ght between the 19th and 20th days of July, 1304,--the precise date of
the birth of Petrarch.

During our poet's infancy, his family had still to struggle with an
adverse fate; for his proscribed and wandering father was obliged to
separate himself from his wife and child, in order to have the means of
supporting them.

As the pretext for banishing Petracco was purely personal, Eletta, his
wife, was not included in the sentence. She removed to a small property
of her husband's, at Ancisa, fourteen miles from Florence, and took the
little poet along with her, in the seventh month of his age. In their
passage thither, both mother and child, together with their guide, had a
narrow escape from being drowned in the Arno. Eletta entrusted her
precious charge to a robust peasant, who, for fear of hurting the child,
wrapt it in a swaddling cloth, and suspended it over his shoulder, in
the same manner as Metabus is described by Virgil, in the eleventh book
of the AEneid, to have carried his daughter Camilla. In passing the
river, the horse of the guide, who carried Petrarch, stumbled, and sank
down; and in their struggles to save him, both his sturdy bearer and the
frantic parent were, like the infant itself, on the point of being
drowned.

After Eletta had settled at Ancisa, Petracco often visited her by
stealth, and the pledges of their affection were two other sons, one of
whom died in childhood. The other, called Gherardo, was educated along
with Petrarch. Petrarch remained with his mother at Ancisa for seven
years.

The arrival of the Emperor, Henry VII., in Italy, revived the hopes of
the banished Florentines; and Petracco, in order to wait the event, went
to Pisa, whither he brought his wife and Francesco, who was now in his
eighth year. Petracco remained with his family in Pisa for several
months; but tired at last of fallacious hopes, and not daring to trust
himself to the promises of the popular party, who offered to recall him
to Florence, he sought an asylum in Avignon, a place to which many
Italians were allured by the hopes of honours and gain at the papal
residence. In this voyage, Petracco and his family were nearly
shipwrecked off Marseilles.

But the numbers that crowded to Avignon, and its luxurious court,
rendered that city an uncomfortable place for a family in slender
circumstances. Petracco accordingly removed his household, in 1315, to
Carpentras, a small quiet town, where living was cheaper than at