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Don't fancy that people are only better because they are in love, but they are greater, bolder, brighter, more daring in danger, and more ready in every emergency. So wonder-working is the real passion that even in the base mockery of Love men have risen to genius. Look what it made Petrarch, and I might say Byron too, though he never loved worthy of the name.
Petrarch, Tasso, Dante, all are open to me now, and I luxuriate even in the anticipation of the last, but how I am digressing.
In this manner, poetry and literature in the vulgar tongue, which had degenerated and sunk into forgetfulness after the days of Petrarch and Boccaccio, has been restored to its former dignity, first by the protection of Lorenzo de' Medici, and then by the influence of this rare lady, and others like her, who are still living at the present time.
This was said to a minstrel, or jongleur, who, with a small lute slung round him, was making his way, with great earnestness, through the throng. "I beg pardon, worthy sir," said the minstrel; "but this is a scene to be sung of! Centuries hence; ay, and in lands remote, legend and song will tell the fortunes of Cola di Rienzi, the friend of Petrarch and the Tribune of Rome!"
We saw a manuscript of Virgil, with annotations in the handwriting of Petrarch, the gentleman who loved another man's Laura, and lavished upon her all through life a love which was a clear waste of the raw material. It was sound sentiment, but bad judgment. It brought both parties fame, and created a fountain of commiseration for them in sentimental breasts that is running yet.
In the midst of all that lovely, liquid music of running, trickling, fluting water, who could go on callously insisting that Laura resisted Petrarch merely because she was a fat married woman with a large family? All was green and pastoral here, and we seemed to have come into eternal spring after the bleak, windy plains encircling Avignon.
The Marquise d'Espard, Mme. de Bargeton, and Mme. de Montcornet's set have taken up the Heron's cause; and I have undertaken to reconcile Petrarch and his Laura Mme. de Bargeton and Lucien." "Aha!" cried Lucien, the glow of the intoxication of revenge throbbing full-pulsed through every vein. "Aha! so my foot is on their necks!
Then, at last, Petrarch was pronounced worthy of the honor which had been offered him, and there was much feasting at the palace that night, and much song, and much music, and much wine was spilled. Not the least attentive listener in those three days of discussion and argument was the Princess Joanna, the granddaughter of the king, his ward and future heir.
With these adventures is interwoven the progress of Thetis, who comes to view her dominions. From the Euxine and the Hellespont her train sweeps on by Adriatic and Atlantic shores, past lands which call up the names of a long line of poets Vergil, Ovid, Ariosto, Petrarch, Tasso, Du Bartas, Marot, Ronsard till ultimately she arrives off the coast of Devon the Devon of Browne and Drake.
But to the student of history Petrarch has seemed even more important as the reflection, if not the source, of a brilliant intellectual movement, which, taking rise in his century, was to grow in brightness in the fifteenth and flood the sixteenth with resplendent light. In some respects Petrarch was a typical product of the fourteenth century.
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