make a trumpet.

_Petrarca._ I wish Alighieri had blown his on nobler occasions.

_Boccaccio._ We may rightly wish it: but, in regretting what he
wanted, let us acknowledge what he had: and never forget (which we
omitted to mention) that he borrowed less from his predecessors than
any of the Roman poets from theirs. Reasonably may it be expected that
almost all who follow will be greatly more indebted to antiquity, to
whose stores we, every year, are making some addition.

_Petrarca._ It can be held no flaw in the title-deeds of genius, if
the same thoughts reappear as have been exhibited long ago. The
indisputable sign of defect should be looked for in the proportion
they bear to the unquestionably original. There are ideas which
necessarily must occur to minds of the like magnitude and materials,
aspect and temperature. When two ages are in the same phasis, they
will excite the same humours, and produce the same coincidences and
combinations. In addition to which, a great poet may really borrow: he
may even condescend to an obligation at the hand of an equal or
inferior: but he forfeits his title if he borrows more than the amount
of his own possessions. The nightingale himself takes somewhat of his
song from birds less glorified: and the lark, having beaten with her
wing the very gates of heaven, cools her breast among the grass. The
lowlier of intellect may lay out a table in their field, at which
table the highest one shall sometimes be disposed to partake: want
does not compel him. Imitation, as we call it, is often weakness, but
it likewise is often sympathy.

_Boccaccio._ Our poet was seldom accessible in this quarter. Invective
picks up the first stone on the wayside, and wants leisure to consult
a forerunner.

_Petrarca._ Dante (original enough everywhere) is coarse and clumsy in
this career. Vengeance has nothing to do with comedy, nor properly
with satire. The satirist who told us that Indignation made his verses
for him, might have been told in return that she excluded him thereby
from the first class, and thrust him among the rhetoricians and
declaimers. Lucretius, in his vituperation, is graver and more
dignified than Alighieri. Painful; to see how tolerant is the atheist,
how intolerant the Catholic: how anxiously the one removes from among
the sufferings of Mortality, her last and heaviest, the fear of a
vindictive Fury pursuing her shadow across rivers of fire and tears;
how laboriously the other