Petrarca, Petrarch's Letters to Classical Authors, tr. Mario Emilio Cosenza (Chicago, 1910), 1, Letter to M. T. Cicero, pp. 3-4 (with the translator's footnote):
. . . Forsooth, what boots it to instruct others, of what profit to discourse eternally on the virtues, and that too in most eloquent terms, if, at the same time, one turns a deaf ear to his own instructions? Ah, how much better had it been for a man of declining years, and especially for one devoted to studies, even as thou, to have lived his last days in the quiet of the country, meditating (as thou thyself hast said somewhere) on that everlasting life, and not on this fleeting one.1
1. The reference is very indefinite: “in tranquillo rure senuisse, de perpetua illa, ut ipse quodam loco ais, non de hac iam exigua vita cogitantem” (Vol. III, p. 263). The passages which Petrarch had in mind may have been De sen., 49: “If, however, we have something that may serve as food (so to speak) for study and learning, there is nothing more pleasant than a leisurely old age;” and 51: “I come now to the pleasures of a country life, with which I am infinitely delighted. None of these finds an obstruction in old age, and they are pleasures which appear to me to be most nearly suited to the life of a philosopher.” These two passages affirm that the sage should live a leisurely and studious old age in the country. As to meditating on the eternal life, Petrarch may have been thinking of Acad. pr., ii, 127:
By no means, however, do I hold that the studies of the natural philosophers should be excluded. Indeed, a consideration and contemplation of nature constitutes the natural food (so to speak) for our minds and talents. We are elevated thereby, and we seem to rise to a higher state of being. We disdain human affairs; and, in meditating on the higher and heavenly things, we scorn earthly matters as being small and insignificant—“cogitantesque supera atque caelestia haec nostra ut exigua et minima contemnimus.”
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