excursus, and viewed in so many lights that not a fleck or spot remains unnoted, for the laborious band of scholars who haunt the literary walks of London or Paris, Rome or Florence. But when, instead of being in the swim of European literary currents, one is beached, as it were, on distant shores, with nothing to put him in sympathy with those who are at the centers of mundane intellectual civilization, it is difficult to rise above the trite and commonplace in literary criticism.

But still, if we do not occasionally examine the models by whose merits we have been trained, we would forget their peculiar beauties, and would find ourselves drifting away into heresies and homage to strange gods, leaving the temples and altars of our literary family idols desolate and bare.

One of these shrines was set up five hun- | dred years since at Vaucluse, with Francesco Petrarca for its minister; and on its walls the literary world has ever since been hanging up its ex votos and taking part in its liturgy. Francis Petrarch was born at the Tuscan town of Arezzo, on the 20th of July, 1304. The circumstances of his birth are of a romantic character; and it would seem as if the wandering spirit of unrest that presided over his long life had taken charge of him even in his mother's womb, and made him a pilgrim and exile from his birth.

His father was one of the band of Florentines driven out in 1302, during the strifes of the Bianca and Nera parties, which at the same time sent Dante (a friend of the elder Petrarch) forth as a fugitive, never to return. The ancestry of the poet was of gentle origin, but limited means, with a hereditary tendency to municipal aspirations and literary culture. The Petrarca household (Petracco, Petraccolo, and Petrarco) in many points resembled that of Goethe, both in its social and political status. But unlike Goethe, Petrarch's infancy was shadowed with family misfortune and ruin, brought about by the party feuds of Florence; and at the very hour of the poet's birth his father was engaged in a forcible but unsuccessful effort to reclaim his citizenship and his property.

A few months after the birth of Petrarch,

his mother, Eletta (who was of the Canigiani family), betook herself with the boy to Ancise, where the family had some little property; and they there remained until the child had reached its eighth year (1312), when the head of the house removed with them to Avignon, the then residence of Clement V., a Gascon pope, which place had become and remained the seat of the papal power during the period styled "The Babylonish Captivity" of the papacy, commencing in 1305 and continuing until 1378, four years after Petrarch's death.

The young exile, from his eleventh to his fifteenth year, went to school at Carpentras; then (1319) removed to Montpelier, where he remained four years.

Like Goethe's parent, Petrarch's father intended him for the law; but, unlike the German, did not as well seek to encourage his son in general literary culture. Indeed, an anecdote is given, depicting Petrarch senior flinging the classical works which his son was surreptitiously reading into the fire. As, however, he seems to have softened and rescued them from the burning, it is quite probable that Petrarch's fondness for the poets was, after all, a bit of hereditary weakness which the parent resented in himself as strongly as in his son.

It may further be fairly assumed that any jurist of those days would necessarily have a turn to polite literature, as even Cino da Pistoja, the friend of Dante, and Petrarch's reputed preceptor at Bologna, whither the student had gone (1323) to complete his legal studies, was fond of elegant learning, and no mean poet himself. Indeed, Cino was the lover of Selvaggia (Ricciardetta dei Selvaggi), one of the four ladies of that period rendered famous by their respective idolaters, Selvaggia being styled the "bel numer' una" of the poetic group, the remaining three being Dante's Beatrice, Petrarch's Laura, and Boccaccio's Fiammetta.

In 1325 Petrarch's mother, a beautiful and good woman, died; and in 1326, his father. These misfortunes drew Petrarch back to Avignon, where he and his only brother, Gherardo, found their inheritance wasted by their guardian.

attachment; and to numerous ladies has been assigned the honor of having enchained his affections. I shall assume at once that the Abbé de Sade is correct in his deductions as to his ancestress. As a fact, it does not

At this period his many brilliant social qualities attracted the attention of the Colonna family, a branch of which was settled at Avignon. He also found a friend in John of Florence, Apostolic Secretary, a learned and patriotic Italian.

Here were the two young men, Francis and Gherardo, thrown upon their own resources, and liable to all the emotions and temptation that beset a youth of refinement and capacities for enjoyment. Petrarch, barely twenty-two, with a complexion which the women envied him, a gracefulness of person and demeanor that drew every eye upon him in admiration, fastidious as a lady in his attire, actually pinching his feet in small shoes with an excess of foppishness, with a scholar's skill in chivalrous verse, whether vulgar or learned, was at that date fit for nothing so much as a grand passion, and only needed a proper object to adore and be miserable about. This he found at Matins, April 6th, 1327, in the church of Santa Clara, in Avignon. This day was at that period a sort of red-letter Lady-day, and may have been fixed upon by the lover merely as a proper conventional period whence to date his real passion. It is amusing to notice how many hearts-then as now-Cupid pierced with shafts sent from the ambush of a prayerbook. No wonder those early illuminators worked the little wretch as an ornament into the borders of the most fervent orisons!

