'I have spent a stupid day reading the Abbe de Sade's Memoirs of Petrarch. What a feeble whipster was this Petrarch with all his talents! To go dangling about, for the space of twenty years, puffing and sighing after a little coquette, whose charms lay briefly in the fervour of his imagination, and the art she had to keep him wavering between hope and despondency - at once ridiculous and deplorable - that he might write sonnets in her praise!'