of the bystander and the extent of the disaster. And yet, in
spite of mishaps, let the truth stand that those who travel fast and go
far, go by Love's Parcel-Post, concerning which there is no limit to the
size of the package.

Romantic Love was impossible at the time when men stole wives. When
wife-stealing gave place to wife-buying, it was likewise out of the
question. To win by performance of the intellect, the woman must have
evolved to a point where she was able to approve and was sufficiently
free to express delight in the lover's accomplishments. Instead of
physical prowess she must be able to delight in brains. Petrarch paraded
his poems exactly as a peacock does its feathers.

And so it will be seen that it was the advance in the mental status of
woman that made possible the Italian Renaissance. The Greeks regarded a
woman who had brains with grave suspicion.

The person who can not see that sex equality must come before we reach
the millennium is too slow in spirit to read this book, and had better
stop right here and get him to his last edition of the "Evening
Garbage."

Lovers work for each other's approval, and so, through action and
reaction, we get a spiritual chemical emulsion that, while starting
with simple sex attraction, contains a gradually increasing percentage
of phosphorus until we get a fusion of intellect: a man and a woman who
think as one being.

* * * * *

For the benefit of people with a Petrarch bee and time to incinerate, I
may as well explain that Professor Marsand, of the ancient and honorable
University of Padua, has collected a "Petrarch Library," which consists
of nine hundred separate and distinct volumes on the work and influence
of Petrarch. This collection of books was sold to a French bibliophile
for the tidy sum of forty thousand pounds, and is now in the Louvre.

I have not read all of these nine hundred books, else probably I should
not know anything about Petrarch. It seems that for two hundred years
after the death of the poet there was a Petrarch cult, and a storm of
controversy filled the literary air.

The accounts of Petrarch's life up to the Eighteenth Century were very
contradictory; there were even a few attempts to give him a supernatural
parentage; and certain good men, as if to hold the balance true, denied
that he had ever existed.

Petrarch was born in Thirteen Hundred Four, and the same edict that sent
Dante into exile