After due deliberation Petrarch accepted the invitation of Rome, and on Easter Sunday, 1340, in the presence of an immense company of people, he was crowned at the capitol, amid the blare of trumpets and the acclamations of the assembled multitudes. This scene may be considered as the climax of Petrarch's victorious career. No man outwardly ever had a happier life than he. He was well-to-do; was handsome and amiable; surrounded by friends; admired and flattered by all Europe; looked on as a great poet and a prodigy of learning. Surely, if any man could be content, Petrarch was that man. And yet he was not happy--owing to his peculiar character, his sensitiveness, his streak of melancholy, his immense vanity which could never be fully satisfied, and especially owing to the constant struggle that went on in his soul between the medieval ascetic view of life (which he could never wholly shake off) and the more worldly modern view, which he himself inaugurated. Owing to all these things, I say, there is a tinge of sadness in all his writings. Perhaps no man ever lived who illustrated so well the beautiful words of the old Latin poet: "E'en where the founts of pleasure flow, A bitter something bubbles up." Indeed, Petrarch's character presents us with strange contrasts. He who loved travel so much is constantly writing about the joys of country life; constantly seen in the gay and often licentious courts of princes, he wrote a treatise in praise of the solitary life; receiving his living from the church and naturally religious, many of his acts were contrary to both religion and morality. And yet Petrarch was not a hypocrite. No one can doubt his sincerity; these things are only the outward expression of that struggle which was constantly going on in his heart. Like St. Paul, he seemed always to be crying out, "The good that I would I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do." The latter part of his life was thus spent in ever-increasing sadness. In 1347 his friend, Colonna, died; in 1348, Laura; in 1347 his high hopes concerning the restoration of the ancient glory of the Roman Republic by Rienzi, the "last of the tribunes," were suddenly dashed by the fall and death of the latter. Henceforth Petrarch spent his life wandering from city to city, from court to court, surrounded by an aureole of glory, yet never at rest, except when he retired to the quiet seclusion of Vaucluse. In 1370 he went to the university town of Padua, then the center of an active intellectual life. In the spring of the same year he started for Rome, in response to an invitation of the pope, but fell so grievously ill at Ferrara that he gave up his journey and settled down at Arquà, a village not far from Padua, where he died July 18, 1374. He was found dead in his library, bending over a folio volume.