It is Francesco Petrarca’s chief title to fame that he was an inveterate collector of classical writings, that he devoted himself with an unending enthusiasm to the recovery of the literature of the Ancients. And yet he knew naught of Greek, little enough of Latin from the point of view of scholarly attainment in the language. What he did realize, did sense, was the value to intellectual development of these bygone literary Titans, and at Padua he warred against the medievalism which was, after all, nothing more than a warring against the complacency of his own times, just as the attitude of those of to-day who fight against such of the finer things of life as are to be reached only through contact with the original writings of Homer, Euripides, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Horace, Virgil, Cicero, Cæsar, Ovid, Plato, Pliny, and the rest is, in effect, smugly complacent in its acceptance of cultural things as they stand. Renan called Petrarch the first modern man; if only we could be as modern! And what a debt the world owes to his collecting proclivities, an instinct connected with an intelligence! Of course, there were hundreds, one may venture to say thousands, of collectors who were his contemporaries; for the love of beautiful and of interesting things is seldom separated in the normal person from the desire to own them, a desire that has produced more history and more romance than one would dream of. There are those who dissolve pearls in wine, those who treasure them in necklaces; these two sorts are in the world. To Petrarch each scrap of writing was as precious as a pearl to be added to a necklace to adorn the fair throat of Learning, and his accomplishment, his devotion to this hobby, marks him as the very Prince of Collectors of Yesterday. I suppose there have been collectors ever since things were discovered to be collectable. Every object of human creation seems eventually to fall within the collecting class, Father Time saying when. _C. Plini Caecilii Secundi Epistularum_ sounds somewhat formidable to the ears of a foe to the classics, but it lately yielded this morsel from the eighth letter of Book VIII, a letter from Pliny to his good friend Rufinus: You have now all the town gossip; nothing but talk about Tullus. We look forward to the Auction Sale of his effects. He was so great a collector that the very day he purchased a vast garden, he was able to adorn it completely with antique statues drawn from his stores of art treasures.