h was to stamp itself upon his
verse for all ages and for all lands, Petrarch had fixed his first
look on Laura.

Afterward he got to know her personally, and they often met in
society. Of Laura herself nothing certain is known, except that her
maiden name was Noves and she lived in Avignon. Some writers say that
she always remained single, in her father's house, and some that she
married and had many children. There are a few pictures of her, for
the authenticity of which it is impossible to answer. They are all
handsome, and remarkable for an almost nun-like shyness and sweetness
of expression. She was certainly a woman of refined taste and
cultivated mind, and at a time when female modesty was the only rare
adornment of the fair sex in Avignon, her character was as stainless
as the first snow-flake which fell on the summit of the Estrelles. The
connection between Petrarch and Laura seems to our modern ideas a very
singular one.

To explain the position in which they stood to each other, we must
turn to the manners and customs of their age and country. Partly,
perhaps, through the great reverence paid in the Roman Catholic Church
to the Virgin Mary and other female saints, a sort of woman worship
had, in the thirteenth century, spread through the south of
Christendom. It was no unusual thing for a knight or a troubadour to
select a certain lady, celebrate her in his songs, call on her name in
the hour of danger, and wear her color in battle. The adored or the
adorer might be either of them married--that made no difference; and
the tender litany would sometimes run on for years, long after the
idol's hair was silvered and her form more remarkable for plumpness
than grace.

Homage of this sort did not at all hurt the reputation of her to whom
it was paid; not even her husband and children respected her the less
for it. Some distinguished ladies had many devotees of this kind. On
her side, the woman professed herself to have for her worshipper an
equable, cordial feeling, which never went beyond sisterly friendship.
Whether these platonic attachments ever slid into something warmer we
cannot say. The history of the time gives us no examples of such being
the case.

As for Petrarch, Laura's beauty and the graces of her mind first awoke
within him a romantic sentiment, which, according to the fashion of
his brethren the troubadours, he at once begun publicly to proclaim in
his verse.

By degrees, through his though