[In the excerpt below, Sedgwick celebrates the six hundreth anniversary of Petrarch's birth with a laudatory survey of the poet's life and literary importance.]

Six hundred years ago, on the 20th of July, 1304, a little Florentine baby was born into exile in a house on Via dell' Orto in Arezzo, whither his father, banished from Florence, had fled. Civil war between Ghibelline and Guelf raged everywhere, mingled with ambitions of nobles and jealousies of cities, with local wrongs and chance enmities. Exiles found no rest; within the year the baby was suspended from a stick, like a papoose, and carried to Incisa in the Valdarno; and before he was a lad his family had wandered to Pisa, and on to Avignon, lately become the city of the papal court. Thence the boy was sent to school at Carpentras, some fifteen miles away.

His father, Ser Petracco—the fastidious son softened these burgher syllables to Petrarca—was a notary, but like a true Florentine wishing his son to fly higher in the world than he, determined to make him a doctor of law, a student and expounder of Pandects; but by some eccentricity of nature, the sons of notaries become addicted to letters, and the boy Francis was already elbow deep in the Latin classics. Discovering this, Ser Petracco, following the foolish precedents of foolish fathers, seized the precious books and burned them all, except one volume of Cicero and one of Virgil, which he spared out of compassion for the poor boy's tears. Petracco did this from the best of paternal intentions, for he himself was amantissimus Ciceronis; but fathers are born unto folly as the sparks fly upward. From Carpentras Francis was sent to the university at Montpellier, a mere lycée as it were, and then at the age of nineteen to the great university of Bologna.

Here, after ten years of exile, Francis's sensitive heart beat hard for his country. The other Italian students might deem themselves Venetians, Milanese, Pisans, Neapolitans, but from the first moment of his coming, he, the exile, felt that he was not a Florentine, but an Italian. This feeling he drank deep in the pleasant city of Bologna, with its Roman traditions and its Italian charm. Those were the years before the great church of San Petronio frowned across the Piazza Maggiore, before the Palace Bevilacqua inclosed the most enchanting of courtyards, before the never-ending arcades protected the just and the unjust from sun and rain; but there was the dungeon palace of the Podestà, where Enzio, poet and king, had for twenty-two years watched his youth go down into the grave; there were the wicked towers, the Asinella, the Garisenda, and an hundred more; and, no doubt, Petrarch used to stop and watch the troop of doves parade and wheel through the air, flinging their shadows on loggia and piazza, flashing them across the narrow streets, as they mounted, stooped, whirled, and encircled the grim, gray towers with their purple and green, for a moment seeming to hang like a wreath, only the more suddenly to swoop down to his feet and pick the corn he had strewn. The city had the charm of Italy, but the university, without hall, dormitory, or lecture room, bare as the poorest student of things corporeal, was greater and more interesting than the city,—imperium majus in imperio minore. There were congregated thousands of students, men and lads from Gaul, Picardy, Burgundy, Poitou, Touraine, Maine, Normandy, Catalonia, Provence, Hungary, Germany, Spain, Poland, Bohemia, England, and from every province and city in Italy; a strange world, immensely democratic, yet enwrapped in the great imperial traditions. It was a university devoted to Roman law, and every gloss on Roman law preached the glory of the Roman Empire. There were other intellectual interests at the university,—the canon law, philosophy, medicine, astrology,—and, more stimulating than they, the contact of youth with youth, of enthusiasm with enthusiasm, in that time of life when young men are so many princes entering into their own; but the great Justinian code was the life of the university, and encouraged in Petrarch an admiration and veneration for Rome equal to his love for Italy. He attended lectures diligently, but his heart inclined neither to gloss nor to Corpus Juris. The very beginnings of those copious outpourings of comment and explanation, which flowed from the lips of professors eager "to prove that they were artists," as one grumbler said, must have chilled him. Nevertheless, he went regularly to his professor's room, and scribbled with his stylus, while the learned man in bad Latin waded in: "Primo dividendo literam, casum ponendo et literalia explanando; secundo loco signabo contraria et solvam, tertio loco, etc. … Prima pars potest subdividi in tres particulas," etc., in saecula saeculorum. Petrarch's thoughts surely wandered away to the sonnets written to Selvaggia la bella by the famous jurist, Ser Guittoncino de' Sinibuldi, more familiarly known to the undergraduates and to posterity as Cino da Pistoia; or perhaps to the verses of Bologna's native poets, to Onesto or to Guido Guinicelli,—

Al cor gentil ripara sempre Amore
Come a la selva augello in la verdura.

