PETRARCH THE MAN 



really hate the city and courts; did he really love the 

 country; was he not, after all, doing Httle more than 

 imitate the men of antiquity, or doing something 

 which, because of its strangeness, would attract admir- 

 ing attention ? We can understand perhaps his dis- 

 liking Avignon, though it may not have been nearly so 

 bad as he describes; but if his hatred for town life was 

 genuine, why did he spend so much time at Parma, at 

 Padua, at Venice, and, above all, not a few years at the 

 court of the Visconti ? Why should the man who, if he 

 did not implant seeds of ambition in the heart of his 

 friend Rienzi to resuscitate the repubUc of Rome, cer- 

 tainly was keenly in sympathy with the attempt, and 

 regretted its failure, why should the descendant of a 

 Florentine, and the object almost of worship on the part 

 of the Florentines of his day, take up his abode with a 

 despotic family, Florence's most dangerous enemy ? 

 Certainly Boccaccio and other Florentine friends were 

 grieved, if not furious. One man, Gano da CoUe, com- 

 posed a sonnet on the poet's apostasy, had it memo- 

 rized by a jongleur, and then sent the performer to 

 declaim it in Petrarch's presence. Apparently Petrarch 

 was not much affected. In a letter to his friend, Fran- 

 cesco degli Apostoli, he declares that he was absolutely 

 forced to go there by the condition of his private affairs, 

 by the wishes (which were really commands) of the 

 Archbishop of Milan, who said that all he desired of 

 him was his presence, which would honor him and his 

 states. In 1904, at the celebration of the six-hundredth 



43 



