JEROME CARDAN. JEROME CARDAN.* THE LIFE GIROLAMO CARDANO, OF MUM, PHYSICIAN. BY HENBY MOELEY. * . IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. LONDON: CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. MDCCCL1V. - PREFACE. JEROME CARDAN, confident of being remembered by posterity, desired that he should be fully known, and left scattered about his writings much material for the bio- grapher. The material so liberally furnished has not yet been used. Encyclopaedists have for generations told the student that the life of this philosopher was one of the most curious on record, full of extremes and contradic- tions, the most wonderful sense and the wildest nonsense. They have adopted the near-sighted views of Gabriel Naud^, have accepted sometimes gross errors of fact from the Scaligers, and, when they have gone to Cardan him- self for information, have rarely carried their research farther than the perusal of a work or two. Commonly they have been content with a reading of his book on his IV PREFACE. own Life, which is no autobiography , but rather a garrulous disquisition upon himself, written by an old man when his mind was affected by much recent sorrow. In that work Cardan reckoned that he had published one hundred and thirty one books, and that he was leaving behind him in manuscript one hundred and eleven. It is only by a steady search among his extant works, and by collecting into a body statements and personal allusions which occur in some of them, assigning to each its due place, and, as far as judgment can be exercised, its due importance, that a complete narrative can be obtained, or a right estimate formed of his Life and Character. Of such collation this work] is the result; and, although it is inevitable that there should be errors and omissions in it, since the ground is new, the labour on it has been great, and I am but a feeble workman, yet, forasmuch as the book is an honest one, in which nothing vital has been held back or wrongly told, except through ignorance, and no pains have been grudged to make the drawback, on ac- count of ignorance, as small as possible, I am not afraid to put my trust in the good-nature of the reader who shall detect some of its omissions and shortcomings. The following sentences, from the notice of Cardan in Tiraboschi's History of Italian Literature, fairly represent PREFACE. v the common feeling with regard to him : " Brlicker regrets with reason that nobody has written his life with exactitude The wide scope of my own argument does not permit me to make any minute researches ; I can only say what will be enough to give some notion of this most rare man. In the account that he gives of his own character, he attributes to himself inclinations that it would seem impossible to have co-existing in a single character, and at the same time he speaks so much evil of himself, that by this only one may see how strange a man he was. .... Whoever would suppose that a man foolishly lost behind judicial astrology .... a man more credulous over dreams than any silly girl, observing them scrupu- lously in himself and others a man who believed that he had the friendship of a Demon, who by marvellous signs warned him of perils a man who himself saw and heard things never heard or seen by any other man a man, in short, of whom, if we read only certain of his works, we may say that he was the greatest fool who ever lived who would suppose, I say, that such a man was at the same time one of the profoundest and most fertile geniuses that Italy has produced, and that he made rare and precious discoveries in mathematics and in medi- cine? Nevertheless; such was Cardan by the con- VI PREFACE. fession even of those who speak of him with most con- tempt." Of that candour of self-revelation to which allusion is made in the preceding extract, Jerome himself writes: " What if I confess my vices; why marvel; am I not a man ? And how much more human is it to acknowledge than dissemble? What we cloak, we protect; what we acknowledge, we confess and avoid. Let, therefore, the most sweet love of truth and the most happy conscious- ness thereof conquer all dread of infamy, all suspicion of calumny 1 ." Elsewhere he says on the same subject and we must remember that he did not live in cleanly times " What if any one were to address the kings of the earth, and say to them, c There is not one of you who does not eat vermin and other worse filth of your servants?' In what spirit would the speech be taken, though most true? What is this but an ignoring of our condition, a determi- nation not to know what we do know, to put a thing out of our sight by force? So it is with our sins, and all else that is filthy, vain, confused, and uncertain in us. Rotten apples fall from the best tree. I tell nothing new ; I do but tell the naked truth 2 ." Evident enough it is that 1 Geniturarum Exemplar (ed. 1555), p. 523. 