ho honoured Avignon, by making that town
the theatre of an honest French passion, and played off for one and
twenty years her _little machinery_ of alternate favours and
refusals[571] upon the first poet of the age. It was, indeed, rather too
unfair that a female should be made responsible for eleven children upon
the faith of a misinterpreted abbreviation, and the decision of a
librarian.[572] It is, however, satisfactory to think that the love of
Petrarch was not platonic. The happiness which he prayed to possess but
once and for a moment was surely not of the mind,[573] and something so
very real as a marriage project, with one who has been idly called a
shadowy nymph, may be, perhaps, detected in at least six places of his
own sonnets. The love of Petrarch was neither platonic nor poetical; and
if in one passage of his works he calls it "amore veementeissimo ma
unico ed onesto," he confesses, in a letter to a friend, that it was
guilty and perverse, that it absorbed him quite, and mastered his heart.

In this case, however, he was perhaps alarmed for the culpability of his
wishes; for the Abbe de Sade himself, who certainly would not have been
scrupulously delicate if he could have proved his descent from Petrarch
as well as Laura, is forced into a stout defence of his virtuous
grandmother. As far as relates to the poet, we have no security for the
innocence, except perhaps in the constancy of his pursuit. He assures us
in his epistle to posterity, that, when arrived at his fortieth year, he
not only had in horror, but had lost all recollection and image of any
"irregularity." But the birth of his natural daughter cannot be assigned
earlier than his thirty-ninth year; and either the memory or the
morality of the poet must have failed him, when he forgot or was guilty
of this _slip_.[574] The weakest argument for the purity of this love
has been drawn from the permanence of its effects, which survived the
object of his passion. The reflection of M. de la Bastie, that virtue
alone is capable of making impressions which death cannot efface, is
one of those which everybody applauds, and everybody finds not to be
true, the moment he examines his own breast or the records of human
feeling.[575] Such apophthegms can do nothing for Petrarch or for the
cause of morality, except with the very weak and the very young. He that
has made even a little progress beyond ignorance and pupilage cannot be
edified with anything but truth