sually acknowledged it.
He was a handsome youth, proud, quiet, low-voiced, self-reliant. His
form was tall and shapely, his face dark and oval, with almost perfect
features, his eyes especially expressive and luminous.

Priests in high office welcomed him to their homes, and ladies of high
degree sighed and made eyes at him as he passed, but they made eyes in
vain.

He was wedded to literature. The assistance he gave to his clerical
friends in preparing their sermons and addresses made his friendship
desirable. The good men he helped, occasionally placed mysterious
honorariums in his way which he pocketed with a silent prayer of
gratitude to Providence.

A trifle more ambition, a modicum of selfishness, a dash of the
worldly-wise, and his course would have been relieved of its curves, and
he would have gravitated straight to the red hat. From this to being
pope would have been but a step, for he was a king by nature.

But a pope must be a businessman, and a real, genuine king must draw his
nightcap on over his crown every night or he'll not keep his crown very
long.

Eternal vigilance is not only the price of liberty, but also of
everything else. High positions must be fought for inch by inch, and
held by a vigilance that never sleeps.

Petrarch would not pay the price of temporal power. His heart was in the
diphthong and anapest. He doted on a well-turned sentence, while the
thing that caught the eye of Boccaccio was a well-turned ankle.

It seems that Petrarch took that proud, cold position held by religious
enthusiasts, and which young novitiates sincerely believe in, that when
you have once entered the Church you are no longer subject to the
frailties of the flesh, and that the natural appetites are left behind.
This is all right when on parade, but there is an esoteric doctrine as
well as an exoteric, which all wise men know, namely, that men are men,
and women are women--God made them so--and that the tonsure and the veil
are vain when Eros and Opportunity join hands.

* * * * *

No man has ever taken the public more into his confidence than Petrarch,
not even Rousseau, who confessed more than was necessary, and probably
more than was true.

Petrarch tells us that at twenty-two years of age he had descended from
his high estate and been led into the prevailing follies of the court by
more than one of the dames of high degree who flocked to Avignon, the
seat of the Papal