2 De Vita Propria, cap. xiii. PREFACE. Vll Cardan is determined to hide nothing, and it is not less evident that he has been ill-rewarded for his frankness. Over and over again all self-accusations have been accepted and driven home against him, all self-praise has been called vanity, and statements of his that appeared to be too marvellous have been pronounced untrue. But the man of profound genius sometimes wrote, we are told, as if he were a fool. His folly may instruct us. It belonged bating some eccentricities not to himself alone. His age claimed part in it, and bought his books. He was the most successful scientific author of his time; the books of his that were most frequently reprinted being precisely those in which the folly most abounded. He was not only the popular philosopher, but also the fashionable physician of the sixteenth century. Pope and emperor sought him; kings, princes, cardinals, arch- bishops were among his patients. There were other physicians in those days wise enough to be less credulous on many points, but greater wisdom did not win for them an equal fame. Cardan obtained a splendid reputation wholly by his own exertions, not only because he was a man of power and genius, but because he spent much of his energy upon ideas that, foolish as they now seem, were conceived in the true spirit of his age. He belonged viii PREFACE. completely to his time. Hence it is that, as a philo- sopher, he almost perished with it ; and for the last hun- dred years his reputation has existed only as a legend. I was first attracted to the study of Cardan, from which this work has arisen, by the individuality with which his writings are all marked, and the strange story of his life reflected in them. The book is twice as large as it was meant to be, and still there was matter that might have occupied another volume; for as I worked on, I found that out of the neglected writings of this old physician it was possible to re-construct the history of his career, with much minuteness in the kind of detail that would make it not only pleasant reading, but also, if rightly done, of some use to the student of the sixteenth century. Pains have been taken to confine the narrative within the strictest bounds. There is not in it an incident, how- ever trivial, which has been created or transformed by the imagination of the writer. I have kept rigidly to truth, and, as was necessary from the nature of the work, have, in treating the main subject, referred in notes to the authority for every statement. If here and there a little fact should happen not. to be so authenticated, I beg to assure the reader that it was not set down lightly. I have even preserved to a very great extent in my own PREFACE. IX writing Cardan's forms of speech. In support of those parts of the book which discuss accessory matters, I have thought it enough to indicate in the notes generally from what sources information has been got, and, in particular cases, to give the exact authority when for any reason it has seemed desirable to do so. Citations from the works of Cardan have been made, as far as possible, from editions published in his lifetime. Of each work, the edition used is stated when it is first named; and the paging quoted afterwards always belongs to the same issue, if no other is mentioned. Where no early copy was to be had, reference has been made to the collected works issued in 1663 at Paris, by Charles Spon, in ten volumes folio. London, March, 1854. When the first sheets of this work were printed, I had not seen Cardan's third horoscope of himself in the " Genitu- rarum Exemplar." I therefore was obliged to conjecture his mother's age, and the paternity of three children, whose deaths are recorded in vol. i. p. 7. It was, at the same time said in a note, that my opinion was insufficiently supported, and that it might be wrong. From the horoscope just men- tioned, it appears that Cardan's mother was not quite so young as I had inferred, though there was still great dis- X PKEFACE. parity between her age and that of Fazio. If her age at Jerome's birth was, as he says, thirty -seven, the disparity was