interest. In one we see Francesco and his brother Gherardo wandering in
the realm of shepherds, and there exchanging their views concerning
religious verse. A group of three, standing apart from the rest, connect
themselves with the subject of the _Canzoniere_. The first describes the
ravages of the plague at Avignon; the second mourns over the death of
poetry in the person of Laura, who fell a victim on April 6, 1348; the
third is a dirge sung by the shepherdesses over her grave. One, lastly, a
neo-classic companion to Theocritus' tale of Galatea, recounts the poet's
unrequited homage to Daphne of the Laurels, thus again suggesting the
idealized source of Petrarch's inspiration. This poem is not only the gem
of the series, but embodies the mythopoeic spirit of classical imagination
in a manner unknown in the later days of the renaissance.

The, eclogues, twelve in number, appear to have been mostly composed
about the middle of the fourteenth century. In the days of Petrarch the
art of Latin verse was yet far from the perfection it attained in those of
Poliziano and Vida; it was a clumsy vehicle in comparison with the vulgar
tongue, which he affected to despise while setting therein the standard
for future ages. Nevertheless, Petrarch's Latin poems bear witness to the
natural genius for composition and expression to which we owe the
_Canzoniere_. The _editio princeps_ of the pastorals appeared in the form
of a beautifully printed folio at Cologne in 1473, ninety-nine years after
the poet's death. They were entitled _Eglogae_[26] (i.e. _aeglogae_), by
which, as Dr. Johnson remarked, Petrarch, finding no appropriate meaning
in the form _eclogae_, 'meant to express the talk of goatherds, though it
will only mean the talk of goats.'

No two men ever won for themselves more diverse literary reputations than
Petrarch and his friend Boccaccio. The Latin eclogue is one of their few
points of literary contact. The bucolic collections contain no less than