His "Gazophylacium Naturæ et Artis" contains engravings descriptive of animals, plants, and fossils from various parts of the world. He also gave in Ray's History an account of the plants of China, Madras, and Africa. In 1709 he published a list of the plants found in the mountains about Geneva. His "Pterigraphia Americana" contains drawings of American ferns, as well as some of marine productions. He paid much attention to British plants, and published in parts an English herbal. He also printed catalogues of the plants of Etruria, Montpellier, Italy, and Guinea; medicinal plants of Peru; drawings of Egyptian plants; and pharmaceutical hortus siccus, and directions for drying plants. He contributed more than twenty papers to the Philosophical Transactions between 1697 and 1717. He adopted the view that the medicinal qualities of plants might be determined to a certain extent by their agreement in natural characters. Petiver also published books on shells, fossils, and minerals. A genus Petiveria was named after him by Plumier.—J. H. B.
PETOEFI, Sandor or Alexander, a Hungarian poet, was born on the 1st of January, 1823, at Felegyhaz in the county of Pesth. His father, a retired butcher, destined him for one of the learned professions, and sent him to a school at Selmecz. The boy, however, was stage-struck, neglected his studies for the theatre, and was expelled the school. For a time he lived a vagabond life, and was found by his father at Pesth performing the duties of a scene-shifter. Two years later he was again sent to school, but took the first opportunity of enlisting in the Austrian army. Ill health procured his discharge, and at the age of eighteen he tried learning once more at the college of Papa, near Raab. The life of a strolling player, however, had more attractions for him than books, and he gradually sank into great poverty. In 1843 he offered some songs he had written to the editor of the Pesth Athenæum, who printed them, and thus paved the way for a regular engagement to write for the Divatlap, a journal of fashion at Pesth. Petoefi became all at once the most popular poet in Hungary, and as a democrat in politics enjoyed the favour of the masses. He wrote novels, plays, and poems, none of which, however, were so successful as his songs. He engaged warmly in the revolution of 1848, and roused the enthusiasm of his younger countrymen by stirring lyrics, of which "Hungarians, up!" and "Now or never," are the most celebrated. In the war of 1849 he acted as aid-de-camp to General Bem in Transylvania, and is supposed to have been slain in battle, though his body was never recovered An edition of his works was published at Pesth in 1847.—R. H.
PETRARCA, Francesco, one of the four most renowned poets of Italy, born at Arezzo in Tuscany, 20th July, 1304; was found dead either of apoplexy or epilepsy, seated with his head resting on a book in his library at Arquà, 19th July, 1374. (The dates of both birth and death differ slightly in various records, and the circumstances of the death are diversely narrated.) In 1302, the year when Dante and many of the Bianchi faction were banished from Florence, Pietro (commonly called Petracco or Petraccolo) da Parengo, an adherent of the same party, went into exile; and with his wife Eletta (called elsewhere Brigida) Canigiani, took up his abode at Arezzo, where their son Francesco di Petracco or Petrarca was born. After various vicissitudes, the exile's hope of return died out; and about 1312 he and his family removed to Avignon, where, under Clement V., the papal court held its state, and formed a centre of attraction to strangers from every quarter. Here and in the neighbouring town of Carpentras Francesco cultivated grammar, dialectics, and rhetoric. His father subsequently sent him to Montpellier, and finally to the Bolognese university to study law as his profession; but the born poet pored far more willingly over Latin classics than over legal documents; and appears to have loathed a calling in which, as he deemed, he might secure success at the cost of conscience, but could scarcely hope to do so with clean hands. Petracco's death put an end to the conflict between filial deference and strong inclination. Francesco abandoned the career selected for him; but, perhaps, made no wiser choice when, at the age of twenty-two, he, with his younger brother Gherardo, assumed the clerical habit, and found it constituted a passport into the corrupt gaieties of the court of Pope John XXII. His studies, however, were not superseded by frivolous pleasure, and he formed various solid friendships; those with Cardinal Giovanni Colonna and his brother Giacomo, bishop of Lombes, proved both tenderly intimate and enduring, whilst for their father Stefano he conceived the reverent affection which he evinces in some of his verses, as in the sonnet beginning—
" Gloriosa Colonna, in cui s'appoggia."
