The Provencal poets were unquestionably the masters of the Florentine.

But they wrote in an age which could not appreciate their merits; and their imitator lived at the very period when composition in the vernacular language began to attract general attention.

Petrarch was in literature what a Valentine is in love.

The public preferred him, not because his merits were of a transcendent order, but because he was the first person whom they saw after they awoke from their long sleep.
Nor did Petrarch gain less by comparison with his immediate successors than with those who had preceded him.

Till more than a century after his death Italy produced no poet who could be compared to him.