all respects different. The consequence is, that English
historical pictures are poems on canvas; while Italian poems are
pictures painted to the mind by means of words. Of this national
characteristic the writings of Petrarch are almost totally destitute.
His sonnets indeed, from their subject and nature, and his Latin Poems,
from the restraints which always shackle one who writes in a dead
language, cannot fairly be received in evidence. But his Triumphs
absolutely required the exercise of this talent, and exhibit no
indications of it.

Genius, however, he certainly possessed, and genius of a high order. His
ardent, tender, and magnificent turn of thought, his brilliant fancy,
his command of expression, at once forcible and elegant, must be
acknowledged. Nature meant him for the prince of lyric writers. But by
one fatal present she deprived her other gifts of half their value. He
would have been a much greater poet had he been a less clever man. His
ingenuity was the bane of his mind. He abandoned the noble and natural
style, in which he might have excelled, for the conceits which he
produced with a facility at once admirable and disgusting. His muse,
like the Roman lady in Livy, was tempted by gaudy ornaments to betray
the fastnesses of her strength, and, like her, was crushed beneath the
glittering bribes which had seduced her.

The paucity of his thoughts is very remarkable. It is impossible to look
without amazement on a mind so fertile in combinations, yet so barren
of images. His amatory poetry is wholly made up of a very few topics,
disposed in so many orders, and exhibited in so many lights, that it
reminds us of those arithmetical problems about permutations, which so
much astonish the unlearned. The French cook, who boasted that he could
make fifteen different dishes out of a nettle-top, was not a greater
master of his art. The mind of Petrarch was a kaleidoscope. At every
turn it presents us with new forms, always fantastic, occasionally
beautiful; and we can scarcely believe that all these varieties have
been produced by the same worthless fragments of glass. The sameness of
his images is, indeed, in some degree, to be attributed to the sameness
of his subject. It would be unreasonable to expect perpetual variety
from so many hundred compositions, all of the same length, all in
the same measure, and all addressed to the same insipid and heartless
coquette. I cannot but suspect also that the perverted tast