and, after recounting the qualities of the poet, and acknowledging him
as guide, teacher, and lord, concludes:

Tanto è l' amor che a te m'avvince; tanto
È degli affetti miei donno il tuo canto--

S_o great the love that bindeth me to thee_;
S_o ruleth in my heart thy minstrelsy_.

But Petrarch is a torch-bearer so far in advance of his successors that
the illumination almost dies out again before they arrive. It was not
until well into the fifteenth century that the long and numerous line of
imitators, translators, adapters, parodists, commentators, editors, and
publishers began, which has continued to the present day. The
modern-Latin poets in all countries were the first, but their efforts
soon gave place to attempts in the vernacular tongues. The German Eduard
Stemplinger, in his _Life of the Horatian Lyric Since the Renaissance_,
published in 1906, knows 90 English renderings of the entire _Odes_ of
Horace, 70 German, 100 French, and 48 Italian. Some are in prose, some
even in dialect. The poet of Venusia is made a Burgundian, a Berliner,
and even a Platt-deutsch. All of these are attempts to transfuse Horace
into the veins of modern life, and are significant of their authors'
conviction as to the vitalizing power of the ancient poet. No author
from among the classics has been so frequently translated as Horace.

Petrarch, as we have seen, led the modern world by a century in the
appreciation of Horace. It was in 1470, ninety-six years after the
laureate's death, that Italy achieved the first printed edition of the
poet, which was also the first in the world. This was followed in 1474