rning,
but because it is so often perverted by evil-minded men.' He seems to
have worked for a time under his friend Cino of Pistoia, and to have
attended the lectures of the jurist Andrea, whose daughter Novella is
said to have sometimes taken the class 'with a little curtain in front of
her beautiful face.' While studying at Bologna, Petrarch made his first
collection of books instead of devoting himself to the Law. His old
father once paid him a visit and began burning the parchments on a
funeral pile: the boy's supplications and promises saved the poor
remainder. He tried hard to follow his father's practical advice, but
always in vain; 'Nature called him in another direction, and it is idle
to struggle against her.'

On Petrarch's return to Avignon he obtained the friendship of Cardinal
Colonna: and here the whole course of his life was fixed when he first
saw Laura 'in a green dress embroidered with violets.' Her face was
stamped upon his mind, and haunted him through all efforts at repose: and
perhaps it is to her influence that he owed his rank among the lyrical
poets and the crown bestowed at Rome. His whole life was thenceforth
devoted to the service of the book. He declared that he had the
writing-disease, and was the victim of a general epidemic. 'All the world
is taking up the writer's part, which ought to be confined to a few: the
number of the sick increases and the disease becomes daily more
virulent.' A victim of the mania himself, he laughs at his own
misfortune: yet it might have been better, he thought, to have been a
labourer or a weaver at the loom. 'There are several kinds of
melancholia: and some madmen will write books, just as others toss
pebbles in their hands.' As for literary fame, it is but a harvest of
thin air, 'and it is only fit for sailors to watch a breeze and to
whistle for a wind.'

Petrarch collected books in many parts of Europe. In 1329, when he was
twenty-five years of age, he made a tour through Switzerland to the
cities of Flanders. The Flemish schools had lost something of their
ancient fame since the development of the University of Paris. Several
fine collections of books were still preserved in the monasteries. The
Abbey of Laubes was especially rich in biblical commentaries and other
works of criticism, which were all destroyed afterwards in a fire, except
a Vulgate of the eighth century that happened to be required for use at
the Council of Trent. Petrarch described hi