ssic learning
which at this time began in Italy.

Petrarch, who lives in the memory of most people nowadays chiefly as a
great Italian poet, owed his fame among his contemporaries far rather to
the fact that he was a kind of living representative of antiquity, that
he imitated all styles of Latin poetry, endeavored by his voluminous
historical and philosophical writings not to supplant, but to make
known, the works of the ancients, and wrote letters that, as treatises
on matters of antiquarian interest, obtained a reputation which to us is
unintelligible, but which was natural enough in an age without
handbooks. Petrarch himself trusted and hoped that his Latin writings
would bring him fame with his contemporaries and with posterity, and
thought so little of his Italian poems that, as he often tells us, he
would gladly have destroyed them if he could have succeeded thereby in
blotting them out from the memory of men.

It was the same with Boccaccio. For two centuries, when but little was
known of the _Decameron_ north of the Alps, he was famous all over
Europe simply on account of his Latin compilations on mythology,
geography, and biography. One of these, _de Genealogia Deorum_, contains
in the fourteenth and fifteenth books a remarkable appendix, in which he
discusses the position of the then youthful humanism with regard to the
age. We must not be misled by his exclusive references to _poesia_, as
closer observation shows that he means thereby the whole mental activity
of the poet-scholars. This it is whose enemies he so vigorously
combats--the frivolous ignoramuses who have no soul for anything but
debauchery; the sophistical theologian to whom Helicon, the Castalian
fountain, and the grove of Apollo were foolishness; the greedy lawyers,
to whom poetry was a superfluity, since no money was to be made by it;
finally the mendicant friars, described periphrastically, but clearly
enough, who made free with their charges of paganism and immorality.
Then follow the defence of poetry, the proof that the poetry of the
ancients and of their modern followers contains nothing mendacious, the
praise of it, and especially of the deeper and allegorical meanings
which we must always attribute to it, and of that calculated obscurity
which is intended to repel the dull minds of the ignorant.

And finally, with a clear reference to his own scholarly work, the
writer justifies the new relation in which his age stood to paganism.