susceptible to the compliment of his poetry, and in spite of
the current notions of duty and fidelity, which were far from exacting,
she had a better self which triumphed. The profligate Madame du Deffand,
who occupies so conspicuous a place in the annals of the French court in
the days of its greatest corruption, has little sympathy with a
situation of this kind, and is led to exclaim: _Le fade personnage que
votre Petrarque! que sa Laure etait sotte et precieuse!_ But Petrarch
himself thought otherwise, for he has written thereupon: "A woman taught
me the duty of a man! To persuade me to keep the path of virtue, her
conduct was at once an example and a reproach."

Without following it in all its various incidents, it will suffice to
say that this love of Petrarch for Laura, which lasted for so many
years, exerted a powerful influence upon the poet and had much to do in
shaping the character which was to win for him in later times the praise
which Pierre de Nolhac has bestowed upon him in calling him the first
modern man. Petrarch considered unworthy, it is true, the poems and
sonnets which he consecrated to the charms of Laura, and he even
regretted that his fame should rest upon them, when, in his own
estimation, his ponderous works in Latin were of much more consequence.
But, incidental to his passion for Laura, he was led to discuss within
himself the two conceptions of love which were current at that
time,--the mediaeval and monkish conception, based upon a sensual idea
which regarded women as the root of all evil and the source of all sin,
and the modern or secular idea, which is spiritual and may become holy.
In an imaginary conversation with Saint Augustine which Petrarch wrote
to furnish a vehicle for the discussion of these matters, the poet
exclaims that it is the soul--the inborn and celestial goodness--that he
loves, and that he owes all to her who has preserved him from sin and
urged him on to a full development of his powers. The ultimate result of
all this thought and all this reflection upon the nature of the
affections developed the humanity of the man, excited broad interests
within his breast, gave him a wide sympathy, and entitled him to rank as
the first great humanist.

Dante, with his vague and almost mystical adoration of Beatrice, which
was at times a passion almost subjective, is still in the shadow of the
Middle Ages, their gloom is still upon him, and he can see but dimly
into the centurie