all the
sonnets produce exactly the same effect on the mind of the reader. They
relate to all the various moods of a lover, from joy to despair:--yet
they are perused, as far as my experience and observation have gone,
with exactly the same feeling. The fact is, that in none of them are the
passion and the ingenuity mixed in just proportions. There is not enough
sentiment to dilute the condiments which are employed to season it. The
repast which he sets before us resembles the Spanish entertainment in
Dryden's "Mock Astrologer", at which the relish of all the dishes
and sauces was overpowered by the common flavour of spice.
Fish,--flesh,--fowl,--everything at table tasted of nothing but red
pepper.

The writings of Petrarch may indeed suffer undeservedly from one cause
to which I must allude. His imitators have so much familiarised the ear
of Italy and of Europe to the favourite topics of amorous flattery and
lamentation, that we can scarcely think them original when we find them
in the first author; and, even when our understandings have convinced us
that they were new to him, they are still old to us. This has been the
fate of many of the finest passages of the most eminent writers. It
is melancholy to trace a noble thought from stage to stage of its
profanation; to see it transferred from the first illustrious wearer to
his lacqueys, turned, and turned again, and at last hung on a scarecrow.
Petrarch has really suffered much from this cause. Yet that he should
have so suffered is a sufficient proof that his excellences were not of
the highest order. A line may be stolen; but the pervading spirit of a
great poet is not to be surreptitiously obtained by a plagiarist. The
continued imitation of twenty-five centuries has left Homer as it
found him. If every simile and every turn of Dante had been copied ten
thousand times, the Divine Comedy would have retained all its freshness.
It was easy for the porter in Farquhar to pass for Beau Clincher, by
borrowing his lace and his pulvilio. It would have been more difficult
to enact Sir Harry Wildair.

Before I quit this subject I must defend Petrarch from one accusation
which is in the present day frequently brought against him. His sonnets
are pronounced by a large sect of critics not to possess certain
qualities which they maintain to be indispensable to sonnets, with as
much confidence, and as much reason, as their prototypes of old insisted
on the unities of the drama. I