little below the church, and abounds plentifully, in the
driest season, with that soft water which was the ancient
wealth of the Euganean Hills. It would be more attractive,
were it not, in some seasons, beset with hornets and wasps. No
other coincidence could assimilate the tombs of Petrarch and
Archilochus. The revolutions of centuries have spared these
sequestered valleys, and the only violence which has been
offered to the ashes of Petrarch was prompted, not by hate,
but veneration. An attempt was made to rob the sarcophagus of
its treasure, and one of the arms was stolen by a Florentine
through a rent which is still visible. The injury is not
forgotten, but has served to identify the poet with the
country, where he was born, but where he would not live. A
peasant boy of Arquà being asked who Petrarch was, replied,
"that the people of the parsonage knew all about him, but that
he only knew that he was a Florentine."

Every footstep of Laura's lover has been anxiously traced and
recorded. The house in which he lodged is shown in Venice. The
inhabitants of Arezzo, in order to decide the ancient
controversy between their city and the neighbouring Ancisa,
where Petrarch was carried when seven months old, and remained
until his seventh year, have designated by a long inscription
the spot where their great fellow citizen was born. A tablet
has been raised to him at Parma, in the chapel of St. Agatha,
at the cathedral, because he was archdeacon of that society,
and was only snatched from his intended sepulture in their
church by a _foreign_ death. Another tablet with a bust has
been erected to him at Pavia, on account of his having passed
the autumn of 1368 in that city, with his son-in-law Brossano.