Or perhaps he thought of his own great compatriot, whose Commedia, recited by butchers, fullers, and tavern-keepers, he himself did not read, half aristocratically, half for fear of becoming subservient to the mighty master.

Out of the classroom, no doubt he was a very elegant young gentleman, singing Provençal madrigals under palace windows, or in less proper neighborhoods shouting out,

Lauriger Horatius, quam vixisti bene,

in the wild company of stroller students. But, though the livery of his youth may have been somewhat gay, at least to the sober eye of his later years, and though the Corpus Juris may have been neglected, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Seneca were not. Out of reach of the notarial arm, he plunged into what classic literature he could get.

Petrarch stayed three years at the university, and returned to Avignon on the death of his father (1326). His mother died soon afterward. Here he led the life of a fashionable young man much concerned with the brushing of his hair, the cut of his cloak, the fit of his shoes, and the whiteness of his linen, as he says in a letter written in grayer years; but these backward glances of age often cast too vivid a color on the follies of youth, for age has its hypocrisies, and loves to moralize on the deceitfulness of ephemeral pleasures. Certainly he continued his classical studies with diligence, and soon became celebrated as a scholar. On his father's death he had frankly abandoned the law, and, as his patrimony had been stolen by his father's executors, it was necessary for him to take steps toward gaining a livelihood. The church was the natural resource for educated men, especially as there were many livings and sinecures set apart for the support of scholars; animated by some hope of stipend, he took deacon's orders. This step did not necessitate strictness of living. Francis was a charming young man, cultivated, clever, agreeable, brimming with interest in life, learned beyond his years, and adorned by the natural grace of Tuscan manners, which had been bettered by his breeding; his company was sought by men of position and distinction, and he naturally felt that he had but entered into his lawful inheritance. Society, however, was to him but a secondary interest; his heart, still fancy free, beat to Cicero's periods and Virgil's hexameters. Thus life passed in the easy, luxurious, windy city, until he was nearly twenty-three. Then, on an April morning in Holy Week, the lovely April of Provence, fresh with flowers and the breath of spring, he walked through the narrow streets of Avignon and entered the cold, gray aisles of the church of St. Clare; there he beheld the golden hair and the beautiful eyes that he was never to forget. As the vision moved, hers was no mortal's step, but an angel's, and her voice murmuring the prayers was more than human; the religious light, the solemn music, the high-aspiring arches, the sacredness of the place, transfigured her, or she transfigured them, and always afterwards, save once or twice when the dust of earth rebelled, whenever he thought of that golden head he bent his own in reverence.

History has not revealed who she was. The poet guarded her in the privacy of his art, and all the curiosity of six hundred years has not made sure of more than he has told. There are always guessers; in the eighteenth century the garrulous, indefatigable, agreeable, self-important Abbé de Sade put forward three stout volumes full of evidences and appendices to prove that Laura was the wife of his own ancestor, Ugo de Sade, and mother of eleven children; thus contradicting himself with a dozen reasons. Many critics, wise, spectacled, lean or maybe fat, with aiblins nae temptations to leave their books for the frivolous study of love, adopt this theory. Other surmises have had their partisans, among them the theory of pure poetical fancy. Let us hear what Petrarch has told us of her:—

I bless the spot, the time, the hour
  When my eyes looked so high.—

Her eyes were beautiful, her brow serene, her smile, her laugh, her speech, sweet and gentle, her voice like an angel's, her hands thin, white, and lovely, her arms grace itself, her movements sweetly high-bred; and her beautiful young body, fit temple for her soul, was the home of refinement, of courtesy, of Love himself; her three chief excellencies were her milk-white neck, the roses of her cheeks, and her golden hair, loved by the wind,—but one might as well count the stars as her perfections. Her dress was charming, too; she wore a gown of green, or of cramoisie, or sometimes one inclining to deep blue, to drab, or to some dark indistinguishable color,—all were lovely.

