. What is called vindicating the honour
of an individual or a nation, is the most futile, tedious, and
uninstructive of all writing; although it will always meet with more
applause than that sober criticism, which is attributed to the malicious
desire of reducing a great man to the common standard of humanity. It
is, after all, not unlikely that our historian was right in retaining
his favourite hypothetic salvo, which secures the author, although it
scarcely saves the honour of the still unknown mistress of
Petrarch.[576]

9.

They keep his dust in Arqua, where he died.
Stanza xxxi. line 1.

Petrarch retired to Arqua immediately on his return from the
unsuccessful attempt to visit Urban V. at Rome, in the year 1370, and
with the exception of his celebrated visit to Venice in company with
Francesco Novello da Carrara, he appears to have passed the four last
years of his life between that charming solitude and Padua. For four
months previous to his death he was in a state of continual languor, and
in the morning of July the 19th, in the year 1374, was found dead in his
library chair with his head resting upon a book. The chair is still
shown amongst the precious relics of Arqua, which, from the
uninterrupted veneration that has been attached to everything relative
to this great man from the moment of his death to the present hour,
have, it may be hoped, a better chance of authenticity than the
Shaksperian memorials of Stratford-upon-Avon.

Arqua (for the last syllable is accented in pronunciation, although the
analogy of the English language has been observed in the verse) is
twelve miles from Padua, and about three miles on the right of the high
road to Rovigo, in the bosom of the Euganean hills. After a walk of
twenty minutes across a flat well-wooded meadow, you come to a little
blue lake, clear but fathomless, and to the foot of a succession of
acclivities and hills, clothed with vineyards and orchards, rich with
fir and pomegranate trees, and every sunny fruit shrub. From the banks
of the lake the road winds into the hills, and the church of Arqua is
soon seen between a cleft where two ridges slope towards each other, and
nearly enclose the village. The houses are scattered at intervals on the
steep sides of these summits; and that of the poet is on the edge of a
little knoll overlooking two descents, and commanding a view, no