In the latter part of the fourteenth century Petrarch was received with a hospitality as open-handed, and much less interested. The great poet and famous ambassador was treated like a king; the palace of the Quattro Torri on the Grand Canal was fitted up for him and placed at his disposal for as long a time as he would stay in Venice, and at every public function or festivity he appeared on the right hand of the Doge. Touched by such consideration, Petrarch bequeathed a part of his priceless library to the Republic, and Venice, on her side, refusing to be outdone in generosity, presented him as a gift with the palace in which he had been living. The palace had originally belonged to the Molina family, and ultimately became a religious house under the Sisters of the Holy Sepulchre. As for the poet’s books, they came to a melancholy end. They are sometimes said to have been the beginning of the library of Saint Mark. The authority from which I quote says that amongst them were a manuscript of Homer, given to Petrarch by Nicolas Sigeros, ambassador of the Emperor of the East, a beautiful copy of Sophocles, a translation of the whole of the _Iliad_ and of a part of the _Odyssey_, copied by Boccaccio himself, he having learned Greek from the translator, Leontio Pilato, an imperfect Quinctilian, and most of the works of Cicero transcribed by Petrarch himself. Such treasures would make even a modern millionaire look grave; yet it is said that when the celebrated Tomasini asked to be allowed to see the books towards the end of the seventeenth century, he found them stowed away in an attic under the roof of Saint Mark’s, ‘partly reduced to dust, partly petrified’--‘in saxa mutatos’--a phenomenon of which I never heard, and which I am at a loss to explain.