But if we proceed from Apollo, our chapter on laureates will be longer than the tail of a comet. We must apply our wise saws to comparatively modern instances, hardly glancing for a moment even as far back as the age of Augustus, to observe that, of his two laurelled favourites, Virgil and Horace, the latter loftily maintains the dignity of the poet's position, when, in his Ode to Lollius, he shows that the alliance between poetic and regal or heroic power, was mutually important from the earliest ages. Kings, wise and great, flourished before Agamemnon, but are utterly forgotten: "Vain was the chief's, the sage's pride! They had no poet, and they died: In vain they schemed, in vain they bled! They had no poet, and are dead." Petrarch is, perhaps, the first eminent poet, among Christians, whose genius is indisputably associated with the laurel crown, which was conferred on him with all form, at Rome, by authority of the king, senate, and people, _in especial token of his quality of poet_. But the laurel was conspicuously the type of his fame in that character. His mistress was a laurel in name, and a Daphne in nature, if we give credence to his melodious complaints of her coldness. Many persons have doubted the very existence of Laura as any thing but an Apollonic laurel, or poetical abstraction of glory, almost too subtle for analysis by metaphysics. We have no such doubt of her materiality; for, over and above all other evidence, there are many passages in those songs and sonnets, that tell of a love, in the poet at least, which, though ever refined, was not all spiritual. In the same way, Dante's Beatrice has been pronounced an incorporeal creation,--a vision of theology, though in his _Vita Nuova_ he expressly declares who she was, where and when she was born, her age and his own, when he first met her, and the year and the day, and the very hour, when she died. Milton read them both truly, and recognised in their writings the language of the human heart, and the truth of human passion undebased by a particle of grossness. Speaking of the laureate fraternity of poets, and of his own early partiality for the elegiac writers, he nobly says: "Above them all, I preferred the two famous renowners of Beatrice and Laura, who never write but in honour of them to whom they devote their verse, displaying sublime and pure thoughts without transgression." After that lofty encomium from such authority, may we venture to observe that among the laureates of Italy there is one still greater poet than the Recluse of Avignon? We do not say a greater man, for the popular reputation of Petrarch, resting as it does on his accomplishment of verse, is not perhaps founded on the strongest of his claims to admiration. But Tasso, too, was a formally laureated bard. And his chaplet was unwithered in the dungeon, to which the cruellest Turk among the desecrators of Jerusalem would