English Writers Author:Henry Morley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: answered in three books three questions, showing, 1, that monarchy was necessary to the world's wellbeing; 2, that the Roman people rightfully held empire; and, ... more »3, that their monarch, immediately dependent upon God, wielded a temporal power independent of the Pope's spiritual authority. That third Uwk, being a philosophical and religious essay, throughout valmly argued against worldly usurpations of the Church. Petrarch, too, born at Arezzo in 1304, was of the Florentine republic, but of a family less noble than Dante's. His Florentine father and grandfather were notaries. His father Pietro, 1'ctrardl- son of Parenzo, being known by the familiar diminutive Pe- traccha, the sou Francisco was described as Franciscus Petnicchi (filius), or, hi the common mouth, Petrarcha. Young Petrarch's father belonged, like Dante, to the pirty of the Whites, and he suffered banishment at the same time as Dante, with accusation of having falsified a document, and sentenced to a fine of a thousand lire, or loss of his right hand. Petrarch afterwards told Boccaccio that his father had friendly relations with Dante, and that he remembered how in his own childhood the great poet was once pointed out to him : the solemn figure of which when it went by was whispered, " See the man who has been in hell." Petrarch was born in camp before Florence on the night of a vain attempt of the Whites and the Ghibellines to get possession of the town. Petraccha's wife, like Dante's, had leave to remain in her own country, and she went to an estate of her husband's at Ancisa with the seven months' child, who was carried by a horseman in a bundle at the end of a stick and almost drowned at the crossing of a river. It was probably at Ancisa that Francis Petrarch's younger brother was born, the pious Gerard who surviv...« less