No More Learning

A few days after he had made this will, he set out for Rome. The
pleasure with which he undertook the journey made him suppose that he
could support it. But when he reached Ferrara he fell down in a fit, in
which he continued thirty hours, without sense or motion; and it was
supposed that he was dead. The most violent remedies were used to
restore him to consciousness, but he says that he felt them no more than
a statue.

Nicholas d'Este II. , the son of Obizzo, was at that time Lord of
Ferrara, a friend and admirer of Petrarch. The physicians thought him
dead, and the whole city was in grief. The news spread to Padua, Venice,
Milan, and Pavia. Crowds came from all parts to his burial. Ugo d'Este,
the brother of Nicholas, a young man of much merit, who had an
enthusiastic regard for Petrarch, paid him unremitting attention during
his illness. He came three or four times a day to see him, and sent
messengers incessantly to inquire how he was. Our poet acknowledged that
he owed his life to the kindness of those two noblemen.

When Petrarch was recovering, he was impatient to pursue his route,
though the physicians assured him that he could not get to Rome alive.
He would have attempted the journey in spite of their warnings, if his
strength had seconded his desires, but he was unable to sit his horse.
They brought him back to Padua, laid on a soft seat on a boat.
His
unhoped-for return caused as much surprise as joy in that city, where he
was received by its lords and citizens with as much joy as if he had
come back from the other world. To re-establish his health, he went to a
village called Arqua, situated on the slope of a hill famous for the
salubrity of its air, the goodness of its wines, and the beauty of its
vineyards. An everlasting spring reigns there, and the place commands a
view of pleasingly-scattered villas. Petrarch built himself a house on
the high ground of the village, and he added to the vines of the country
a great number of other fruit-trees.

He had scarcely fixed himself at Arqua, when he put his last hand to a
work which he had begun in the year 1367. To explain the subject of this
work, and the circumstances which gave rise to it, I think it necessary
to state what was the real cause of our poet's disgust at Venice. He
appeared there, no doubt, to lead an agreeable life among many friends,
whose society was delightful to him. But there reigned in this city what
Petrarch thought licentiousness in conversation. The most ignorant
persons were in the habit of undervaluing the finest geniuses. It fills
one with regret to find Petrarch impatient of a liberty of speech,
which, whatever its abuses may be, cannot be suppressed, without
crushing the liberty of human thought. At Venice, moreover, the
philosophy of Aristotle was much in vogue, if doctrines could be called
Aristotelian, which had been disfigured by commentators, and still worse
garbled by Averroes. The disciples of Averroes at Venice insisted on the
world having been co-eternal with God, and made a joke of Moses and his
book of Genesis. "Would the eternal architect," they said, "remain from
all eternity doing nothing? Certainly not! The world's youthful
appearance is owing to its revolutions, and the changes it has undergone
by deluges and conflagrations. " "Those free-thinkers," Petrarch tells
us, "had a great contempt for Christ and his Apostles, as well as for
all those who did not bow the knee to the Stagirite.