If poets, however, were to speak in a prosaic manner of their early loves, their works would be less admired. The public loves loyalty and hence it encourages love literature that is over-sentimental and false. No doubt when a man contracts an unhappy marriage or does not succeed in winning love later in life he looks back upon an early love affair with tenderness. And while it is true that the past always rules us we are often satisfied as to the manner in which it shaped our futures. Robert Browning had an early sad love affair which influenced his _Pauline_ and indeed many of his later lyrics, but he was happy in the love of the poetess Elizabeth Barrett. Mark Twain's married life was ideal and happy, in spite of an early love affair of his which ended because of the accidental non-delivery of a letter. On the other hand Byron, who was unhappily married, cherished the love of his early sweetheart Mary Chaworth for over twenty years. Strangely and unjustly enough he has been accused of insincerity and posing, and most critics refuse to admit that many of his later love poems were written to her. There are two conspicuous instances in literature where a poet's love was thought by himself to have lasted for life, the cases of Dante and Petrarch. If the loves of these Italians for their mistresses are strictly investigated, I think it will be discovered that they have hoodwinked the world about their loves. They wrote their best poems about their beloved ones, after these had died, and death often makes a man unwittingly write falsely about the past. Pfister tells us in his _Psychoanalytic Method_ of a diseased man of fifty who lived apart from his wife in the same house, and who treated her brutally. After her death he always insisted that they were an ideal couple. Pfister relates another story of a widower who recalled only the happy part of his unhappy married life, and thought he never could marry again. There has always been a suspicion among some people about the durability of the love felt by Dante and Petrarch, for Beatrice and Laura respectively. Symonds says of Laura: "Though we believe in the reality of Laura, we derive no clear conception either of her person or her character. She is not so much a woman as woman in the abstract.... The _Canzoniere_ is therefore one long melodious monotony poured from the poet's soul, with the indefinite form of a beautiful woman seated in a lovely landscape." (Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. XXI, P. 314.)