Part I - The Humanists

Summary

Petrarch, b. 1304. d. 1374

It was at Avignon, in the early part of the fourteenth century, that a father and his son might one day have been seen standing by a fire into which the former was thrusting books. Had the volumes represented the literature of some condemned heresy, and had the son, the guilty and obstinate student of their contents, been destined to perish martyrwise in the same flames, he could hardly have exhibited more emotion. The father half relents as he witnesses his sorrow, and rescuing two of the volumes hands them to the lad. ‘Take this,’ he says, as he hands him back a Virgil, ‘as a rare amusement of your leisure hours, and this’ (the Rhetoric of Cicero), ‘as something to aid you in your real work.’ It was an experience of a kind far from uncommon in the history of early genius,—a total inability on the part of the well-meaning but mediocre parent to recognise or to sympathise with the as yet undeveloped genius of its own offspring. The worldly prudence of Francesco di Petracco designed that his son should gain his livelihood as a professor of civil law; while the ardent intellect of the youthful Francesco was already being attracted, as by some magnetic power, to the neglected and almost forgotten literature of antiquity.