Under these circumstances, Petrarch was most anxious for a MS.

of Cicero, which his father had highly prized.

"The guardians," he writes, "eager to appropriate what they esteemed the more valuable effects, had fortunately left this MS.

as a thing of no value." Thus he owed to their ignorance this treatise, which he considered the richest portion of the inheritance left him by his father.
But, that inheritance being small, and not sufficient for the maintenance of the two brothers, they were obliged to think of some profession for their subsistence; they therefore entered the church; and Avignon was the place, of all others, where preferment was most easily obtained.

John XXII.