Complete. From “Table-Talk.”

THERE is plenty of evidence in her lover’s poetry to show that Laura portioned out the shade and sunshine of her countenance in a manner that had the instinctive effect of artifice, though we do not believe there was any intention to practice it. And this is a reasonable conclusion, warranted by the experience of the world. It is not necessary to suppose Laura a perfect character, in order to excite the love of so imaginative a heart as Petrarch’s. A good half or two-thirds of the love may have been assignable to the imagination. Part of it was avowedly attributable to the extraordinary fidelity with which she kept her marriage vow to a disagreeable husband, in a city so licentious as Avignon, and, therefore, partook of that not very complimentary astonishment and that willingness to be at an unusual disadvantage, which make chastity cut so remarkable a figure amid the rakeries of Beaumont and Fletcher. Furthermore, Laura may not have understood the etherealities of Petrarch. It is possible that less homage might have had a greater effect upon her; and it is highly probable (as Petrarch, though he speaks well of her natural talents, says she had not been well educated) that she had that instinctive misgiving of the fine qualities attributed to her, which is produced even in the vainest of women by flights to which they are unaccustomed. It makes them resent their incompetency upon the lover who thus strangely reminds them of it. Most women, however, would naturally be unwilling to lose such an admirer, especially as they found the admiration of him extend in the world; and Laura is described by her lover as manifestly affected by it. Upon the whole, I should guess her to have been a very beautiful, well-meaning, woman, far from insensible to public homage of any sort (she was a splendid dresser, for instance), and neither so wise nor so foolish as to make her seriously responsible for any little coquetries she practiced, or wanting in sufficient address to practice them well. Her history is a lofty comment upon the line in “The Beggar’s Opera”:—

  As to the sonnets with which this great man immortalized his love, and which are full of the most wonderful beauties, small and great (the versification being surprisingly various and charming, and the conceits of which they have been accused being for the most part as natural and delightful as anything in them, from a propensity which a real lover has to associate his mistress with everything he sees), justice has been done to their gentler beauties, but not, I think to their intensity and passion. Romeo should have written a criticism on Petrarch’s sonnets. He would have done justice both to their “conceits” and their fervor. I think it is Ugo Foscolo who remarks that Petrarch has given evidence of passion felt in solitude, amounting even to the terrible. His temperament partook of that morbid cast which makes people haunted by their ideas, and which, in men of genius, subjects them sometimes to a kind of delirium of feeling, without destroying the truth of their perceptions. Petrarch more than once represents himself in these sonnets as struggling with a propensity to suicide; nor do we know anything more affecting in the record of a man’s struggles with unhappiness than the one containing a prayer of humiliation to God on account of his passion, beginning:—

    The commentators tell us that it was written on a Good Friday, exactly eleven years from the commencement of his love.