The following anecdote respecting it is told by Petrarch himself:--"One of his friends, a man of knowledge and intellect, undertook to read it to a company; but he had hardly got into the midst of it, when his tears would not permit him to continue.

Again he tried to resume the reading, but with no better success." Another friend from Verona having heard what had befallen the Paduan, wished to try the same experiment; he took up the composition, and read it aloud from beginning to end without the smallest change of voice or countenance, and said, in returning the book, "It must be owned that this is a touching story, and I should have wept, also, if I believed it to be true; but it is clearly a fable.

There never was and there never will be such a woman as Griseldis."[N] This letter, which Petrarch sent to Boccaccio, accompanied by a Latin translation of his story, is dated, in a MS.

of the French King's library, the 8th of June, 1374.

It is perhaps, the last letter which he ever wrote.