Petrarch used to wander in the woods eager to avoid all mankind, lest his face should betray his inward struggle; there he repeated his own sonnets till mountain, hill, wood, and river knew his inmost thoughts. Everywhere the beautiful eyes haunted him, hid everything but themselves, cloaked in their own splendor mountains, rivers, lakes, the blue Mediterranean. A thousand times he felt impelled to offer her his heart, but she would not suffer him, and after she perceived his too fervent inclination, she wore a veil over her starry eyes and golden hair, and when he gazed at her she put her hand before her face, and even for a time banished him from her company. On one ineffaceable day, as he sat thinking of love, his lady passed; he rose with pale face and reverent gesture to do her honor; but no sooner did she see him than she flushed in anger, and with a brief word walked on. He shrank within himself. But in the earlier days, before his speech or his face had betrayed him, she used to speak to him words that scarcely have had their like in all the world, and she used to honor him with her salutation, such as angels give when they meet, and fired his heart with a passion for heaven.

Everything that had come near her, or touched her, made him tremble; her glove,—

Candido, leggiadretto, e caro guanto,—

her veil, which a little shepherdess washed at a mountain brook; the portrait, painted (as if in heaven) by Simone Martini; the south window of her house; the stone seat on which she used to sit; every spot on which her shadow had fallen or her foot had trod. Thus in melodious sonnets he berhymed her.

Some years after he first saw her, he wrote a poem in Latin rhymes in which he says: "Especially dear to me is a most illustrious lady, known by her virtue and her birth. My poems have published her fame and spread it abroad. My thoughts always revert to her; always with renewed pangs of love she troubles me. I do not think she will ever be shaken in her lordship over me. Not by coquetry, but by her native charm and beauty has she bound me." Then he describes his efforts to throw off her yoke; how he had traveled north and south, to mountain and to sea, always in vain. Even in the pathless woods, whither he has fled to avoid her, no bush bent in the wind but he saw her lithe figure, no oak stood firm but he saw her immobile, no brooks but reflected her face; he saw her pictured in the clouds, in the empty air, and on the flinty rock.

In December, 1336, he wrote to his friend Giacomo Colonna: "But you, like an everlasting tease, follow me up and say that I have invented the name of Laura, because that which I like to talk of and that which makes other people talk of me is all one, and that the only Laura [Laurel] in my heart is that which bestows honor upon poets, for my studies show that to be the top of my desire; but that the other Laura, whose beauty I say has made me prisoner, is the creature of my fancy, that my verses are make-believe, and my sighs imaginary. Would to Heaven that your jests had hit the Truth, and that my love were a joke, and not the madness that it is. But believe me, not without great labor does a man succeed in simulation for a long time, and to labor without any advantage that others may deem you mad, would be the maddest of madnesses. … Time wounds and Time cures; and against Laura, who you say is imaginary, perhaps that other imaginary friend of mine, St. Augustine, will help me."

Later still, perhaps fifteen years after that scene in the church of St. Clare, Petrarch wrote a book, entitled Concerning Contempt for the World, in the form of a dialogue between St. Augustine and himself. The saint is his conscience, and they talk together. I can but give the substance of one dialogue:—

St. Augustine. Is not loving mere folly?

Petrarch. According to the object loved. Love is the noblest or the basest of all passions. To love a worthless woman is a great misfortune; to love a good woman is the top of happiness.

St. Aug. (Bringing the conversation to Laura.) The love of woman is surely folly.

Pet. There are bad women; but a gulf yawns between them and Laura. Her mind, knowing nothing of earthly cares, burns for heaven. In her face (if there be any truth anywhere) shines the glory of divine beauty; her behaviors are the pattern of perfect modesty. Neither her voice, nor the light of her eyes, resembles any mortal thing, and her bearing is more than human.

St. Aug. Think what it will be when you come to die. Remember how it was when she nearly died.

Pet. God let me die first! The memory of her illness makes me cold. I thought to lose the noblest part of my soul.

St. Aug. Turn from her; she has already lost much of her beauty.

Pet. I loved her body less than her soul. Her manners surpass the ways of earth, and her example shows how the dwellers in heaven live. If she die first I shall love her virtue, which cannot die.

St. Aug. But you cannot gainsay that the most noble things are sometimes vilely loved.