of nineteen years. He adds, however, that she died on the 26th of July, 1537, at the age of seventy ; and if the age so given be accurate, she must have been thirty-four years old when he was born, and twenty-two years younger than Fazio. She was the widow of Antonio Alberio ; and of her three children that died of plague soon after Jerome's birth, Alberio was the father. They all died within forty days ; two of them, within a week after their mother dreamt that they had gone to heaven. On the same authority, it may be added that Fazio and Clara had another child, a son, which diecl at birth. A remark upon a trivial point is suggested by the word Clara that has just been used. There are few people men- tioned in this narrative whose names would not admit of being written in more ways than one. I have had to make my choice in nomenclature among Latin forms, Latin Ita- lianised, old or impure Italian, modern Italian, and Italian Englished. In speaking of men not Italians there was often a like difficulty. Yery much wishing to avoid pedantry, and putting that wish foremost, I have endeavoured to use in each case a form that would suit the temper of the book without vexing the reader. CONTENTS TO VOL. I. CHAPTER I. PAGE BORN TO SORROW CHAPTER II. IN WHAT WAY THE CHILD EARNED A MOST HOLY AND MOST HAPPY GODFATHER 10 CHAPTER in. CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH ARE VANITY 21 CHAPTER IV. ILLS OF THE ELESH THE STIPEND OF THE HUNDRED SCUDI . 33 CHAPTER V. JEROME CARDAN, GRADUATE IN MEDICINE His LIFE AT SACCO, AND THE STRANGE ADVENTURE OF HIS MARRIAGE . .55 CHAPTER VI. WORK OF THE BRAIN . . . 87 CHAPTER Vn. THE STORY OF ALDOBELLO BANDARINI ILLS OF FORTUNE OF THE PORTENT THAT AFFLICTED CARDAN AT THE BAPTISM OF HIS ELDEST SON HUNGER IN GALLARATE POVERTY IN M.TT.AN 104 Xll CONTENTS. CHAPTER YIH. PAGE LIFE AS A LECTURER IN MILAN How JEROME AT LENGTH FOUND A MAN WILLING TO PRINT ONE OF HIS BOOKS THE ISSUE OF THAT ENTERPRISE 129 CHAPTER IX. PHYSIC AND PHILOSOPHY .148 CHAPTER X. ARITHMETIC AND CONSOLATION . 175 CHAPTER XI. THE WOLF AT THE DOOR 199 CHAPTER Xn. OF THE GREAT ALGEBRAIC QUARREL THAT AROSE BET WEEN MJESSER HIERONIMO CARDANO AND MESSER NICOLO TARTAGLIA WHAT LETTERS PASSED, AND HOW TARTAGLIA FELT THAT IT WAS DUE TO HIMSELF TO MAKE THE CORRESPONDENCE PUBLIC . . 207 CHAPTER XTII. . THE REST OF THE DISPUTE BETWEEN THE TWO MATHEMATICIANS IN THIS CHAPTER is CONTAINED AN ACCOUNT OF THE LIFE AND FORTUNES OF LODOVICO FERRARI, CARDAN'S FOREMOST PUPIL 254 CHAPTER XIV. THE CONQUEST OF AN ADVERSE WORLD . . . 277 or rftt UNIVERSITY JEROME CARDAN. CHAPTER I. BORN TO SORROW. IN the year 1501 1 , a woman, flying from the plague, passed under the gate of Milan which leads out upon the road to Pavia 2 . She was a young widow 3 , the daughter of a studious man, Giacomo Micheria 4 , and she turned her back not only on the plague, but also on a grave 1 De Consolatione, Lib. iii. (ed. Yen. 1542) p. 74. In the De Pro- pria Vita Liber (ed. ex Bibl. Gab. Naudsei, Paris. 1643), cap. ii. p. 7, he writes the date 1500 by misprint. The misprint has been some- times followed, though facts stated in the same book (as is shown by Bayle, who had read no other) correct it, and in every other place in his works Cardan writes 1501. See especially the date and hour of his birth given by him in his horoscope (Libelli V. De Supplemento Almanach. &c. ed. Norimberg. 1547, p. 121), where they are stated to be the 24th Sept/ 1501, at forty minutes past six in the afternoon. Except the misprint, this coincides with his other statements on the subject. See also De Utilitate ex Adversis Capienda (ed, Basil. , 1561), Lib. iii. p. 427. 2 De Libris Propriis eorumque Usu. Liber ultimus. Opera cura Spon. Vol. i. p. 96. 3 Compare notes 1, p. 2, and 1, p. 6. 4 De Propr. Vit. Lib. (ed. cit.) cap. i. p. 6. VOL. I. B 2 JEROME CAKDAN. jurisconsult and mathematician, who was, at that time, probably as much an object of aversion to her as the plague itself his name was Fazio Cardan 1 . Fazio Cardan was a man of note among the learned in his neighbourhood, and was then fifty-six years of age 3 . At the age of fifty-six he had already become toothless, although strong of limb and ruddy of complexion. He had good eyes; not in the sense of "Being beautiful, for they were white, but in the sense of being useful ; for it was said that he could see with them in the night time. To his last days to the age of eighty Fazio Cardan continued to see objects clearly with the aid of less light than his neighbours