it that along with the similarity there is a large measure of dissimilarity; and furthermore such likeness as there is must be elusive, something that it is impossible to seize except by a sort of still-hunt, a quality to be felt rather than defined. In brief, we may appropriate another's thought, and may even copy the very colours[1] of his style, but we must abstain from borrowing his actual words. The resemblance in the one case is hidden away below the surface; in the other it stares the reader in the face. The one kind of imitation makes poets; the other—apes. It may all be summed up by saying with Seneca, and with Flaccus before him, that we must write just as the bees make honey, not keeping the flowers but turning them into a sweetness of our own, blending many very different flavours into one, which shall be unlike them all, and better.
I often say such things, and he always listens as
- ↑ A metaphor of which Petrarch is fond. Usually his employment of it can be traced directly to Cicero and Quintilian, but now and then it occurs in a passage that seems to tell of his own keen delight in the sensuous side of language; as in Fam., viii., 7, where he says to 'Socrates': 'Ubi … dulciter intermicantes colores rhetoricos quærebamus, nil nisi dolentis interjectiones … aspicimus.' This quotation, and the entire letter above, concerning the young Humanist, are but two among very many indications, scattered through the whole correspondence, that Petrarch had thought long and carefully about literary art, and had formulated to himself all of its principles, down to the very least. His judgment and feeling concerning literature were unerring, except when he was led astray by his allegorising tendency and by a mediæval fondness for senseless plays upon words. Yet outside of his own art he seems to have been decidedly crude æsthetically, as has been the case with many another great man of letters, before and since.