Pet. If you could but see my love! It is not less fair than her face. In it there has been nothing base or shameful, nor anything blameworthy except its greatness. One thing I cannot pass in silence,—whatever little I am become, I am because of her; nor should I have ever attained to whatever name or fame I have, if any, had she not, by inspiring me with a most noble affection, watered and tended the tiny seeds of virtue which nature planted in me. She plucked my young mind away from every shameful thing, and dragged it back as with a hook, and bade it look upward to the heights. It is certain that love undergoes a change to conform to the beloved. No backbiter was ever found so base to touch her name with his cur's tooth, or to dare say that there was any fault to find in her; and I do not say in what she did, but even in the turn of her words. They who leave nothing untouched left her in admiration and veneration. It is small wonder therefore, if she, so famous in good repute, made me long for a fairer fame, and smoothed the rude labors by which I sought it. While a young man I desired nothing but only to please her, who alone pleased me; now you bid me forget or love her less, who set me apart from vulgar fellowship.

St. Aug. Filling your heart with love of the creature, you shut yourself off from the love of the Creator,—and that is the road to death.

Pet. Not her body, but her soul I love; the years have faded her cheeks, but her soul has become more beautiful, and my love has likewise increased.

St. Aug. Are you making fun of me? If her soul dwelt in a hideous, knotty body, would it please you as much?

Pet (Quoting Ovid.) Her soul with her body I loved.

Step by step, however, St. Augustine led him to confess and tell that in the beginning he had not been free from earthly desires, and had striven to gratify them, but that Laura had remained firm against flattery and prayers, and that now he rendered thanks unto her. Lord Byron says: "It is satisfactory to think that the love of Petrarch was not platonic."

There is also on the first leaf of his copy of Virgil a note in his handwriting of the first time he saw her and of her death, and he adds: "To write these lines in bitter memory of this event, and in the place where they will most often meet my eyes, has in it somewhat of a cruel sweetness, lest I forget that nothing more ought in this life to please me, and this by the grace of God need not be difficult to one who thinks strenuously and manfully of the idle cares, the empty hopes, and the unexpected end of the years that are gone."

Such was Laura; not the allegorical Beatrice of Dante, nor the conventional beauty of the troubadours, but still ideal and beautiful, the first real woman in poetry since the Greeks.

Petrarch's renown is so enduring because he is the first master of letters in Europe since the death of Cicero. He was by no means the first modern master of art, even if we pass by Gothic and Moorish art; for in painting, Giotto, in sculpture, Niccola Pisano, in architecture, Arnolfo del Cambio, were a generation ahead of him; in poetry, Dante, born nearly forty years before, was immeasurably greater than he, but Petrarch was the first to make letters as letters the work of his life, and the first to hold the faith that literature is as great a factor in civilization as politics or theology. He was a professional man of letters, and became the first of the great tyrants of European literature; he is more important than his successors,—Erasmus, Voltaire, Goethe,—in that he stands at the threshold of modern literature, while it was hesitating which way to turn, while Latin still was the only known classic literature, and national literatures had not yet got out of their leading strings. In contemporary literature what was there? In France, Froissait was a baby; in England, Langland a little boy, Chaucer not born; in Germany and in Spain, only an encyclopædia knows. The Roman de la Rose, setting Dante aside, is the one remembered work of letters that existed when Petrarch wrote his sonnets. For the third time in history Italy was about to take her place at the head of Europe, and Petrarch, representing her intellectual life, set his seal on unformed literatures, and stamped an ideal impression.

Poetry is the attempt by man to carry on the divine labor of creation, and make this world more habitable; poets take mere words, and fashion a habitation, whither, when the world of sense grows chill, we may betake ourselves and breathe a richer atmosphere. In another aspect poetry is merely the arrangement of words in a certain order; it is a matter of empirical psychology. Poets are practical psychologists, measuring sensations by measures finer than men yet use in laboratories; and in mastery of the fuller knowledge of this psychology Petrarch is perhaps unrivaled. Hundreds of thousands of men have loved as dearly as he; thousands have thought greater thoughts than he, and many poets, English poets at least, have had a nobler instrument; but he had the skill to put his words into the right order, and when we read them we forget everything except love.

The charm of his verses made him famous from the very beginning. Well it might, for his sonnet differs from other sonnets as the song of the bird differs from that of a singing master; the soft Italian syllables unburden all their rapture in the fourteen lines, then close their lips, for they have finished. Italian words are made to be strung in a sonnet. Italian verses rhyme, as if they were lovers—Hero and Leander—calling across the gap between line and line; they melt away in sensuous vowels, they echo melodious in l's and m's and r's.

