In the biography of Petrarch by Jerome Equarciafico, we learn that this poetic dawn-bird of the Renaissance had a beautiful sister, named Selvaggia. Upon this lovely girl, Pope Benedict XII. looked with the eyes of desire. He made infamous proposals to Petrarch, while the poet scornfully rejected. Then His Holiness caused it to be whispered to Petrarch that the Inquisition felt inclined to question him concerning the orthodoxy of his faith. "The Question," meant torture, and Petrarch fled from Avignon for his life. But a younger brother of Selvaggia was more of "a man of the world," as the world went in those days of all-powerful popery; and this brother gave ear to the Pope's temptings. By his connivance, the girl was seized one night, as she slept, and carried into the bedroom of the Vicar of Christ. When this girl of sixteen realized what was intended, she fell on her knees, and piteously begged the Pope, the Holy Father, to take pity on her. The raging lusts of the Pope were only maddened the more by the sight and the touch of her charms, and he threatened her with eternal damnation if she persisted in her obstinacy. The weeping, despairing child _did_ persist, and "_he had recourse to force_" ("Love Affairs of the Vatican." Page 154.) * * * * * * * Petrarch, as I have said, may be fairly regarded as the dawn-bird of the Renaissance, that marvellous Easter of Literature, when European _Intellect_, which popery had buried and set the soldiers of the Inquisition to guard, heard the golden trumpet of Resurrection sounded by the Byzantine scholars--fleeing from Moslem invasion--and threw off the shroud of a degrading superstition, defied the terrors of the stupid fanatic, and said to all the world-- "_I will be free again, even though I die for it._" Petrarch was the purest of ten thousand pure, a lover who lived in the glory of the sentiment, without even the temptation to plunge the sacred torch into the stream of sensuality--a poet who sang as the bird sings, because Nature put music in his brain and heart and throat. Petrarch was a devout Christian; and to be a Christian at that time, meant to be a Catholic. You may be sure that it was no heretic whom the Romans publicly honored in Rome, in the year 1342, and crowned with the laurels that Virgil had not worn more worthily. Surely, Petrarch's description of the Pope's morals and the Papal Court will not be spurned as the libel of an abominable heretic. "You find there the terrible Nimrod, Semiramis, armed * * * the scandalous monument of the most infamous amours. Confusion, darkness and horror, vice and crime dwell within these precincts. I am only describing to you what I have seen with my own eyes.