needed, and required no spectacles. As a doctor, both in law and medicine, and member of the venerable college of men skilled in law, the white- eyed, toothless, stuttering, and round-shouldered mathe- matician clothed his healthy body in a purple robe. He wore a black skull-cap, which he dared only remove for a few minutes at a time, because his skull had suffered 1 "... natus essem Papise, grassante in urbe nostra peste, turn etiam quod mater partum ipsum occultari volebat, nee illius affines resciscerent. Pater enim meus, ut Senex ac Jurisconsultus, viduse Matris meae pauperis publicas nuptias aversabatur : ipsa vero turpe ducebat, quod diceretur non ex coDJuge peperisse." De Libris Propriis. Liber ultimus. Opera cura Spon. Vol. i. p. 96. Cardan never defames his mother. 2 He was born at twenty minutes to nine in the morning of the 16th of July, 1445. See the date in his horoscope, Libelli V. De Suppl. Almanach. &c. (ed. cit.) p. 106. PORTRAIT OF A GENTLEMAN. 3 damage in his youth, and it had been found necessary to remove some pieces of it. The skull may have been broken in a fray, for Fazio Cardan was always hot of temper 1 . There was also a quick spirit of humour in him, but it was not genial; he was careless of money, and a ready lender, but he made few friends 2 . He dwelt with Euclid in a world of angles and right-angles, and he him- self was angular; nevertheless, his heart had rounded itself to the love of one man, very different in taste, Galeazzo Rosso 3 . As a student, also, he delighted in the ingenuity of Gianangelo Salvatico 3 , his pupil and house- companion. Rosso, who was a smith, equalled the juris- consult in a decided taste for mathematics, and delighted him by the ingenuity with which he turned his know- ledge to good practical account. The knowledge of Fazio, at the same time, had not re- mained idle. In the prime of life he had been deliberately drawn into print by the booksellers of Milan, who desired to publish something profitable to the learned, and applied to Fazio Cardan as a man likely to produce for them 1 De Propria Vita (ed. cit.), cap. iii. p. 10, for the preceding details. 2 De Utilitate ex Adv. Capiend. (ed. Basil 1561) Lib. iii. pp. 428 430. 3 De Propr. Vit. cap. iii. p. 11. Galeazzo was by trade a smith. Op. cit. cap. xv. p. 71. Salvatico a senator. The smith was an ingenious man, who discovered for himself the screw of Archimedes before the works of that philosopher had been put into print. He made also re- markably well-tempered swords and shot-proof breastplates. De Prop. Vit. p. 11. B2 4 JEROME CARDAN. judicious matter 1 . He resolved then to edit a work, at that time, I think, known only in manuscript, treating of rays of light, and of the eye, of reflection, and of allied topics, in the form of propositions proved by the aid of geometrical diagrams, of which the original author was John Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury. This book, which really deserved promulgation Peckham's Perspec- tiva Communis* Fazio took upon himself, as he tells us in the dedication to his own edition, the great labour of correcting, a work heavy enough for a learned man, most heavy therefore for him. It was an arduous undertaking, he said, calling for great knowledge of mathematics pre- 1 " Prospecti va Communi s d. Johannes Archiepiscopi Cantuariensis .... ad unguem castigata per Facium Cardanum." Milan, 1480; p. 1 in the dedication. It begins thus: "In tanta laborura cujuscunque generis copia, divino quodam imprimendi artificio com- parata, appetentes hujus urbis impressores novi quidquam in medium afierre quod esset studiosis non mediocriter profuturum : persuasique rnea opera id effici posse : me illud efflagitantes convenerunt." 2 John Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury, born 1240, became a minorite friar, and rose through sundry grades of Church preferment to his crowning dignity. He bought it of the Pope for 4000 marks, which afterwards he risked excommunication by not paying, or by paying slowly. He was a man of taste, luxurious, accomplished in the learning of the age, and liberal to all but Jews. The Jews he persecuted. He died in 1292, and was buried in Canterbury Cathe- dral. He left many .works which still exist in MS. Only two have profited by the discovery of printing, namely, his Collectanea Bibliorum, and his Perspectiva Communis. The last is interesting as the first systematic work of the kind, and I find no trace of its having passed out of MS. into print before it was