Essays on Petrarch by Ugo Foscolo

8vo. pp. VIII, 325. Signatures: [A]4, B-X8, Y4. Contemporary morocco-backed boards. Primarily in English, with appendices including Latin poetry and Greek translations, as well as facing pages of Petrarch’s Italian sonnets along with their English translations.

First commercial edition, exposing the interpolated 34 lines on the death of Mago, in the 1781 edition of De bello punico secundo, as taken from Petrarch’s epic Africa, and printing, for the first time, ‘the translation [of these appropriated lines] by a great poet of our age’, i.e. his correspondent Lord Byron, together with Petrarch’s original, at pp. 214-16. Although Foscolo clearly assumed the verse to be genuinely Byron’s, the translation is in fact by Thomas Medwin: see Medwin’s Journal of the Conversations with Lord Byron ... at Pisa, in the years 1821 and 1822. Ernest J. Lovell, Jr. (ed.), Princeton, 1966 (orig. 1824), pp. 98-100).

Content: On the love of Petrarch; On the poetry of Petrarch; On the character of Petrarch; A parallel between Dante and Petrarch; Appendix: I. Specimens of Petrarch’s Latin poetry; II. Specimens of Greek amatory poetry, from Sappho down to the writers of the lower empire; III. A theory of Platonic love, by Lorenzo de’ Medici; IV. Comparative description of woman’s beauty according to Platonic ideas, by the early Italian poets; V. Petrarch’s unpublished letters in Italian (with facsimile); VI. A letter, in Latin, of Dante’s lately discovered Epistola "amico florentino"; VII. Translations from Petrarch, by Barbarina Lady Dacre.

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