Perhaps the least objectionable way to deliver a lecture on the Petrarchan sonnet will be to show by example how impossible it is to transport this union of sound and sense across the fatal gap between the lingua di si and the tongue of yes. I choose the best translation I can readily lay hands upon, out of an attractive little book entitled Sonnets of Petrarch, translated by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, which has Italian sounds on pages to the left and English to the right.

Qual donna attende a gloriosa fama
Di senno, di valor, di cortesia,
Miri fiso negli occhi a quella mia
Nemica, che mia donna il mondo chiama.
Come s'acquista onor, come Dio s'ama,
Com' è giunta onestà con leggiadria,
Ivi s' impara; e qual è dritta via
Di gir al Ciel, che lei aspetta e brama.

Doth any maiden seek the glorious fame
Of chastity, of strength, of courtesy?
Gaze in the eyes of that sweet enemy
Whom all the world doth as my lady name!
How honor grows, and pure devotion's
 flame,
How truth is joined with graceful dignity,
There thou mayst learn, and what the path
 may be,
To that high heaven which doth her spirit
 claim.

To begin the lecture with the first time of the sonnet, in the Italian married women are not excluded from gazing at Madonna Laura, nor, in the second line, does senno shrink to chastity, nor valor to strength, even if the cortesia of the Italians can be frozen into the courtesy of us Americans. The fourth line, Whom all the world doth as my lady name! sounds a little like the language of hard-put sonneteers, whereas che mia donna il mondo chiama would be said with a bow, hand on heart, from the foot of the Alps to the Strait of Messina. Come Dio s' ama and pure devotion's flame mark the difference between a religion and our American Sunday-go-to-meeting-isms. Com' è giunta onestà con leggiadria—most delightful of meetings! Onestà, shy dignity of maidenhood, sweet innocence of motherhood, such as looks out from Raphael's Madonnas; leggiadria, the gay, girlish motion of comely youth, the grace of the leaping fawn, the sentiment in Botticelli; how did these most charming of feminine graces meet? At what Golden Gate? Are they corporeal or angelic? How, how and where? "How truth is joined with graceful dignity" is the proper junction of two respectable dames,—a sight that arouses very moderate exhilaration. In the last line of the octave, the Italian heaven, in a heavenly way, waits for Laura, aspetta e brama; the English heaven, instinct with Common Law, serving, as it were, a writ from the King's Bench, claims her.

We are forced to the conclusion that sense and sound are fatally imprisoned in the Petrarchan sonnet, and must stay there forever; they are stored where time doth not corrupt them, neither can translators break in and steal. But from the days of Wyatt and Surrey to those of Colonel Higginson, men who love poetry have felt ever renewing temptations to translate Petrarch, and to carry home the moonbeams that lie so lovely on water.

The union of sound and sense is very nearly perfect in Petrarch,—he used to test and try and substitute until all the words fell into their true order,—and as this perfection was not of a kind to require special knowledge in order to be enjoyed, his poetry, accredited and sustained by his great reputation as a scholar, quickly passed from mouth to mouth, and so set its seal on the nascent literature of Europe.

His poetry asserted this dogma, that in the only real world, the world of ideas, woman and the love of woman are noble and beautiful. From this central dogma of the idealistic faith proceed the derivative dogmas, that all life, all things great and little, are noble and beautiful. This is the mission of poetry,—to see life as a divine work, to be the priestess of a perpetual revelation, in all things to behold the beauty of God. This is the continuation by man of the divine work of creation, for the Lord rested after six days of labor, before His work was complete, and entrusted the fulfillment of the everlasting task to poets. Petrarch has done his duty. What is Laura? Her corporeal existence has become a myth, but she is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, because Petrarch saw her with the eyes of love and faith. This idealism uplifted all modern literature and constitutes Petrarch's greatness, and not that scholastic excellence by which, according to Mr. John Addington Symonds, he "fore-saw a whole new phase of European culture,"—melancholy prospect. The Petrarchan view is set forth in the familiar sonnet of Michelangelo, which says that within the shapeless marble lies beauty imprisoned. So it is with all things: within our rude, rough, shapeless, unpolished selves lies imprisoned something that awaits the liberating eye and hand of faith and love.

There was a second very memorable day in Petrarch's life, the 8th of April, 1341. On that day, in the palace of the Roman Senate on the top of the Capitoline Hill, he received the poet's crown of laurel, bestowed in the name of the Senate and the People of Rome.