published, with additions and corrections, by Fazio Cardan. After that date it was re-issued fre- quently by other editors at Leipsic in 1504, at Venice in 1505, and afterwards at Nuremberg, and Paris, and Cologne. A BOOK. A BABY. 5 paratory to the correction of the original figures and the amendment of the text. He knew, however, that a work so difficult would at no time be undertaken ; not for want of men learned enough Heaven forbid that he should be so arrogant as to suppose it! but for the trouble's sake, the work, though useful, would remain undone. Therefore he, Fazio Cardan, had done it. On the threshold of his task, however, since he had great need of a patron's countenance, he committed his book to one who was as grave as Camillus, as dexterous as Scipio, and so on 1 . That was the book, and that was the manner of dedication to the book published by "the excellent doctor in the arts as well of medicine as law, and most experienced mathematician, Fazio Cardano, of Milan, re- siding in the venerable college of the Milanese juriscon- sults." This offspring of the mind of Fazio was about twenty years old 2 when Chiara Micheria, flying for re- fuge from the plague to Pavia 3 , took with, her off- spring of another kind, to which he also was the father, a child yet unborn. Whatever pains Fazio had taken to protect his literary bantling against any risk of dropping dead into the world, the care that preceded the birth of his true child was 1 Op. cit. In dedication. 2 Its date of 1480 is assigned on the authority of Burnet. The copy in the British Museum has no title-page. 3 De Libr. Tropr. Ed. ultima. Opera cura Spon. Vol. i. p. 96. 6 JEROME CARDAN. bestowed in a precisely opposite direction. Chiara (Clara) Micheria was still very young 1 , passionate of temper 2 , and had quitted Milan in the worst of humours. Medicine refused, however, at her bidding or rather at the bidding of her bad advisers 3 to fulfil an evil purpose; and at Pavia, on the 24th of September 4 , in the year 1501, the living child of Fazio Cardan was brought, after a three days' labour 5 , through much trouble 6 , silently to light. Considering that it was very nearly dead, the nurse promptly immersed the infant in a little bath of wine 5 . It had already a growth of long dark hair upon its head 5 , and it very soon gave evidence of life and strength. That it would not die very soon there was great reason, the mother knew, to hope or fear, since it is certain that longevity becomes often inherited, and she herself a short, fat, healthy woman, of a lively wit 2 as well as the geometrician, came of long-lived ancestors 7 . Let me dwell for a few minutes on this question of the 1 "Matrem meam Claram Micheriam juvenem vidi, cum admodum puer essem." De Consolatione (ed. Ven. 1542), Lib. ii. p. 41. 2 De Propr. Vit. Lib. p. 11. 3 " Medicamentum abortivum Alieno mandate bibit." De Ut. ex Adv. Cap. (ed. 1561) Lib. iii. p. 427. 4 See Note 1 on page 1. 5 De Ut. ex Adv. Cap. p. 427. 6 " Per vim extractus ut meo supplicio matrem liberarem a morte," De Ut. ex Adv. Cap. p. 427. 7 " Longsevi autem fuere majores nostri." De Propr. Vit. cap. iv. pp. 5, 6, for the succeeding details. AN OLD FAMILY. 7 infant's probable longevity. The father of Clara lived seventy-five years, and his brother, Angiolo, lived eighty- five. In the Cardans, the habitual tenacity of life was most remarkable. The grandfather of Fazio, the mathe- matician, was another Fazio; he had three sons: Gio- vanni, who lived to the age of ninety-four; Aldo, who lived eighty-eight years; and Antonio, the father of the second Fazio, who lived to the age of eighty-six. Gio- vanni, the first of these, uncle to Fazio the scholar, had two sons, Antonio and Angiolo, of which the former lived to the age of eighty-eight, and the latter very nearly reached a hundred. This Angiolo became known to the young son of Fazio as a decrepid old man, who, at the age of eighty, claimed paternity of two decrepid-looking children, and regained his sight. Even of these children one lived seventy years. To this enumeration must be added Gothardo, a brother to the second Fazio Cardan, and uncle of the child, who died eventually at the age of eighty-four. Since several of these men were living in the year 1501, Clara Micheria could take into her calcu- lation a part only of these facts ; there was enough, how- ever, in her knowledge to remind her that the unwelcome son came of a long-lived stock, and that if he was to be accounted a discredit, he would probably