(Glorious Colonna, i.e., Column, on which leans.)
In 1327 occurred that event which may be represented as the turning-point of Petrarca's life, which inspired so much of his Italian Canzoniere, and of which the traces are discernible more or less openly in his correspondence and in other of his compositions, yet which is shrouded with a veil of mystery, and of which the accounts irreconcilably differ. To follow one of the most popular narratives:—On Good Friday, 6th April, in the church of St. Clara, in Avignon, Petrarca first beheld that incomparable golden-haired Laura, who for precisely twenty-one years swayed, living, the current of his life; whose eyes and voice, habitual reserve and exceptional pity, inspired poem after poem; and from whose thrall not even the lady's death availed to release him. Her bare hand and dainty glove, her sweet speech and sweet laugh, her tears, her paleness, her salutation, are noted with untiring minuteness; he records how he watched with rapture a young girl washing the veil of Laura; and on another occasion how he beheld a group of ladies with Laura in the midst, like the sun girt by twelve stars. To read these elegant Tuscan strains, one might imagine that this veritable slave of love had few cares or interests or occupations, but what sprang from the master passion; that Avignon and Vaucluse, Rome and Naples, busy court life and solitary retirement, took their colour alike from the presence or absence of Laura; but the historic facts of Petrarca's life bear a different witness. Between 1330 and 1334, in the endeavour, as some say, to alleviate his disastrous passion, Petrarca took sundry short journeys, which at any rate served to augment his love of Italy; and the accession in 1334 of Benedict XII. to the pontificate, was followed by the first of those appeals, poetic and epistolary, which Petrarca addressed to popes and to temporal powers, urging the restitution of the papal court to Rome, and the deliverance of Italy. In 1335 Azzo da Correggio appeared at Avignon to solicit, in opposition to Marsiglio Rossi, the pontifical confirmation of the house of La Scala in the lordship of Parma; and formed an acquaintance with Petrarca, which gave rise to so great a mutual affection that for this dear friend's sake Francesco waived his rooted antipathy to the legal profession, pleaded Azzo's cause before Pope Benedict XII., and triumphed over the rival claimant. Late in 1336 Petrarca quitted Avignon, and early in the following year reached Rome, where he met with a warm reception from the Colonna family, and explored the antique monuments of the Eternal City; nor did he return to Avignon until the summer, soon again quitting it for the comparative solitude of Vaucluse, where he purchased a small house and estate, and found leisure to compose many of his works, both in prose and in verse, and to commence that Latin poem "Africa," on the exploits of Scipio in the second Punic war, which procured for him the laurel crown, but which has been handed down to us in an imperfect form, probably the result of intentional mutilation. In August, 1340, Petrarca received from the senate an invitation to Rome, there to be crowned poet-laureate; and on the self-same day a letter reached him from the chancellor of the university of Paris, proffering him the like honour in that capital. His own inclination and the advice of his friends made him prefer the former offer; and early in March, 1341, he arrived at the court of Robert, king of Naples and Jerusalem, to make before that most learned monarch of the period a solemn exhibition of his powers. For three days he discoursed publicly of poetry and science; after which the king formally certified his worthiness of the laurel, and deputed the poet Giovanni Barrili, one of his own courtiers, to represent the majesty of Naples at the ensuing ceremonial. On the following 8th of April, being Easter-day, Petrarca at the capitol delivered an oration, long and flowery, in honour of the muses; after which Orso degli Orsini, count of Anguillara, a senator, pronounced a discourse in praise of the poet-aspirant, and crowned him with the laurel wreath, in presence of an approving concourse of the Roman people and of many dignified personages. Boccaccio avers that the capitol had not witnessed a similar function since the coronation of Statius, under Domitian. From Rome Petrarca removed to Parma, and spent some months with the Correggi lords of that city, especially with his friend Azzo. In 1342 he was one of the ambassadors sent into France by the Roman senate and people to congratulate Pope
