One morning early, as Petrarca (the name he had now adopted, probably out of vanity) entered the church of the nuns of Santa Clara, he was struck, say his biographers, by the dazzling beauty of a young girl, by the sweet expression of her face, the grace of her form, and the tastefulness of her costume. Her eyes were blue, say some; they were black, say others; and the reader will see presently that this is not the only point on which opinions differed. This beauty was Laura, or Loretta de Noves, or de Sade, or Desbaux; for there is great uncertainty even regarding her name. Petrarca, we are told, took her for his ideal. He may really have been in love with her, or he may only have conformed to the fashion of those days, when poets were in the habit of selecting some imaginary object for their devotion and adoring it in a poetical sense. Thus was it with Cavalcanti, Montemagno and Cino da Pistoja, whose Mandetta, Lauretta, and Selvaggia were only poetical fictions and so was it in fact with Dante himself, whose Beatrice was a child who died at nine years of age. Thomas Keightley, in his _Tales and Popular Fictions_, and other English authors, adopt the latter sceptical opinion. “I confess,” says Keightley, “that I am not indisposed to regard the Beatrice of Dante, the Laura of Petrarca, the Fiammetta of Boccacio, and all those ladies with significant names, who were all first seen in passion week, and whose lovers all survived them, as being more the creatures of air and of romance than of real flesh and blood.” Petrarca, at the time we speak of, was twenty-three years of age; and, after composing a great number of sonnets to his lady-love, he left Avignon, went to Paris, and travelled through France, Flanders, Brabant and Germany. It has been remarked as a strange coincidence, that during his absence he wrote only four letters to Avignon, and but one to Laura. Ginguené, in his _Literary History of Italy_, has collected from the works of Petrarca a few stray sentences on his mistress, but the poet gives no particulars of her life, and, neither in his Italian nor in his Latin compositions, does he speak of the family of his beloved, although she is almost the sole subject of his songs. It is not then to be wondered at if his later biographers are left in the dark about Laura, notwithstanding that contemporary authors must have been acquainted both with the lover and with his mistress. Baldelli, a very partial commentator on Petrarca, is obliged to confess that the poet was by no means faithful to his divinity; but that another, whom he loved after a less ideal fashion, presented him with a daughter, who afterwards became the consolation of his old age. “_Francesco nei passati falli ricadde, e dal suo commercio con femina impura ebbe una figlia appellata Francesca che fu poscia tenera compagna e fedel sostegno di sua vecchiezza. La madre fu rapita da morte dopo la nascita di Francesca, con grand dolore di Petrarca._”