discredit her for many years to come. During the first month of the boy's life his nurse was 8 JEROME CARDAN. seized by the plague, and died under its touch in a few hours 1 . The infant did not pass unscathed, for there appeared at the same time five carbuncles on its face; one on the nose, the other four arranged around it in the pattern of a cross. Although healing in a short time, it was observed that three years afterwards these carbuncles appeared again in the same places 3 . Deprived of his nurse, and little aided by his mother, the son of Fazio Cardan was received into the house of Isidore dei Resti 3 , a noble gentleman, his father's friend. At that time the geometer was burying in Milan all his other children dead of plague. They were two boys and a girl, half- brothers and half-sister to Clara's child 4 . In the house of Isidore, the survivor says, speaking of the past out of his after-life, and tincturing his words with the bitter- ness of many griefs, " After a few days I fell sick of a dropsy and flux of the liver, yet nevertheless was pre- * De Propr. Vit. cap. iv. p. 12. 2 The page last cited and De Ut. ex Adv. Cap. p. 427. a De Propr. Vit. p. 13. De Ut. ex Adv. Cap. p. 427. 4 De Consolatione (ed. Ven. 1542), p. 74. Their names were Thomas, Ambrose, and Catilina. De Ut. ex Adv. Cap. p. 427. The passage in the De Consolatione, "jam trimestris duos fratres et unam sororem perdidi : crassante in civitate nostra pestilentia . . . tune audaci et pio facto Is. Kestse nobilis viri et amici paterni, manibus ejus inter funera exceptus . . ." is my only textual authority for attributing these children to Fazio. It is indecisive, and I may be wrong. They may have been children left as consolations to the widow. If so, Clara must have married very early. Had they belonged equally to Fazio and Clara, one does not see why in the case of Jerome his mother PLAGUED. 9 served, whether through the wrath or mercy of God I know not 1 ." Thus environed by the plague-spots, physical and moral, which belong to an unwholesome period of human- history, began the life of which we are about to trace the current. Out of the peace of our own homes let us look back with pity on the child whose birth made no man happy, and whose first gaze into the world was darkened by a mother's frown. should have endeavoured to keep a knowledge of his birth from her relations, or why she should, in expectation of a fourth child, desire abortion, and resent the fact that Fazio was not known to the public as her husband. (See note 1, p. 2.) Besides, if her relations with Eazio were thus of some years' standing, how old was her widowhood ? and could she still be "juvenis" when Jerome was a boy old enough to be told of her unhappiness, and of her wish (DeConsolatlone, p. 41) that she had died when he was born ? 1 De Consolatione (ed. Ven. 1542), Lib. iii. p. 74. 10 JEROME CARDAN. CHAPTER H. IN WHAT WAY THE CHILD EARNED A MOST HOLY AND MOST HAPPY GOD- FATHER. AFTER the death of its first nurse by plague, Clara Micheria had returned for a short time to her infant 1 , but a new mother having been hired for it, she again obtained exemption from her burden. The nurse, who in the second month of the child's life became the third to whom it clung as to a mother, did not accept her charge without due knowledge of the fact that it had been kissed by the very plague itself, and bore the marks upon its countenance. To the new nurse, therefore, the baby was delivered by Isidoro dei Resti, naked and wet, out of a warm bath of vinegar. With clothes, infection might have gone into the poor woman's family so men 5 at any rate, believed the clothes, therefore, were burnt ; vinegar, it was hoped, would disinfect the child. By this nurse the "child was taken to Moirago, a place distant about seven miles from Milan, on the road from Pavia to Binasco. The infant did not thrive under her 1 De Propr. Vit. Lib. (ed. Naudsei), pp. 12,"13, for the facts stated in this and the succeeding page. MOCK MOTHERS. 