Rome, on Easter Sunday in April, Thirteen Hundred Forty-one, with
great ceremony, Petrarch was crowned with the laurel-wreath, reviving
the ancient custom of thus honoring poets. Petrarch had been working
hard to have this distinction shown him at Paris as well as at Rome, and
the favorable response to his request at both places arrived on the same
day. His heart longed for Rome.

All his life he worked both wisely, and otherwise, for the Holy See to
be removed to that city of his dreams. Paris was second choice.

Petrarch had been cramming for exams for many months, and when he set
out on his journey in February his heart beat high. He stopped at Naples
to be examined by the aged King Robert as to his merit for the honor of
the laurel, and "for three days I shook all my ignorance," is Petrarch's
reference to the way he answered the questions asked him by the scholars
of his time.

The King wanted to go on to Rome to the coronation, but he was too
feeble in strength to do this, so he placed his own royal robe upon the
young man and sent him to the ancient city of learning, where a three
days' proceeding marked an epoch in the history of learning from which
the Renaissance began. Petrarch closed the Preraphaelite period in
letters.

While there is much in Petrarch's character that is vain and
self-conscious, it must not be forgotten that there was also much that
was true, tender, noble and excellent.

Petrarch was the founder of Humanism. He is the first man of modern
times to make us realize that Cicero, Vergil, Horace, Quintilian and
Seneca were real and actual men--men like ourselves. Before his time the
entire classic world stood to us in the same light that the Bible
characters did to most so-called educated people, say in Eighteen
Hundred Eighty-five. Even yet there are people who stoutly maintain that
Jesus was something different from a man, and that the relationship of
God to Moses, Isaiah, Abraham, Elijah and Paul was totally different
from God's attitude towards us.

Before Petrarch's time the entire mental fabric of Greece and Rome for
us was steeped in myth, fable and superstition. Petrarch raised the
status of man, and over and over again proclaimed the divinity of all
humanity.

He realized his own worth, and made countless other men realize theirs.
He wrote familiar letters to Homer, Sallust, Plato, Socrates and Seneca,
addressing them as equals, and issued their replies. He showed the
world tha