Note 001
From Chapter 70 of the Decline & Fall

The Memoires sur la Vie de Francois Petrarque (Amsterdam, 1764, 1767, 3 vols. in 4to), form a copious, original, and entertaining work, a labor of love, composed from the accurate study of Petrarch and his contemporaries; but the hero is too often lost in the general history of the age, and the author too often languishes in the affectation of politeness and gallantry. In the preface to his first volume, he enumerates and weighs twenty Italian biographers, who have professedly treated of the same subject.

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