was not
overpleased with the gentleman.

Then he became displeased with his mother for having contracted an
intimacy with such a man. Hence the change of name--he belonged to
neither of them. But as this was at adolescence, the unrest of the youth
should not be taken too seriously.

The family had moved several times, living in half a dozen different
towns and cities. They finally landed at Avignon, the papal capital.

Matters had mended the fortunes of Petracco, and the boy was induced to
go to Montpelier and study law. The legend has it that the father,
visiting the son a few months later, found on his desk a pile of books
on rhetoric and poetry, and these the fond parent straightway flung into
the fire. The boy entering the room about that time lifted such a
protest that a "Vergil" and a "Cicero" were recovered from the flames,
but the other books, including some good original manuscript, went up in
smoke.

The mother of Petrarch died when our poet was twenty years of age. In
about two years after, his father also passed away. Their loss did not
crush him absolutely, for we find he was able to write a poem expressing
a certain satisfaction on their souls being safely in Paradise.

At this time Petrarch had taken clerical orders and was established as
assistant to the secretary of one of the cardinals. Up to his twentieth
year Petrarch was self-willed, moody, and subject to fits of melancholy.
He knew too much and saw things too clearly to be happy.

Four authors had fed his growing brain--Cicero, Seneca, Livy and Vergil.
In these he reveled. "Always in my hand or hidden in my cloak I carried
a book," he says, "and thoughts seem to me to be so much more than
things that the passing world--the world of action and
achievement--seemed to me to be an unworthy world, and the world of
thought to be the true and real world. It will thus be seen that I was
young and my mind unformed."

The boy was a student by nature--he had a hunger for books. He knew
Latin as he did Italian, and was familiarizing himself with Greek.
Learning was to him religion. Priests who were simply religious did not
interest him. He had dallied in schools and monasteries at Montpelier,
Pisa, Bologna, Rome, Venice and Avignon, moving from place to place, a
dilettante of letters. At none of the places named had he really entered
his name as a student. He was in a class by himself--he knew more than
his teachers, and from his nineteenth year they u