Petrarch, who was born in 1304, and lived for seventy years, was both a poet and a scholar. He cared, in fact, more for his Latin writing in an epic like _Africa_, and for his collections of Latin MSS. than for those Italian poems which have made him famous to all Europe. We may render him hearty thanks for the immense help he gave towards bringing about the Renaissance; but we are here concerned with him only as the poet who expresses the Italian mind and expands the literature of England. Petrarch is the poet of love. He is the heir of the Provençal lyrics of chivalrous idealizing devotion. But his Laura is set upon a more human plane than Beatrice. The Laura de Noves, whom Petrarch first saw in the church at Avignon in the year 1327, and to whom he addressed some three hundred sonnets, was his inspiration, as Beatrice was Dante’s. “I owe to Laura all that I am,” he asserts. “She made to bud forth with the noblest sentiments all the seeds of virtue which nature had sowed in my heart.” Here we meet explicitly the accepted Italian attitude, as we met it in Dante, and as it was afterwards adopted—though with a change due to time and race and circumstances—by our English Surrey, and even by Shakespeare. Beatrice was a woman seen through all the grave piety and theology of Dante’s serious soul; Laura was a woman seen through a Platonic atmosphere which the humanist Petrarch was adopting from the Greek revival. Yet Laura, though an inspiration, is only a real woman; she does not become refined away, like Beatrice, into a mere personification of some abstract motive force. Petrarch’s sonnets are poems to Laura, so many polished gems, so many keleidoscopic aspects of a true and pure passion, of the fluctuations of hope, despair, surprise. He is an artist in words and in verbal music. He uses no artificial ornamentation, and he scarcely ever falls below himself. If taste, delicacy, and refinement, combined with ingenious fancy and with a purity of thought which spurns all vulgarity, can make a poet, Petrarch is a great poet. And it is no wonder if sonneteers of all nations have made him their model. Nor is it much wonder that, after the exhaustive manner in which he treats of the phases of his passion, its vicissitudes, and its inward and outward experiences, there was little room for novelty on the part of any but a more than ordinary genius.