the [36]Pena
de los Enamorados, spots on which a simple and obscure legend has thrown
an interest which Vaucluse cannot really possess, though embellished by
every thing which poetry can do for it.

[Footnote 35: See the Quarterly Review, to which I am obliged for the
Abbe's remark.]

[Footnote 36: See Campbell's ballad of "The Brave Roland," in one of the
numbers of the New Monthly Magazine; and Southey's tale of Manuel and
Leila, in his early productions.]

It were to be wished, that the shade of Petrarch could return to his
former haunts, to frighten away frivolous visitors, and read a lesson to
the thinking. Instead of rejoicing at the posthumous fame which his
poetical talents have earned, he would probably dwell on the
insufficiency of the highest mental endowments without conduct and
self-command. He would also probably describe his passion as fostered by
the pedantic and high-flown gallantry of the age, and the applauses
bestowed on his verses; as increasing and strengthening, after the
marriage of Laura had rendered it criminal, without any purpose which
his better conscience dared avow, till his eyes at length opened
themselves too late to its culpable nature. His mind, of that
high-wrought and desponding tone which often characterizes extraordinary
genius, and too sincere to trifle with impunity, struggled then
fruitlessly against a fatality formerly imagined, but become real; and
the flower of his life was passed amid illusions and conflicts, in
alternate self-deception and self-reproach, in wild and beautiful
visions from which he awoke to sickness of heart and weariness of
himself and all things, like the victim of a powerful opiate.
Compromising weakly between his passion and his conscience, he would
say, he secluded himself at Vaucluse from a society which had become
dangerous to him, and by the verses which he composed as a vent to his
feelings, fixed the illusion too deep to be eradicated by lapse of time,
or the indifference of Laura. Such voluntary mental martyrdom resembles
the punishment inflicted by some tyrant of history on his prisoners,
whom he commanded to embrace his Apega, a beautiful automaton so
constructed as to plunge a concealed dagger into their hearts.

The better feelings of Petrarch's readers will dwell with the least
alloy on the period after the death of Laura, when he contemplated her
as beyond the reach of human ties, affections, or jealousies, and
sought only to rescue fro