. His face and hands, and his legs, as seen from
his knees down, had the tone of the richest bronze; he wore a mountain
cap with a long tasseled fall to the back of it; his face was comely
and his eye beautiful; and he was so nobly ignorant of every thing
that a colt or young bullock could not have been better company. He
merely offered to guide us to Petrarch's house, and was silent, except
when spoken to, from that instant.

I am here tempted to say: Arqua is in the figure of a man stretched
upon the hill slope. The head, which is Petrarch's house, rests upon
the summit. The carelessly tossed arms lie abroad from this in one
direction, and the legs in the opposite quarter. It is a very lank
and shambling figure, without elegance or much proportion, and the
attitude is the last wantonness of loafing. We followed our lout
up the right leg, which is a gentle and easy ascent in the general
likeness of a street. World-old stone cottages crouch on either side;
here and there is a more ambitious house in decay; trees wave over
the street, and down its distance comes an occasional donkey-cart very
musically and leisurely. By all odds, Arqua and its kind of villages
are to be preferred to those hamlets of the plain which in Italy cling
to the white-hot highway without a tree to shelter them, and bake and
burn there in the merciless sun. Their houses of stuccoed stone are
crowded as thickly together as city houses, and these wretched little
villages do their worst to unite the discomforts of town and country
with a success dreadful to think of. In all countries villages are
hateful to the heart of civilized man. In the Lombard plains I wonder
that one stone of them rests upon another.

We reached Petrarch's house before the custodian had arrived to admit
us, and stood before the high stone wall which shuts in the front of
the house, and quite hides it from those without. This wall bears
the inscription, _Casa Petrarca_, and a marble tablet lettered to the
following effect:--

SE TI AGITA
SACRO AMORE DI PATRIA,
T'INCHINA A QUESTE MURA
OVE SPIRO LA GRAND' ANIMA,
IL CANTOR DEI SCIPIONI
E DI LAURA.

Which may be translated: "If thou art stirred by love of country,
bow to these walls, whence passed the great soul, the singer of the
Scipios and of Laura."

Meanwhile we became the centre of a group of the youths of Arqua, who
had kindly attended our progress in gradually increasing numbers from