The plague was now increasing in Italy; and, after it had deprived Petrarch of many dear friends, it struck at the root of all his affections by attacking Laura.  He describes his apprehensions on this occasion in several of his sonnets.  The event confirmed his melancholy presages; for a letter from his friend Socrates informed him that Laura had died of the plague on the 1st of April, 1348.  His biographers may well be believed, when they tell us that his grief was extreme.  Laura’s husband took the event more quietly, and consoled himself by marrying again, when only seven months a widower.

Petrarch, when informed of her death, wrote that marginal note upon his copy of Virgil, the authenticity of which has been so often, though unjustly, called in question.  His words were the following:—­

“Laura, illustrious for her virtues, and for a long time celebrated in my verses, for the first time appeared to my eyes on the 6th of April, 1327, in the church of St. Clara, at the first hour of the day.  I was then in my youth.  In the same city, and at the same hour, in the year 1348, this luminary disappeared from our world.  I was then at Verona, ignorant of my wretched situation.  Her chaste and beautiful body was buried the same day, after vespers, in the church of the Cordeliers.  Her soul returned to its native mansion in heaven.  I have written this with a pleasure mixed with bitterness, to retrace the melancholy remembrance of ‘MY GREAT LOSS.’  This loss convinces me that I have nothing now left worth living for, since the strongest cord of my life is broken.  By the grace of God, I shall easily renounce a world where my hopes have been vain and perishing.  It is time for me to fly from Babylon when the knot that bound me to it is untied.”

This copy of Virgil is famous, also, for a miniature picture expressing the subject of the AEneid; which, by the common consent of connoisseurs in painting, is the work of Simone Memmi.  Mention has already been made of the friendly terms that subsisted between that painter and our poet; whence it may be concluded that Petrarch, who received this precious MS. in 1338, requested of Simone this mark of his friendship, to render it more valuable.

When the library of Pavia, together with the city, was plundered by the French in 1499, and when many MSS. were carried away to the library of Paris, a certain inhabitant of Pavia had the address to snatch this copy of Virgil from the general rapine.  This individual was, probably, Antonio di Pirro, in whose hands or house the Virgil continued till the beginning of the sixteenth century, as Vellutello attests in his article on the origin of Laura.  From him it passed to Antonio Agostino; afterwards to Fulvio Orsino, who prized it very dearly.  At Orsino’s death it was bought at a high price by Cardinal Federigo Borromeo, and placed in the Ambrosian library, which had been founded by him with much care and at vast expense.