journey.  The principal persons of the town took leave of him publicly at his departure, after pointing out to him the house in which he was born.  “It was a small house,” says Petrarch, “befitting an exile, as my father was.”  They told him that the proprietors would have made some alterations in it; but the town had interposed and prevented them, determined that the place should remain the same as when it was first consecrated by his birth.  The poet related what had been mentioned to a young man who wrote to him expressly to ask whether Arezzo could really boast of being his birthplace.  Petrarch added, that Arezzo had done more for him as a stranger than Florence as a citizen.  In truth, his family was of Florence; and it was only by accident that he was born at Arezzo.  He then went to Florence, where he made but a short stay.  There he found his friends still alarmed about the accident which had befallen him in his journey to Rome, the news of which he had communicated to Boccaccio.

Petrarch went on to Padua.  On approaching it, he perceived a universal mourning.  He soon learned the foul catastrophe which had deprived the city of one of its best masters.

Jacopo di Carrara had received into his house his cousin Guglielmo.  Though the latter was known to be an evil-disposed person, he was treated with kindness by Jacopo, and ate at his table.  On the 21st of December, whilst Jacopo was sitting at supper, in the midst of his friends, his people and his guards, the monster Guglielmo plunged a dagger into his breast with such celerity, that even those who were nearest could not ward off the blow.  Horror-struck, they lifted him up, whilst others put the assassin to instant death.

The fate of Jacopo Carrara gave Petrarch a dislike for Padua, and his recollections of Vaucluse bent his unsettled mind to return to its solitude; but he tarried at Padua during the winter.  Here he spent a great deal of his time with Ildebrando Conti, bishop of that city, a man of rank and merit.  One day, as he was dining at the Bishop’s palace, two Carthusian monks were announced:  they were well received by the Bishop, as he was partial to their order.  He asked them what brought them to Padua.  “We are going,” they said, “to Treviso, by the direction of our general, there to remain and establish a monastery.”  Ildebrando asked if they knew Father Gherardo, Petrarch’s brother.  The two monks, who did not know the poet, gave the most pleasing accounts of his brother.

The plague, they said, having got into the convent of Montrieux, the prior, a pious but timorous man, told his monks that flight was the only course which they could take:  Gherardo answered with courage, “Go whither you please!  As for myself I will remain in the situation in which Heaven has placed me.”  The prior fled to his own country, where death soon overtook him.  Gherardo remained in the convent, where the plague spared him, and left him alone, after having destroyed, within a few days,