[Illustration:  MILAN CATHEDRAL.]

Next day he departed with Sacromoro di Pomieres, whose company was a great solace to him.  They arrived at Basle, where the Emperor was expected; but they waited in vain for him a whole month.  “This prince,” says Petrarch, “finishes nothing; one must go and seek him in the depths of barbarism.”  It was fortunate for him that he stayed no longer, for, a few days after he took leave of Basle, the city was almost wholly destroyed by an earthquake.

Petrarch arrived at Prague in Bohemia towards the end of July, 1356.  He found the Emperor wholly occupied with that famous Golden Bull, the provisions of which he settled with the States, at the diet of Nuremberg, and which he solemnly promulgated at another grand diet held at Christmas, in the same year.  This Magna Charta of the Germanic constitution continued to be the fundamental law of the empire till its dissolution.

Petrarch made but a short stay at Prague, notwithstanding his Majesty’s wish to detain him.  The Emperor, though sorely exasperated against the Visconti, had no thoughts of carrying war into Italy.  His affairs in Germany employed him sufficiently, besides the embellishment of the city of Prague.  At the Bohemian court our poet renewed a very amicable acquaintance with two accomplished prelates, Ernest, Archbishop of Pardowitz, and John Oczkow, Bishop of Olmuetz.  Of these churchmen he speaks in the warmest terms, and he afterwards corresponded with them.  We find him returned to Milan, and writing to Simonides on the 20th of September.

Some days after Petrarch’s return from Germany, a courier arrived at Milan with news of the battle of Poitiers, in which eighty thousand French were defeated by thirty thousand Englishmen, and in which King John of France was made prisoner.[M] Petrarch was requested by Galeazzo Visconti on this occasion to write for him two condoling letters, one to Charles the Dauphin, and another to the Cardinal of Boulogne.  Petrarch was thunderstruck at the calamity of King John, of whom he had an exalted idea.  “It is a thing,” he says, “incredible, unheard-of, and unexampled in history, that an invincible hero, the greatest king that ever lived, should have been conquered and made captive by an enemy so inferior.”

On this great event, our poet composed an allegorical eclogue, in which the King of France, under the name of Pan, and the King of England, under that of Articus, heartily abuse each other.  The city of Avignon is brought in with the designation of Faustula.  England reproaches the Pope with his partiality for the King of France, to whom he had granted the tithes of his kingdom, by which means he was enabled to levy an army.  Articus thus apostrophizes Faustula:—­

    Ah meretrix oblique tuens, ait Articus illi—­
    Immemorem sponsae cupidus quam mungit adulter! 
    Haec tua tota fides, sic sic aliena ministras! 
    Erubuit nihil ausa palam, nisi mollia pacis
    Verba, sed assuetis noctem complexibus egit—­