From this period Petrarch’s health was never re-established.  He was languishing with wishes to repair to Perugia, and to see his dear friend the Cardinal Cabassole.  At the commencement of spring he mounted a horse, in order to see if he could support the journey; but his weakness was such that he could only ride a few steps.  He wrote to the Cardinal expressing his regrets, but seems to console himself by recalling to his old friend the days they had spent together at Vaucluse, and their long walks, in which they often strayed so far, that the servant who came to seek for them and to announce that dinner was ready could not find them till the evening.

It appears from this epistle that our poet had a general dislike to cardinals.  “You are not,” he tells Cabassole, “like most of your brethren, whose heads are turned by a bit of red cloth so far as to forget that they are mortal men.  It seems, on the contrary, as if honours rendered you more humble, and I do not believe that you would change your mode of thinking if they were to put a crown on your head.”  The good Cardinal, whom Petrarch paints in such pleasing colours, could not accustom himself to the climate of Italy.  He had scarcely arrived there when he fell ill, and died on the 26th of August in the same year.

Of all the friends whom Petrarch had had at Avignon, he had now none left but Mattheus le Long, Archdeacon of Liege, with whom his ties of friendship had subsisted ever since they had studied together at Bologna.  From him he received a letter on the 5th of January, 1372, and in his answer, dated the same day at Padua, he gives this picture of his condition, and of the life which he led:—­

“You ask about my condition—­it is this.  I am, thanks to God, sufficiently tranquil, and free, unless I deceive myself, from all the passions of my youth.  I enjoyed good health for a long time, but for two years past I have become infirm.  Frequently, those around me have believed me dead, but I live still, and pretty much the same as you have known me.  I could have mounted higher; but I wished not to do so, since every elevation is suspicious.  I have acquired many friends and a good many books:  I have lost my health and many friends; I have spent some time at Venice.  At present I am at Padua, where I perform the functions of canon.  I esteem myself happy to have quitted Venice, on account of that war which has been declared between that Republic and the Lord of Padua.  At Venice I should have been suspected:  here I am caressed.  I pass the greater part of the year in the country, which I always prefer to the town.  I repose, I write, I think; so you see that my way of life and my pleasures are the same as in my youth.  Having studied so long it is astonishing that I have learnt so little.  I hate nobody, I envy nobody.  In that first season of life which is full of error and presumption, I despised all the world except myself.  In middle life, I despised only myself.  In my aged years,