sentations of his person, and of inscriptions with his name
and arms. No expense had been spared in copying all his works as they
appeared. He was received by Capra with a princely magnificence; lodged
in a chamber hung with purple, and a splendid bed on which no one before
or after him was permitted to sleep. Goldsmiths, as we may judge by this
instance, were opulent persons; yet the friends of Petrarch dissuaded
him from the visit, as derogatory to his own elevated station. De Sade,
t. iii. p. 496.

[885] See the beautiful sonnet, Erano i capei d'oro all'aura sparsi. In
a famous passage of his Confessions, he says: Corpus illud egregium
morbis et crebris partubus exhaustum, multum pristini vigoris amisit.
Those who maintain the virginity of Laura are forced to read
_perturbationibus_, instead of _partubus_. Two manuscripts in the royal
library at Paris have the contraction _ptbus_, which leaves the matter
open to controversy. De Sade contends that "crebris" is less applicable
to "perturbationibus" than to "partubus." I do not know that there is
much in this; but I am clear that corpus exhaustum partubus is much the
more elegant Latin expression of the two.

[886] [Note III.]

[887] [I leave this as it stood. But my own taste has changed. I retract
altogether the preference here given to the Triumphs above the Canzoni,
and doubt whether the latter are superior to the Sonnets. This at least
is not the opinion of Italian critics, who ought to be the most
competent. 1848.]

[888] A sufficient extract from this work of Layamon has been published
by Mr. Ellis, in his Specimens of Early English Poetry, vol. i. p. 61.
This extract contains, he observes, no word which we are under the
necessity of ascribing to a French origin.

[Layamon, as is now supposed, wrote in the reign of John. See Sir
Frederick Madden's edition, and Mr. Wright's Biographia Literaria. The
best reason seems to be that he speaks of Eleanor, queen of Henry, as
then dead, which took place in 1204. But it requires a vast knowledge of
the language to find a date by the use or disuse of particular forms;
the idiom of one part of England not being similar to that of another in
grammatical flexions. See Quarterly Review for April 1848.

The entire work of Layamon contains a small number of words taken from
the French; about fifty in the original text, and about forty more in
that of a manuscript, perhaps half a century later, and very
considerably altered