From this letter it appears that this epic, to which he owed the laurel and no small part of his living reputation, had not yet been published, with the exception of thirty-four verses, which had appeared at Naples through the indiscretion of Barbatus.  Boccaccio said that Petrarch kept it continually locked up, and had been several times inclined to burn it.  The author of the Decameron himself did not long survive his master:  he died the 21st of December, 1375.

Petrarch so far succeeded in clearing the road to the study of antiquities, as to deserve the title which he justly retains of the restorer of classical learning; nor did his enthusiasm for ancient monuments prevent him from describing them with critical taste.  He gave an impulse to the study of geography by his Itinerarium Syriacum.  That science had been partially revived in the preceding century, by the publication of Marco Polo’s travels, and journeys to distant countries had been accomplished more frequently than before, not only by religious missionaries, but by pilgrims who travelled from purely rational curiosity:  but both of these classes of travellers, especially the religionists, dealt profusely in the marvellous; and their falsehoods were further exaggerated by copyists, who wished to profit by the sale of MSS. describing their adventures.  As an instance of the doubtful wonders related by wayfaring men, may be noticed what is told of Octorico da Pordenone, who met, at Trebizond, with a man who had trained four thousand partridges to follow him on journeys for three days together, who gathered around like chickens when he slept, and who returned home after he had sold to the Emperor as many of them as his imperial majesty chose to select.

His treatise, “De Remediis utriusque Fortunae” (On the Remedies for both Extremes of Fortune) was one of his great undertakings in the solitude of Vaucluse, though it was not finished till many years afterwards, when it was dedicated to Azzo Correggio.  Here he borrows, of course, largely from the ancients; at the same time he treats us to some observations on human nature sufficiently original to keep his work from the dryness of plagiarism.

His treatise on “A Solitary Life” was written as an apology for his own love of retirement—­retirement, not solitude, for Petrarch had the social feeling too strongly in his nature to desire a perfect hermitage.  He loved to have a friend now and then beside him, to whom he might say how sweet is solitude.  Even his deepest retirement in the “shut-up valley” was occasionally visited by dear friends, with whom his discourse was so interesting that they wandered in the woods so long and so far, that the servant could not find them to announce that their dinner was ready.  In his rapturous praise of living alone, our poet, therefore, says more than he sincerely meant; he liked retirement, to be sure, but then it was with somebody within reach of him, like the young lady in Miss Porter’s novel, who was fond of solitude, and walked much in Hyde Park by herself, with her footman behind her.