This ceremony was the outward recognition of a new force in Europe; arms and theology were making room for literature, for the voice of men of peace. There, on the axis of European history, on the Capitol of the City of Rome, pitiably shrunk to an arena for Pope, Emperor, noble, and burgher to play at gladiators, yet still splendid with unequalled renown, a poet, the head of the new estate, was crowned at a time when popes had fled to receive the tiara elsewhere, and emperors were forced to fight their way step by step to the Vatican. Letters were honored indeed, but it was Petrarch who had convinced the world that literature was worthy of honor, and for his sake the honor had been given.

As we look back over six hundred years, with Petrarch's life before our eyes, it is easy for us to see that he, the prince of living poets and the foremost scholar of Europe, was worthy to be the gonfaloniere of the new guild; but how did the cultivated world of 1340 know this? How did it choose this young man, ruddy, and withal of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look at, to be its king? Petrarch was thirty-six years old; he had written some eighty sonnets, a dozen canzoni, and a few metrical epistles; and these few contributions to literature, excepting what he may afterwards have judged not worth keeping, were all, and there was no printing to spread them abroad. How did the vague new feeling, that literature ought to be publicly recognized as a force in civilization, manage to select him as its standard bearer, and crown him on the Capitol? The answer is that Petrarch himself hoisted the flag, and the world of letters rallied round him. Even by that time he had come into personal acquaintance with a large part of the cultivated world, and everybody he met was charmed by his beauty, his grace, his gifts in conversation, his high morality, his sweet character, as well as by his rare scholarship and his unequalled poetry. First Bologna brought him into familiar fellowship with men who in later life became persons of consequence; afterwards Avignon served him in a similar way. Avignon he never liked; he complained of its dirty streets, where nasty pigs, snarling dogs, noisy carts, four-horse coaches, filthy beggars, gaping foreigners, isolent revelers, and rowdy crowds made walking intolerable. Worse than these was the fundamental sin of harboring popes who ought to go back to Rome, the Holy City. But Avignon returned good for evil. It was the cosmopolitan city of Europe; for Rome without the papal court was but a little bickering town, and Paris was not what it became when the intellectual sceptre of Europe passed from Italy to France. The main current of European life still flowed in the old channel dug by the ideas that acknowledged Pope and Emperor as the two heads of the civilized world; and by Petrarch's time the popes had thrust the emperors into the second place, and had thereby become the most important personages in Europe; where the pope lived, there was the head of ecclesiastical affairs, and the centre of political intrigue. The pope sent legates and nuncios to every court in Christendom, and received ambassadors in return; to him came archbishops, bishops, abbots, heads of monastic orders, princes, and even kings. In this dirty city the papal court lived in ease and luxury,—the cardinals would not go back to Rome, Petrarch said, because they could not bear to leave the Burgundian wines;—all was reminiscent of the old Provençal civilization. A careless, sensual life, these high priests of Christendom led, accompanied by a refinement in manners not common elsewhere. Avignon was a city to which everybody went; it was easier to go there than to Rome, and immeasurably pleasanter to a man lacking belligerent tastes. The papal dinner parties, if nothing else, would have attracted good society from the Ebro to the Elbe. Wonderful were the dishes, glorious the wines of Roccella, of Bielna, of Sanporciano, noble those from Rhineland and from Greece, quisite the old Vernaccia; all flowed abbondantissimamente. This high living Petrarch in later days denounced like Habakkuk, but the dinners added lustre to the papal court, and helped his career. Avignon was the natural place to look for a poet laureate, because such a poet must not only be excellent, but he must be known, he must not live away from the main thoroughfare of European life,—not far from its dinner-tables.

At Avignon Petrarch saw everybody, not merely because of his personal charm and gifts for conversation, but as the honored inmate of the Colonna household. This family played a great part in Petrarch's life, particularly on that eventful Easter in 1341. The Colonnas had a European importance, because their strongholds in the city of Rome enabled them to block either pope or emperor in that great move in the game of European politics,—the imperial coronation in Rome. In their palace (report still points out the spot), of which he became an inmate, Petrarch met everybody of consequence who came to Avignon.

