h it
is certainly not an indispensable, trait of superior genius.

Every footstep of Laura's lover has been anxiously traced and recorded.
The house in which he lodged is shown in Venice. The inhabitants of
Arezzo, in order to decide the ancient controversy between their city
and the neighbouring Ancisa, where Petrarch was carried when seven
months old, and remained until his seventh year, have designated by a
long inscription the spot where their great fellow citizen was born. A
tablet has been raised to him at Parma, in the chapel of St. Agatha, at
the cathedral, because he was arch-deacon of that society, and was only
snatched from his intended sepulture in their church by a _foreign_
death. Another tablet, with a bust, has been erected to him at Pavia, on
account of his having passed the autumn of 1368 in that city, with his
son-in-law Brossano. The political condition which has for ages
precluded the Italians from the criticism of the living, has
concentrated their attention to the illustration of the dead.

10.

In face of all his foes, the Cruscan quire,
And Boileau, whose rash envy, etc.
Stanza xxxviii. lines 6 and 7.

Perhaps the couplet in which Boileau depreciates Tasso may serve as well
as any other specimen to justify the opinion given of the harmony of
French verse--

"A Malherbe, a Racan, prefere Theophile,
Et le clinquant du Tasse a tout l'or de Virgile."
_Sat_. ix. v. 176.

The biographer Serassi,[578] out of tenderness to the reputation either
of the Italian or the French poet, is eager to observe that the satirist
recanted or explained away this censure, and subsequently allowed the
author of the _Jerusalem_ to be "a genius sublime, vast, and happily
born for the higher flights of poetry." To this we will add, that the
recantation is far from satisfactory, when we examine the whole anecdote
as reported by Olivet.[579] The sentence pronounced against him by
Bouhours[580] is recorded only to the confusion of the critic, whose
_palinodia_ the Italian makes no effort to discover, and would not,
perhaps, accept. As to the opposition which the _Jerusalem_ encountered
from the Cruscan academy, who degraded Tasso from all competition with
Ariosto, below Bojardo and Pulci, the disgrace of such opposition must
also in some measure be laid to the charge of Alfonso,