243.  PETRARCH, THE PLATONIC DIALOGUE, AND THE RIGHT GOOD SCOLDING.  You simply never know what you’re going to run across, working at a secondhand bookshop.  I’ve just finished reading Petrarch: Four Dialogues for Scholars, translated by Conrad H. Rawski, published back in 1967 by the Press of Western Reserve University, and found it unexpectedly entertaining.  In the fourteenth century an increasing familiarity with the Greek language and Ficino’s translations of Plato into Latin spurred the whole humanist movement, and the Platonic dialogue became a popular form again.  Now, like Peter Wimsey, I must admit that “I have not the philosophic mind.”  (Challenged to define the philosophic mind, he says “I wouldn’t—definitions are dangerous. But I know that philosophy is a closed book to me, as music is to the tone-deaf.”).  I have always found Plato alien, tiresome and unreadable (my fault, I know—let’s admit this and move on) and the humanist dialogue and discourse is not one I’m much drawn to.  (Give me Montaigne, instead, who let his subjects graze free-range rather than trying to pen them in, though he knew the classics intimately and quoted them liberally. Dame Edna Everage compared hosting an interview show to “a monologue with interruptions”; a Montaigne essay is a monologue with appropriations.)  These Petrarch dialogues—revenons a nos moutons--for all the sonority of the Latin, are short, sharp and, beneath the solemn surface, cheerfully subversive.  The first is “On the Abundance of Books,” in which he disentangles the act of owning from the virtue of reading with understanding, thus allowing me to indulge my own bad attitude to book collectors who buy but don’t read.  (I always want to say, Flaubert didn’t spend four years writing Madame Bovary, or Joyce seven years writing Ulysses so you can brag about owning a leatherbound copy.  I don’t say it, but I think it.  A woman once bought a copy of Twenty Years A-Growing as “a pretty little book to put on my shelves,” and I wanted to snatch it out of her hand.  Grrr.)  The others are “On the Fame of Writers,”  “On the Master’s Degree,” and “On Various Academic Titles,” and you can imagine the scolding Petrarch hands around, which I for one enjoyed immensely.  The dialogues are followed by three of Petrarch’s letters, a separate and saddening story of patronage disregarded, and the book’s tone alters there suddenly to one of hurt and regret.  We are reminded that Petrarch’s lasting fame has come from the Canzoniere, the poems of his frustrated love for Laura de Noves.  Scholarship can do much, but it offers scant protection from disappointed love.  Petrarch in these last letters steps down from the scholar’s desk and joins the rest of us in human frailty.