them. He should consider them as his models and guides in the path to glory. Their great actions will warm his soul, and spur him on to the like. O, how glorious is that ambition that springs from virtue! You may present to your prince a pattern of every virtue without going far. If love does not blind me, I know no one more perfect than that of his uncle, the divine king Robert; whose death has proved, by the calamities that have followed it, how necessary his life was to his people. He was great, wise, kind, and magnanimous! In a word, he was the king of kings! His nephew can do nothing better than tread in his steps.

You feel, my lord, the burden with which you are charged; but a great man finds nothing hard or weighty when he is sure he is beloved. At the head of your pupil's counsels, the confidant of all his secrets, you are as dear to him as Chiron was to Achilles, as Achates to Æneas, and as Lelius to Scipio. Complete what you have begun. Love accomplishes all things; he who partakes the honour should participate in the labour. Adieu! You are the glory of our country, and of your own. I have said a great deal; but I have left much more unsaid.'

Petrarch made use of the same courier to answer a letter of Barbatus de Sulmone, who lamented he had not found him at Rome when he

went to gain the jubilee, and begged he would send him his Africa. You speak of our not meeting at Rome as a misfortune; I hold it to have been providential. If we had met in that great city, we should have been more occupied with the arts and the sciences than with our souls; and should have sought to ornament our understandings rather than to purify our hearts. The sciences are most agreeable food for the mind: but what a void do they leave in the heart, if they are not directed to their true and perfect end! As to my Africa, if it ever sees the day, it shall visit you; but it has languished of late through the negligence of its master and the obstacles of fortune.

'I am now freed from many embarrassments, and my mind approaches rather nearer that point to which it ought to arrive. I hope, however, to be always making some little progress, and to be learning something every day, till death closes my eyes: at least, as said a wise old man, I will strive so to do: and what gives me hopes I shall succeed, is, the passions that troubled my soul have almost ceased to torment me; and I flatter myself in a little time to be wholly exempted from their power. Adieu, my dear Barbatus. If we should not be able to meet in this world, we shall see one another again in the heavenly Jerusalem!' Avignon, 1352.

The pope's sickness detained Petrarch a long time at Avignon, and retarded the decision of the greatest affairs: it began about autumn. A malignant humor broke out in his face; it swelled prodigiously, and he was judged to be in great danger. In the month of December his condition terribly alarmed those who were interested in him. He was a little better in January, and they profited by this gleam of health to assemble the consistories for necessary business; in one of which the affair of Naples was decided: but this was only a false hope; and we see, by a letter of Petrarch to the bishop of Cavaillon, that he relapsed soon after. This prelate went and passed five days at Vaucluse, without acquainting Petrarch, who complains of it in a letter, as follows:

And could you pass five days without me in my transalpine Helicon? I was so near to you, that had you wanted any thing easy to procure, I should have heard if you had called me. Why did you envy me this sweet consolation? I should complain bitterly, if you had not compensated your negligence to me by your indulgence to my works, with which I find you have passed the days and the nights. It is not conceivable that, in the midst of so many poets, historians, philosophers, and saints, you should give the preference to my trifles. Iowe this to your tender blindness for me. My housekeeper tells me you had a mind to carry away some

of my books, and did not dare to do it without my consent. Ought I not from this to fear some coolness on your part? Use your pleasure, my dear father! Do not you know that all I have is yours?

'I carried your letter to cardinal Taillerand, our master. He thanks you; and orders me to tell you, he has long determined never to importune the pope for any advantage to himself. He is in

accessible to all inordinate desires: it is rather to the turn of his mind, than the greatness of his fortune, he owes this manner of thinking. You know the public news. The king of Sicily has at last obtained the crown he has sighed for so long. God grant that his peace with the king of Hungary may be lasting. Our pope came back from death's door, and is returned thither again. He would have been well long ago, if he had not about him a gang of physicians, whom I look on as the plagues of the rich. Cardinal d'Ostie is this moment expiring. He has lived long enough, according to nature; but his death is a loss to the republic.'

In the beginning of March the pope sent a young man on some business to Petrarch. After inquiring about the pope's disorder, he charged the young man expressly to desire the pontiff from him, to take care of the physicians, and recollect the epitaph of that emperor,

I was killed by the multitude of physicians.' The young man, who was extremely ignorant, related what had been told him in a very dark and confused manner. The pope, who highly esteemed the sentiments of Petrarch, sent the young man back to him, with an order to write down what was told him. In obedience to this order, Petrarch wrote the following letter:

'Holy father! I shudder at the account of your fever! Compare me not, however, to those flatterers whom the satirist describes, who are drowned in tears if they see a friend cry, or who sweat when he says I am hot. I rather resemble the man of whom Cicero speaks, who trembled for the welfare of Rome because his own was concerned. My health depends upon yours. I will trouble you with few words; conscious who it is that addresses the divine ears of his holy father, and of the state he is in at present.

'I tremble to see your bed always surrounded with physicians, who are never agreed, because it would be a reproach for the second to think as the first, and only repeat what he had said before. "It is not to be doubted," as Pliny says, ❝ that, desiring to raise a name by their discoveries, they make experiments upon us, and thus barter away our lives." We see in this profession what we sec in no other. We confide at once in those who call themselves physicians, though there is