There was even in Petrarch's life-time, and among his intimate friends, a veil of discretion cast over the actual facts of his

in the matter of family. We can understand her character from Petrarch's own evidence.

Laura de Noves, wife of Hugo de Sade, was then in her twentieth year, and had been a wife two years. Taking it for granted that the alleged portraits of her that have reached us are correct, her style of beauty had a demure dignity which would have been certain to enthrall an intellectual person who might be attracted by it when posed in religious humility upon a hassock at early devotions. She was not a blue-stocking. It has been murmured by priggish critics that she could barely have known how to read. She seems to have been femininely fond of gorgeous attire. She had two dresses, the description of which has come down to us, that, to use an enthusiastic expression, were "just too lovely for anything," and that would throw an assembly of the Utter of to-day into orgasms of delight.

Laura was, however, remarkable for her virtue and discretion; and all the personal beauty and accomplishments of the embryo poet appear not to have caused her to swerve a hair's breadth from the safe path of conjugal fidelity. Heine's malicious verses might be applied to her by an observer of sarcastic ungentleness of spirit:

"Zu der Lauheit und der Flauheit
Deiner Seele passte nicht
Meiner Liebe wilde Rauheit,

Die sich Bahn durch Felsen bricht.

"Du, du liebtest die Chausseen

In der Liebe, und ich schatı
Dich am Arm des Gatten gehen-"

But the unwary Petrarch took the disease in its most virulent form. His divinity's charms were thenceforth ever in his thoughts; and he recorded his feelings and sorrows in a succession of sonnets, madrigals, ballads, and canzoni that, superior to the class of erotic lyrics then in circulation, fell in with the

taste in that regard of his contemporaries; and he became famous.

It may be fairly set down as a fact that a disappointment or misfortune in an author's love affairs is the best recommendation to popular favor that he can have. Successful love, it is true, excites a certain degree of tender interest; but the sentimental world admits the jilted swain, or him who has loved and forever lost, at once to its heart, without asking for passport. It is the nightingale with breast tortured by the thorn whose song is the most emotional. Loss of wealth or power cannot move the heart nearly so effectually as the misfortune which springs from the adverse whim of some simple girl whose views on any other matter are not worth a button, or the removal by death of some unpretending wife from the circle of a man's worldly happiness. Hyperion is a bright book of travel; but I question if its pictures of Old World experiences would strike us half so vividly if it were not that we view them through the eyes of a young husband stricken by the greatest domestic misfortune.

In his twenty-eighth year (1331) Petrarch left Avignon for a grand tour through France and Germany. He hoped by this absence to dull the pain of his unfortunate passion. He visited Paris, the Low Countries, and Germany; and on coming back to Italy, he, together with Jacob Colonna, journeyed to Rome to gratify their enthusiastic taste for its antiquities. Indeed, wherever Petrarch went, he kept up a constant search for MSS. and art treasures that might illustrate or bring back the culture of the Augustan age of Rome.

But Avignon and Laura were ever associated in his thoughts; he hastened back, and on his return thither, at the instance of his patron, Cardinal Colonna, he entered the service of John XXII., then Pope, who employed him as an envoy to France, to Italian princes, and even, as is said, to England. Wearying of this half-diplomatic, halfecclesiastical life, Petrarch sought retirement in Vaucluse, where he nursed his love griefs with the most tender assiduity.

Vaucluse (Val Chiusa, Vallis Clausa) is a beautiful and romantic spot fourteen miles from Avignon. Its rocks, its picturesque beauty, and the fact that here Petrarch idled away so many hours of love-sick melancholy, have rendered the place, with the petulant little river Sorgue that boils through the valley, one of the most interesting attractions for literary pilgrimages in the south of Europe.

At this spot Petrarch lived with an old fisherman and his wife-ignorant peasants, whom Petrarch, however, easily found worthy of his friendship, and about whom he wrote some of his most interesting and touching observations.

At this period (1339) he projected his Latin epic "Africa," desiring thereby to glorify his great hero, Scipio Africanus.

At this time, too, he seems to have had a sly, commonplace sort of intrigue which might give cause to doubt his sincerity in his poetic professions of homage to Laura. Whatever feeling Petrarch may have invested in the experience, the girl involved does not appear to have been as rigorous as Laura. A son, Giovanni, was born in 1337, whom Petrarch afterwards recognized and had legitimated. What a relief the matter-of-fact facility of this humble love must have been to the icicle-tipped sentiment of the stately Laura! It was at this period that Simon Memmi, a pupil of Giotto, and a friend of the lover-poet, executed a marble medallion of Laura, which is still in existence at Flor

ence.

But Petrarch's learning, his political experience, and his amiable character (and above all, perhaps, the romance of his barren love, and his musical complainings thereat) began to bring him literary glory; and at this date (1340) he received from the Chancellor of the University of Paris and from the Roman Senate simultaneous invitations to visit those capitals for the purpose of receiving a laurel crown as a mark of recognition of his eminence as a poet. He decided, from patriotic motives, to accept the Senate's invitation.

His real claims as a poet rested at that