RGIL to retrace his landscape. There is a grove
at Magdalen College which retains the name of ADDISON's walk, where still
the student will linger; and there is a cave at Macao, which is still
visited by the Portuguese from a national feeling, for CAMOENS there
passed many days in composing his Lusiad. When PETRARCH was passing by his
native town, he was received with the honours of his fame; but when the
heads of the town conducted Petrarch to the house where the poet was born,
and informed him that the proprietor had often wished to make alterations,
but that the townspeople had risen to insist that the house which was
consecrated by the birth of Petrarch should be preserved unchanged; this
was a triumph more affecting to Petrarch than his coronation at Rome.[A]

[Footnote A: On this passage I find a remarkable manuscript note by Lord
Byron:--"It would have pained me more that 'the proprietor' should have
'often wished to make alterations, than it could give pleasure that the
rest of Arezzo rose against his _right_ (for _right_ he had); the
depreciation of the lowest of mankind is more painful than the applause of
the highest is pleasing; the sting of a scorpion is more in torture than
the possession of anything could be in rapture."]

In the village of Certaldo is still shown the house of BOCCACCIO; and on a
turret are seen the arms of the Medici, which they had sculptured there,
with an inscription alluding to a small house and a name which filled the
world; and in Ferrara, the small house which ARIOSTO built was purchased,
to be preserved, by the municipality, and there they still show the poet's
study; and under his bust a simple but affecting tribute to genius records
that "Ludovico Ariosto in this apartment wrote." Two hundred and eighty
years after the death of the divine poet it was purchased by the
_podesta_, with the money of the _commune_, that "the public veneration
may be maintained."[A] "Foreigners," says Anthony Wood of MILTON, "have,
out of pure devotion, gone to Bread-street to see the house and chamber
where he was born;" and at Paris the house which VOLTAIRE inhabited, and
at Ferney his study, are both preserved inviolate. In the study of
MONTESQUIEU at La Brede, near Bordeaux, the proprietor has preserved all
the furniture, without altering anything, that the apartment where this
great man meditated on his immortal work should want for nothing to assist
the reveries of the spectator; and on the side