brought him into touch with libraries and influential men.

The ruin of Italy and Rome, caused in great measure by the absence of
the Popes during their residence at Avignon, roused all the patriotic
instincts of Petrarch, and urged him to strive with all his might for
the restoration of the ancient glory of his country. Hence in his
politics he was strongly nationalist, and hence, too, he threw the
whole weight of his influence on the side of Cola di Rienzi, when in
1347 the latter proclaimed from the Capitol the establishment of the
Roman Republic. Nor did he hesitate to attack the Popes, to whom he
was indebted so deeply, for their neglect of Rome and the Papal
States, as well as for the evils which he thought had fallen upon
Italy owing to the withdrawal of the Popes to Avignon. He himself
strove to awaken in the minds of his countrymen memories of the past
by forming collections of old Roman coins, by restoring or protecting
wherever possible the Pagan monuments, and by searching after and
copying manuscripts of the classical writers. In poetry, Virgil was
his favourite guide. As a rule he wrote in Italian, but his writings
were saturated with the spirit of the early Pagan authors; while in
his pursuit of glory and his love for natural, sensible beauty, he
manifested tendencies opposed directly to the self-restraint,
symbolism, and purity of the Middle Ages. His longest poem is
/Africa/, devoted to a rehearsal of the glories of ancient Rome and
breathing a spirit of patriotism and zeal for a long lost culture, but
it is rather for his love songs, the /canzoni/, that he is best
remembered.

Petrarch, though a Humanist,[4] was no enemy of the Christian
religion, nor did he imagine for a moment that the study of the Pagan
classics could prove dangerous in the least degree to revealed