litical
affairs which distracted Florence, and was of a stern and somewhat
forbidding character, mingling study with action, Petrarch, humanist and
scholar as he was, represents also the more polite accomplishments of
his time, as he was a most polished courtier and somewhat vain of his
fair person. Dante's whole exterior was characteristic of his mind. If
accounts be true, his eyes were large and black, his nose was aquiline,
his complexion dark, and in all his movements he was slow and
deliberate. Petrarch, on the contrary, was more quick and animated; he
had bright blue eyes, a fair skin, and a merry laugh; and he himself it
is who tells us how cautiously he used to turn the corner of a street
lest the wind should disarrange the elaborate curls of his beautiful
hair. Though record is made of this side of his character, it must not
be assumed that his mind was a frivolous one, for he may be
considered--as Professor Robinson says--as "the cosmopolitan
representative of the first great forward movement" in Western
civilization and deserves to rank--as Carducci claims--with Erasmus and
Voltaire, each in his time the intellectual leader of Europe.

With regard to Laura, Petrarch has left the following lines, which were
inscribed upon the fly-leaf of a favorite copy of Virgil, wherein it was
his habit to keep a record of all those things which most concerned him:
"Laura, who was so distinguished by her own virtues and so widely
celebrated by my poetry, first appeared before my eyes in my early
manhood, in the year of our Lord 1327, upon the sixth day of April, at
the first hour, in the Church of Santa Clara at Avignon; in the same
city, in the same month of April, on the same sixth day, at the same
first hour, in the year 1348, that light was taken from our day, while
I, by chance, happened to be at Verona, ignorant, alas! of my fate. The
sad news came to me at Parma, in a letter from my friend Ludovico, on
the morning of the nineteenth of May of the same year. Her chaste and
beautiful form was laid in the Church of the Franciscans, the evening of
the day she died. I am persuaded that her soul returned, as Seneca says
of Scipio Africanus, to the heaven whence it came. I have experienced a
certain satisfaction in writing this bitter record of a cruel event,
especially in this place, where I may see it often, for so may I be led
to reflect that life can afford me no further joys; and the most serious
of my temptations being