At first the debaucher, he becomes at last the victim of his sensations.
Among the ancients we find no trace of sentimentalism. Their masculine
mood both of body and mind left no room for it, and hence the bracing
quality of their literature compared with that of recent times, its tonic
property, that seems almost too astringent to palates relaxed by a
daintier diet. The first great example of the degenerate modern tendency
was Petrarch, who may be said to have given it impulse and direction. A
more perfect specimen of the type has not since appeared. An intellectual
voluptuary, a moral _dilettante_, the first instance of that character,
since too common, the gentleman in search of a sensation, seeking a
solitude at Vaucluse because it made him more likely to be in demand at
Avignon, praising philosophic poverty with a sharp eye to the next rich
benefice in the gift of his patron, commending a good life but careful
first of a good living, happy only in seclusion but making a dangerous
journey to enjoy the theatrical show of a coronation in the Capitol,
cherishing a fruitless passion which broke his heart three or four times
a year and yet could not make an end of him till he had reached the ripe
age of seventy and survived his mistress a quarter of a century,--surely
a more exquisite perfection of inconsistency would be hard to find.
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