supported by sixteen doctors on a bier covered with
cloth of gold bordered with ermine, was carried to the parish church of
Arqua, which was fitted up in a manner suitable to the ceremony. After
the funeral oration had been pronounced by Bonaventura da Praga, of the
order of the hermits of St. Augustin, the corpse was interred in a
chapel which Petrarch himself had erected in the parish church in honour
of the Virgin. A short time afterwards, Francesco Brossano, having
caused a tomb of marble to be raised on four pillars opposite to the
same church, transferred the body to that spot, and engraved over it an
epitaph in some bad Latin lines, the rhyming of which is their greatest
merit. In the year 1637, Paul Valdezucchi, proprietor of the house and
grounds of Petrarch at Arqua, caused a bust of bronze to be placed above
his mausoleum.

In the year 1630, his monument was violated by some sacrilegious
thieves, who carried off some of his bones for the sake of selling them.
The Senate of Venice severely punished the delinquents, and by their
decree upon the subject testified their deep respect for the remains of
this great man.

The moment the poet's will was opened, Brossano, his heir, hastened to
forward to his friends the little legacies which had been left them;
among the rest his fifty florins to Boccaccio. The answer of that most
interesting man is characteristic of his sensibility, whilst it
unhappily shows him to be approaching the close of his life (for he
survived Petrarch but a year), in pain and extreme debility. "My first
impulse," he says to Brossano, "on hearing of the decease of my master,"
so he always denominated our poet, "was to have hastened to his tomb to
bid him my last adieu, and to mix my tears with yours. But ever since I
lectured in public on the Divina Commedia of Dante, which is now ten
months, I have suffered under a malady which has so weakened and changed
me, that you would not recognise me. I have totally lost the stoutness
and complexion which I had when you saw me at Venice. My leanness is
extreme, my sight is dim, my hands shake, and my knees totter, so that I
can hardly drag myself to my country-house at Certaldo, where I only
languish. After reading your letter, I wept a whole night for my dear
master, not on his own account, for his piety permits us not to doubt
that he is now happy, but for myself and for his friends whom he has
left in this world, like a vessel in a stormy sea witho