FRANCESCO PETRARCA, son of a Florentine notary, who had been exiled to Arezzo, was one of the greatest scholars of the Middle Ages and one of the greatest lyric poets of any age. He is chiefly known by his sonnets to Laura, but the same wonderful ear for the melody of language they illustrate made him a great linguist, and his mastery of Homer and the classical poets of the Homeric school fitted him for leadership in forcing the revival of learning which made modern times possible. The “Laura” to whom the sonnets were addressed was “the daughter of Audibert de Noves and the wife of Hugues de Sade.” It is said that she was an entirely decorous matron, the mother of a numerous family of children. Petrarch’s admiration for her was Platonic, and he seems to have used her for poetical purposes as a peg to hang his sonnets on, with much the same reality and unreality of passion Don Quixote felt towards Dulcinea del Toboso, after adopting her as a necessary part of the outfit of a knight-errant. It is hard for the modern mind to enter into the mediæval idea of romantic or chivalric love. It is much easier to appreciate Petrarch’s intellectual dignity when we turn from his sonnets to his work as a “humanist.” Among his essays and prose treatises written in Latin are those “On the Contempt of the World.” “On Solitude,” “On True Wisdom,” and “On Illustrious Men.” He also wrote a Latin poem, “Africa,” which he himself valued highly, though it has found few readers since his death. His “Treatise on the Remedies of Good and Bad Fortune” (De Remediis Utriusque Fortunæ”) was dedicated to his friend Azzo da Correggio. In it Petrarch declares that “our distresses arise chiefly from ourselves,” and as a remedy for them he proposed, as did Goethe, development of the true self. To that end, he studied the great classical poets and the great fathers of the Christian Church, valuing Homer and St. Augustine if not equally, yet alike as masters. His mildness and his catholic sympathy gave him a popularity in his own generation which was denied to the sterner and sublimer Dante. On April 8th, 1341, he was crowned at Rome as the Poet Laureate of the “Holy Roman Empire.” His house at Vaucluse was bought in 1337 and much of his later life was spent there, but he had princes and great nobles among his friends and they frequently called on him for services in diplomacy and politics. He died at Arquà on July 18th or 19th, 1374, holding then, as he does still, a place next to Dante among Italian poets. He had as a lyric poet the same ear for “time” and melody which immortalized Horace, and the study of his sonnets can do much to elucidate the important and almost wholly misapprehended laws of “quantity” on which Horatian verse depends.