78 Petrarch at the Banquet 



had not started till May 25;'' did not arrive till the 29th^ or 30th/** 

 two days after Lionel, and then at Pavia. Secondl}^ he was 

 suffering about this time, and for six weeks after, from an 

 injury to his shin, which kept him under the care of physicians. ^^ 

 Thirdly, the chief purpose of his visit was not to attend the 



Arctic Ocean. Not much more flattering is the view of English learning 

 expressed by Boccaccio in his verses written on Petrarch's Africa 

 (Corazzini, p. 250) : 



Hispanus et Gallus, studiis tardiisquc Britannus. 



^ Sen. II. 2. 



° So De Sade 3. 719; Fracassetti i. 187. 



"So Korting, p. 437; but Magenta (i. 133) says May 31. Petrarch's 

 letter says : 'VI illuc die, hora tertia, perveni.' This would seem to 

 indicate 9 o'clock, or earlier, on May 30. 



" Writing on July 21 to Francisco Bruni, he speaks of this affliction 

 (Sen. II. 2) : 'Illico rediturus fueram, non obstante tibiae coUisione, qua 

 in parte corporis a pueritia parum foelix fui, et quae me tum saepe olim, 

 tum per hos dies complusculos afflixit, invisasque [Petrarch had no 

 opinion of doctors] inter medicorum manus usque nunc detinet.' This 

 was not the first time he had suffered from an injury to his left leg. In 

 1350, when he was traveling to Rome for the fifth time, the horse of one 

 of his companions, an old abbot, came up on his left side, and, lashing 

 out with his heels at Petrarch's horse, struck the poet instead, just below 

 the knee. This happened between Bolseno and Viterbo, and it took him 

 three days more to go from Viterbo to Rome (54 miles). The bruise 

 festered, and when he wrote to Boccaccio on Nov. 2, he had already been 

 in bed with it fourteen days, which seemed to him fourteen years, since 

 his mind grew torpid when he could not stir about (Fam. 11. i.) In 1359 

 a stranger incident befell him. He had a large volume of Cicero's letters, 

 copied by his own hand some time before. This he kept on a shelf just 

 beside the door of his library. On this particular occasion, as he entered 

 the room, a fiap of his garment caught on the book, and brought it down 

 on the same left leg, this time just above the heel; the next day the 

 same thing occurred again, and it was not till the book had fallen a third 

 and a fourth time that he changed its place. Petrarch went about his 

 affairs as usual, hoping the bruise would heal, but again it festered, and 

 he had to submit to fasting, frequent fomentations, and absolute repose. 

 He adds : 'It seems as though my many pains and aches had always, since 

 my childhood, fastened upon this unfortunate left leg, and now it forces 

 me to stay in bed, which I detest' (Fam. 21. 10). This was written on 

 Oct. IS, but the accident must have occurred much earlier, for on Aug. 

 18 of the next year (1360) he writes from Milan to Boccaccio that a year 

 after the mischance, finding things grow from bad to worse, he had 

 dismissed the doctors and taken matters into his own hands ; he had never 

 suffered so much in his life, he says, but was now slowly recovering 



