After some more adventures and wanderings the old man fixed his residence at Arquà, a village situated on the Euganean hills, at four leagues distance from Padua. Here he led a life of abstinence and study, reposing from the toilsome vicissitudes to which he had been subjected, but not from his thirst for knowledge and desire of glory. His last years were solaced by his intimacy with Boccaccio, who seemed to supply the place of those numerous and valued early friends whom he had survived, and by the filial attentions of his daughter Francesca. The last important act of his life was his appearance before the Senate of Venice, in behalf of Francesco of Carrara, who had been forced to conclude a humiliating peace with the republic in 1373. It is said that he was so much awed by the majesty of the assembly, that on the first day on which he appeared before it, he was unable to deliver his address. The next day he recovered his spirits, or more probably his strength, and his speech in behalf of Carrara was loudly applauded. He returned to his retirement in a failing state of health, and his complaints were aggravated by imprudence, and disregard of medical advice. July 18, 1374, he was found dead in his library, his head resting on an open book. A stroke of apoplexy had thus suddenly terminated his life. All Padua assisted at his obsequies, and Francesco of Carrara led the funeral pomp. A marble tomb, which still exists, was raised to him before the door of the church of Arquà.
Such was the death and such the life of Francesco Petrarca, than whom few men have exerted more influence over their own times; have contributed more to form and polish the language of their native land; or have given a more decided tone to the literature of succeeding generations. This is not the place to enter into a minute analysis of his merits as a poet. If he did not create the kind of poetry in which he excelled, at least he carried it to perfection: if he could not save his style from being disfigured by feeble imitators, at least he left it in itself a noble work: if he did not avoid the false conceits and strained illustrations, which at the rise of a new literature are almost always found to possess irresistible attractions, he redeemed and even ennobled them by strains of simple passion, imagination, and melody, which will live as long as the language in which they are composed. His Latin writings, on which he wished his reputation to rest, are now much neglected. They are not indeed calculated for general reading; but they are highly valuable as records of the time and of the man. His letters form the most interesting, because the most personal, portion of them. Few men have laid bare their hearts so completely as Petrarch. His vanity, his dependence on the sympathy of others, led him to commit to writing every incident of his life, every turn in the troubled course of his feelings. But he gains rather than loses by this voluntary exposure. His Christian faith and Christian principles of philosophy, however swayed by occasional currents of passion, stand out beautifully amidst the corruptions of that age. It is as impossible to rise from a perusal of Petrarch’s poetry, and even more perhaps of his prose, without a feeling of love for the man, as of admiration for the author.