more profound, liberal, and elegant scholarship, and communicated
to his countrymen that enthusiasm for the literature, the
history, and the antiquities of Rome, which divided his own heart
with a frigid mistress and a more frigid Muse. Boccaccio turned
their attention to the more sublime and graceful models of
Greece.

From this time, the admiration of learning and genius became
almost an idolatry among the people of Italy. Kings and
republics, cardinals and doges, vied with each other in honouring
and flattering Petrarch. Embassies from rival States solicited
the honour of his instructions. His coronation agitated the Court
of Naples and the people of Rome as much as the most important
political transaction could have done. To collect books and
antiques, to found professorships, to patronise men of learning,
became almost universal fashions among the great. The spirit of
literary research allied itself to that of commercial enterprise.
Every place to which the merchant princes of Florence extended
their gigantic traffic, from the bazars of the Tigris to the
monasteries of the Clyde, was ransacked for medals and
manuscripts. Architecture, painting, and sculpture, were
munificently encouraged. Indeed it would be difficult to name an
Italian of eminence, during the period of which we speak, who,
whatever may have been his general character, did not at least
affect a love of letters and of the arts.

Knowledge and public prosperity continued to advance together.
Both attained their meridian in the age of Lorenzo the
Magnificent. We cannot refrain from quoting the splendid passage,
in which the Tuscan Thucydides describes the state of Italy at