nd of Petrarch.

The poet has himself described his meeting with the Englishman travelling
in such splendid fashion to lay before his Holiness his master's claims
upon France. 'It was at the time,' says Petrarch, 'when the seeds of war
were growing that produced such a blood-stained harvest, in which the
sickles are not laid aside nor as yet are the garners closed.' He found
in his visitor 'a man of ardent mind and by no means unacquainted with
literature.' He discovered indeed that Richard was on some points full of
curious learning, and it occurred to him that one born and bred in
Britain might know the situation of the long-lost island of Thule. 'But
whether he was ashamed of his ignorance,' says Petrarch, 'or whether, as
I will not suspect, he grudged information upon the subject, and whether
he spoke his real mind or not, he only answered that he would tell me,
but not till he had returned home to his books, of which no man had a
more abundant supply.' The poet complains that the answer never came, in
spite of many letters of reminder; 'and so my friendship with a Briton
never taught me anything more about the Isle of Thule.'

Richard was consecrated Bishop of Durham in 1333, after an amicable
struggle between the Pope and the King as to the hand that should bestow
the preferment. A few months afterwards he became High Treasurer, and in
the same year was appointed Lord Chancellor. Within the next three years
he was sent on several embassies to France to urge the English claims,
and he afterwards went on the same business to Flanders and Brabant. He
writes with a kind of rapture of his first expeditions to Paris; in
later years he complained that the study of antiquities was superseding
science, in which the doctors of the Sorbonne had excelled. 'I was sent
first to the Papal Chair, and afterwards to the Court of France, and
thence to other countries, on tedious embassies and in perilous times,
bearing with me all the time that love of books which many waters could
not extinguish.' 'Oh Lord of Lords in Zion!' he ejaculates, 'what a flood
of pleasure rejoiced my heart when I reached Paris, the earthly Paradise.
How I longed to remain there, and to my ardent soul how few and short
seemed the days! There are the libraries in their chambers of spice, the
lawns wherein every growth of learning blooms. There the meads of Academe
shake to the footfall of the philosophers as they pace along: there are
the peaks of Parnassus