caught the father of Petrarch in its coils.

His father was a lawyer and politician, but on account of a political
cyclone he became a soldier of fortune--an exile. The mother got
permission to remain, and there she lived with their little brood at
Incisa, a small village on the Arno, fourteen miles above Florence.

It is a fine thing to live near a large city, but you should not go
there any more often than you can help. A city supplies inspiration,
from a distance, but once mix up in it and become a part of it, and you
are ironed out and subdued. The characters and tendencies of the
majority of men who have done things were formed in the country. Read
the lives of the men who lifted Athens, Rome, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris,
London and New York out of the fog of the commonplace, and you will
find, almost without exception, that they were outsiders. Transplanted
weeds often evolve into the finest flowers.

And so my advice would be to any one about to engage in the genius
business: Do not spend too much time in the selection of your parents,
beyond making sure that they are not very successful. They had better be
poor than very rich. They had better be ignorant than learned,
especially if they realize they are learned. They had better be morally
indifferent than spiritually smug. If their puritanism is carried to a
point where it absolutely repels, it then has its beneficent use,
teaching by antithesis. They had better be loose in their discipline
than carry it so far that it makes the child exempt from coming to
conclusions of his own. And as for parental love, it had better be
spread out than lavished so freely that it stands between the child and
the result of his own misdeeds.

In selecting environment, do not pick one too propitious, otherwise you
will plant your roses in muck, when what they demand for exercise is a
little difficulty in way of a few rocks to afford an anchor for roots.
Genius grows only in an environment that does not fully satisfy, and the
effort to better the environment and bring about better conditions is
exactly the one thing that evolves genius.

Petrarch was never quite satisfied. To begin with, he was not satisfied
with his father's name, which was Petracco. When our poet was fifteen he
called himself Petrarch, probably with Plutarch in mind, "for the sake
of euphony," he said. But the fact was that his wandering father had
returned home, and the boy looking him over with a critical eye