...be very little applicable to poetry like that in question; because, in truth, as the Clown says in As You Like It, what is most feigning is most poetical, and because the Platonizing period, in which Petrarch lived, filled the world with imaginations not less extravagant than Laura; and many of them of the same kind, which have hardly yet ceased to be worshipped as realities. I am not, however, willing ...