ne so before him; and Shakespeare and Ronsard, as Sir Sidney Lee
has proved, were literary legatees of Petrarch, the aforesaid native
of Arezzo. And yet, if we were to tell the story of how Rossetti's
sonnets came to be composed, it is doubtful if we should go further
back in time than the occasion when his friend Deverell introduced him
to the beautiful daughter of a Sheffield cutler who became the
immediate inspiration of his poetry of love.

Dickens, in many novels, of which "David Copperfield" may be taken
as an example, has chosen to tell the entire life-story of his hero
from birth up to maturity. But other novelists, like George
Meredith in "The Egoist," have chosen to represent events that
pass, for the most part, in one place, and in an exceedingly short
stretch of time. It is by no means certain that Meredith does not know
as much about the boyhood and youth of Sir Willoughby Patterne as
Dickens knew about the early years of David Copperfield; but he has
chosen to compact his novel by presenting only a brief series of
events which exhibit his hero at maturity. Surely Turgenieff, after
writing out that _dossier_ of each of his characters to which Henry
James referred, must have known a great many events in their lives
which he chose to omit from his finished novel. It is interesting to
imagine the sort of plot that George Eliot would have built out of
the materials of "The Scarlet Letter." Probably she would have begun
the narrative in England at the time when Hester was a young girl.
She would have set forth the meeting of Hester and Chillingworth
and would have analyzed the causes culminating in their marriage.
Then she would have taken the couple overseas to the colony of
Massachusetts. Here Hester would have met Arthur Dimmesdale; and
George Eliot would have expended all her powers as an analyst of
life in tracing the sweet thoughts and imperious desires that led the
lovers to the dolorous pass. The fall of Hester would have been the
major knot in George Eliot's entire narrative. It would have stood at
the culmination of the _nouement_ of her plot: the subsequent
events would have been merely steps in the _denouement_. Yet the
fall of Hester was already a thing of the past at the outset of
the story that Hawthorne chose to represent. He was interested only in
the after-effects of Hester's sin upon herself and her lover and
her husband. The major knot, or culmination, of his plot was therefore
the revelatio