and praising God, and thanking God as well for evil as for good; which evil, if I err not, is trial merely and not punishment.  And all the while I pray to Christ that he make good the end of my life, and have mercy on me, and forgive me, and even forget my youthful sins; wherefore, in this solitude, no words are so sweet to my lips as these of the psalm:  ’Delicta juventutis meoe, et ignorantias meas ne memineris.’  And with every feeling of the heart I pray God, when it please Him, to bridle my thoughts, so long unstable and erring; and as they have vainly wandered to many things, to turn them all to Him—­only true, certain, immutable Good.”

I venerate the house at Arqua because these sweet and solemn words were written in it.  We left its revered shelter (after taking a final look from the balcony down upon “the slopes clothed with vines and olives”) and returned to the lower village, where, in the court of the little church, we saw the tomb of Petrarch—­“an ark of red stone, upon four columns likewise of marble.”  The epitaph is this:—­

  “Frigida Francisci lapis hic tegit ossa Petrarcae;
  Suscipe, Virgo parens, animam; sate Virgine, parce
  Fessaque jam terris Coeli requiescat in arce.”

A head of the poet in bronze surmounts the ark.  The housekeeper of the parish priest, who ran out to enjoy my admiration and bounty, told me a wild local tradition of an attempt on the part of the Florentines to steal the bones of Petrarch away from Arqua, in proof of which she showed me a block of marble set into the ark, whence she said a fragment had been removed by the Florentines.  This local tradition I afterwards found verified, with names and dates, in a little “Life of Petrarch,” by F. Leoni, published at Padua in 1843.  It appears that this curious attempt of the Florentines to do doubtful honor to the great citizen whose hereditary civic rights they restored too late (about the time he was drawing nigh his “good end” at Arqua), was made for them by a certain monk of Portagruaro named Tommaso Martinelli.  He had a general instruction from his employers to bring away from Arqua “any important thing of Petrarch’s” that he could; and it occurred to this ill-advised friar to “move his bones.”  He succeeded on a night of the year 1630 in stealing the dead poet’s arm.  The theft being at once discovered, the Venetian Republic rested not till the thief was also discovered; but what became of the arm or of the sacrilegious monk neither the Signor Leoni nor the old women of Arqua give any account.  The Republic removed the rest of Petrarch’s body, which is now said to be in the Royal Museum of Madrid.