Venice, when finding there not Petrarca whom he expected to find, but Petrarca's daughter, he describes to the father her modesty, grace, and cordiality in his reception. The imagination can form to itself nothing more lovely than this picture of the gentle Ermissenda: and Boccaccio's delicacy and gratitude are equally affecting. No wonder that Petrarca, in his will, bequeathed to his friend a sum the quintuple in amount of that which he bequeathed to his only brother, whom however he loved tenderly. Such had been, long before their acquaintance, the celebrity of Petrarca, such the honours conferred on him wherever he resided or appeared, that he never thought of equality or rivalry. And such was Boccaccio's reverential modesty, that, to the very close of his life, he called Petrarca his master. Immeasurable as was his own superiority, he no

and pained him to find himself preferred to his friend Petrarca; which indeed did not happen in his lifetime. So difficult is it to shake the tenure of long possession, or to believe that a living man is as valuable as an old statue, that for five hundred years together the critics held Virgil far above his obsequious but high-souled scholar, who now has at least the honour of standing alone, if not first. Milton and Homer may be placed together: on the continent Homer will be seen at the right hand; in England, Milton. Supreme, above all, immeasurably supreme, stands Shakspeare. I do not think Dante is any more the equal of Homer than Hercules is the equal of Apollo.

more thought himself the equal of Petrarca, than | Yet he believed his genius was immeasurably inDante (in whom the superiority was almost as ferior to Alighieri's; and it would have surprised great) thought himself Virgil's. These, I believe, are the only instances on record, where poets have been very tenaciously erroneous in the estimate of their own inferiority. The same observation can not be made so confidently on the decisions of contemporary critics. Indeed the balance in which works of the highest merit are weighed, vibrates long before it is finally adjusted. Even the most judicious men have formed injudicious opinions on the living and the recently deceased. Bacon and Hooker could not estimate Shakspeare, nor could Taylor and Barrow give Milton his just award. Cowley and Dryden were preferred to both, by a great majority of the learned. Many, although they believe they discover in a contemporary the qualities which elevate him above the rest, yet hesitate to acknowledge it; part, because they are fearful of censure for singularity; part, because they differ from him in politics or religion; and part, because they delight in hiding, like dogs and foxes, what they can at any time surreptitiously draw out for their sullen solitary repast. Such persons have little delight in the glory of our country, and would hear with disapprobation and moroseness it has produced four men so pre-eminently great, that no name, modern or ancient, excepting Homer, can stand very near the lowest these are, Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton, and Newton. Beneath the least of these (if anyone can tell which is least) are Dante and Aristoteles; who are unquestionably the next.* Out of Greece and England, Dante is the only man of the first order; such he is, with all his imperfections. Less ardent and energetic, but having no less at command the depths of thought and treasures of fancy, beyond him in variety, animation, and interest, beyond him in touches of nature and truth of character, is Boccaccio.

*We can speak only of those whose works are extant. Democritus and Anaxagoras were perhaps the greatest in discovery and invention.

Though Hercules may display more muscles, yet Apollo is the powerfuller without any display of them at all. Both together are just equivalent to Milton, shorn of his Sonnets, and of his Allegro and Penseroso; the most delightful of what (wanting a better name) we call lyrical poems. But in the contemplation of these prodigies we must not lose the company we entered with. Two contemporaries so powerful in interesting our best affections, as Giovanni and Francesco, never existed before or since. Petrarca was honoured and beloved by all conditions. He collated with the student and investigator, he planted with the husbandman, he was the counsellor of kings, the reprover of pontiffs, and the pacificator of nations. Boccaccio, who never had occasion to sigh for solitude, never sighed in it: there was his station, there his studies, there his happiness. In the vivacity and versatility of imagination, in the narrative, in the descriptive, in the playful, in the pathetic, the world never saw his equal, until the sunrise of our Shakspeare. Ariosto and Spenser may stand at no great distance from him in the shadowy and unsubstantial; but multiform Man was utterly unknown to them. The human heart, through all its foldings, vibrates to Boccaccio.

PERICLES AND ASPASIA.

PERICLES AND ASPASIA.