Moreover, Petrarch was a Florentine,—the fifth essence in nature, as Boniface VIII said,—and Florentine merchants, notaries, envoys, were spread over Western Europe, and when traveling through Avignon naturally met their attractive fellow citizen. Two of these wandering Florentines were closely concerned with Petrarch's coronation. Roberto de' Bardi, chancellor of the University of Paris, procured him an invitation to be crowned poet laureate there, and Fra Dionigi, for a time professor of philosophy and theology, brought him to the notice of King Robert of Naples, who, patron of philosophy and letters, obtained the crown for him in Rome.

Though these were the reasons that brought Petrarch before the eyes of cultivated Europe, yet Petrarch was worthy to be their cynosure. He was not a mere lover of the classics, a worshiper of the long dead, he was conversant with the moderns as well; he was known from Durham to Messina as a scholar, a poet, a writer of letters, a man of philosophic mind; in truth, by his tongue and pen, by his "rethorique swete" he gave a great upward push to literature, lifting it from a beggarly condition to a great estate in the realm of thought.

Petrarch's life after his coronation was one perpetual recurrence of social successes. The Pope invited him to be a papal secretary, the King of France extended the hospitality of Paris to him, the Emperor bade him to Prague, the Visconti wanted him at Milan, the Scaligeri at Verona, the Correggi at Parma, the Carraresi at Padua, the Lord High Seneschal at Naples; the Florentines asked him to accept a chair in their new university, Venice offered him a house. This social renown was the fulcrum by which, pressing the lever of classical enthusiasm, he stirred the world and budged mediæval ideas from their places.

His immediate influence on his contemporaries was as a classical scholar, as a lover of the wisdom, the beauty, the greatness of the long past. It is this aspect of his career that has impressed Mr. Symonds and the German scholars with so deep a dint; scholars themselves, they admire him as a man of like passions with themselves, they look back at the revival of learning, at the updigging of classic culture, and they regard Petrarch as we regard Christopher Columbus, and do appropriate homage to his memory. That aspect of Petrarch's career naturally obtrudes itself on students; but those of us who are indifferent to the fanfares of historic importance may disregard that, and take leave of Petrarch in our own way.

He was a mixture of the good comrade and the anchorite, pushing neither quality to excess. He was fond of talking, and when he could help, never dined alone; but he was also fond of seclusion. Nothing he liked better than to wander along the banks of the Sorgue and dream of Laura, of poetry, of life, of things old and new. He built a house in Vaucluse, the beautiful valley, shut off from Avignon and the whole outer world of lower things, where, from a blue basin within a great cave, the Sorgue breaks out in noisy cataract; there he lived, rich in books, eating black bread, fruits, and the little fishes that he caught himself. His companions were but three,—his dog, and an old couple; the man, gardener, librarian, valet; the woman, farmer, cook, and washerwoman. He loved to stroll about the fields, even long after dark; and sometimes in the middle of the night he would get up, say his prayers, and wander forth in the moonlight, thinking of the beautiful things in heaven and earth. Vaucluse, "loveliest place out of Italy," was his favorite resort; he lived there many years, and thither he loved to return, to meditate in quiet. Even when domiciled by fate in a city, he desired country things; in Milan he rejoiced in dwelling fuori le mura; in Parma he grew choice fruits in his garden. In Arquà—

The mountain-village where his latter days
Went down the vale of years—

he lived in a little house, built by himself, surrounded by vines and olive trees. Here he had horses, for he was too infirm to walk, several servants to minister to him and to the many guests who came eager to see him, four or five copyists copying Latin manuscripts, and an old priest, who used to accompany him on his long drives to the church in Padua, where Petrarch as canon had sundry duties. There, among the Euganean hills, his thoughts turned to death. He was found at the last, so report says, his head bent over his book as if he had paused in the reading. Many mourned him. Among the chief was Giovanni Boccaccio, who is never more charming nor more amiable than in the filial demonstrations of his simple admiration for Petrarch.

Petrarch was good and kind and industrious, always hard at work upon those things which seemed to him important,—the discovery and dissemination of classical knowledge; and, moreover, he had continuously with him a sense of a presence which transcends our measures, and this he used to express in mediæval phrases, that nevertheless still satisfy here and there a backward heart. "Philosophy is to love wisdom; true wisdom is Jesus Christ. Let us read historians, poets, philosophers, but let us always have in our hearts the gospel of Jesus Christ, in which abide true wisdom and true happiness."