music of
his native language, his correctness of style, scarcely two or three
words that he has used having been rejected by later writers, his
exquisite elegance of diction, improved by the perpetual study of
Virgil; but, far above all, that tone of pure and melancholy sentiment
which has something in it unearthly, and forms a strong contrast to the
amatory poems of antiquity. Most of these are either licentious or
uninteresting; and those of Catullus, a man endowed by nature with deep
and serious sensibility, and a poet, in my opinion, of greater and more
varied genius than Petrarch, are contaminated above all the rest with
the most degrading grossness. Of this there is not a single instance in
the poet of Vaucluse; and his strains, diffused and admired as they have
been, may have conferred a benefit that criticism cannot estimate, in
giving elevation and refinement to the imaginations of youth. The great
defect of Petrarch was his want of strong original conception, which
prevented him from throwing off the affected and overstrained manner of
the Provencal troubadours, and of the earlier Italian poets. Among his
poems the Triumphs are perhaps superior to the Odes, as the latter are
to the Sonnets; and of the latter, those written subsequently to the
death of Laura are in general the best. But that constrained and
laborious measure cannot equal the graceful flow of the canzone, or the
vigorous compression of the terza rima. The Triumphs have also a claim
to superiority, as the only poetical composition of Petrarch that
extends to any considerable length. They are in some degree perhaps an
imitation of the dramatic Mysteries, and form at least the earliest
specimens of a kind of poetry not uncommon in later times, wherein real
and allegorical personages are intermingled in a masque or scenic
representation.[887]

[Sidenote: English language.]

None of the principal modern languages was so late in its formation, or
in its application to the purposes of literature, as the English. This
arose, as is well known, out of the Saxon branch of the Great Teutonic
stock spoken in England till after the Conquest. From this mother
dialect our English differs less in respect of etymology, than of
syntax, idiom, and flexion. In so gradual a transition as probably took
place, and one so sparingly marked by any existing evidence, we cannot
well assign a definite origin to our present language. The question of
identity is almost as p