How can you be happy with him, whilst you are hearing of the ruins, the conflagrations, the imprisonments, the deaths, and the rapines, that he spreads around him ?" Petrarch's answers to these and other reproaches which his friends sent to him were cold, vague, and unsatisfactory.

He denied that he had sacrificed his liberty; and told Boccaccio that, after all, it was less humiliating to be subservient to a single tyrant than to be, as he, Boccaccio, was, subservient to a whole tyrannical people.

This was an unwise, implied confession on the part of Petrarch that he was the slave of Visconti.

Sismondi may be rather harsh in pronouncing Petrarch to have been all his life a Troubadour; but there is something in his friendship with the Lord of Milan that palliates the accusation.

In spite of this severe letter from Boccaccio, it is strange, and yet, methinks, honourable to both, that their friendship was never broken.
Levati, in his "_Viaggi di Petrarca_," ascribes the poet's settlement at Milan to his desire of accumulating a little money, not for himself, but for his natural children; and in some of Petrarch's letters, subsequent to this period, there are allusions to his own circumstances which give countenance to this suspicion.
However this may be, Petrarch deceived himself if he expected to have long tranquillity in such a court as that of Milan.