general spirit and tone of all his letters, and of his other writings too, that he affected the thought of his time.
Ignorance and Presumption Rebuked.
To Giovanni Andrea di Bologna.[1]
I find it hard to tell you how much my ears, fatigued by the clamour of the multitude, have been refreshed by your letter, which I have read and reread several times over. You thought it verbose, as I learned at the end; but I found nothing to criticise in it except its brevity. Your threat at the close, that in the future you will be more concise, I did not like. I should prefer to have you more detailed. But that shall be as you please; you are my master; it is not for you to think of my preferences, but for me to try to adapt myself to yours.
This, however, does not necessarily mean that the game is to be entirely in your hands. Things
often turn out, as you very well know, quite differently from what we expect. It is possible that you- ↑ Fam., iv., 15. Giovanni Andrea († 1348), whose lectures Petrarch had attended when at the University of Bologna, was renowned as an expert in the canon law; he was called "the Archdoctor of the Decretum," and held his chair in the University for no less than forty-five years. His extant writings do not exhibit the ignorance which Petrarch here exposes. He was perhaps, as Fracassetti suggests, un poco più cauto e considerato in his books than in his lectures to his students and his letters to his friends. Cf. Let. delle Cose Fam., i., 568 sqq.