11 care. It may have carried with it some seeds of disease ; it most probably found little that was wholesome in the squalid hut to which it was removed; perhaps, as they who paid for the child said, the woman herself was not competent to play the part of mother in a wholesome way 1 . Certainly, the little body wasted, and acquired the hard and swollen belly, which at that time in Italy, as it is now in England, was too well known to the sight and touch of men, who in vain sought to supply with drugs the want of healthy homes among the poor. Though the child was not loved, there existed in the mind of nobody a criminal desire that it should die; and since, therefore, it wasted at the breast of its third mother, a fourth was hired, under whose care its health improved. With this nurse the boy remained still at Moirago and by her he was weaned in the third year of his life. In the next year, Clara Micheria claimed him at last, and took the son, who had learned to prattle at the knees of strangers, home to her own sad lodging in Milan. The doubtful charac- ter of Fazio's relation to her she a girlish widow, he a toothless old geometer, aged sixty filled her life with shame and sorrow, and a frequent theme of her discourse to the child was a desire that she had died when he was born 2 . 1 " Quod nutrix utero gereret." De Propr. Vit. p. 13. 2 De Consolatione, p. 41. 12 JEROME CARDAN. Clara Micheria was not at that time resident under the roof of Fazio Cardan 1 . The laudatory verses sung in honour of the literary offspring of the grave jurisconsult, had ended with a distich in his praise, of which the literal translation is, that " in this man the house of Cardan re- joices. One man has acquired a knowledge of everything. Our age has not his equal 3 ." Probably this man, who had learned everything, was not, in the year 1505, acquainted with the voice of his own child, that had been four years in the world and never sat upon his knee. The rejoicing of the house of Cardan was not great in the person of the little fellow who, after his removal to. Milan, was perpetu- ally beaten by his mother and her sister, Margherita, who dwelt with her: "A woman," he says afterwards, "who I believe must have been herself without a skin," so little was her mercy for the skin of Clara's child 3 . The hands of three persons at Milan were against the child, for Fazio Cardan, though not residing in one house with Clara, now came into habitual communication with 1 De Propr. Vit. p. 13. Statements in this and the next page to which no note is attached are dependent on the same authority. 2 " Magna ratis magno curanda est remige. Deerat Navita. Nunc Facius talia damna levet. Hoc Cardana viro gaudet Domus. Omnia novit Unus. Habent nullum secula nostra parem." Prospectiva Comm. d. Joh. Archiep. Cant, per Fac. Cardan. Milan. 1480. Last page. 3 " Mulier cui fel defuisse existimo." De Propr. Vit. p. 13. UNDER THE ROD. 13 him, and administered a due share of the prickliest paternal discipline. The ill-treatment of the neglected boy was not, however, constant though the hands of his father and mother were against him, their hearts were with him he was, on the whole, treated less unkindly than before. His parents had ill-regulated tempers, and the child became the victim of the passions out of which he was unluckily begotten 1 . Flagellation from his father and his mother, and his pitiless aunt, Margherita, impressed upon his memory three miserable years after his first arrival at Milan. At the end of those years, when his age was seven, and he had often been brought even to the point of death by the results of too incessant punishment, a respite followed. Father, mother, and Aunt Margaret perceived that the weak child, who had up to this time been suffering from a long series of bodily distempers, could be knocked about no longer without certain danger to his life; and so it happened, as the boy himself ex- pressed it afterwards, that when he became old enough to do things by which he could fairly merit blows, it was found requisite to leave off beating him. In that after-life, to which allusion has been made just now, I ought to say at once, that the son is never to be 1 " Ambobus parentibus commune fuit iracundus esse, parum con- stanter etiam in amore filii." De Propr. Vit. p. 11. 2 " Turn primum cum merito possem verberibus dignus haberi, a yerberibus abstinendum decreverunt." De Propr. Vit. p. 13. 4 JEROME CARDAN. found referring with unfilial bitterness to either of his parents. He always avoids making any express statement that would reflect positive dishonour on his mother 1 ; and both of her and of his father he speaks often with a re- verent affection 2 . He speaks more frequently, however, of his father, whom he certainly preferred, although he does not venture much beyond the remark made in an ir- resolute way on one occasion, that " my father appeared to me (if such a thing may be said) better and more loving than my mother 3 ." There was a rest then from blows for the sick child when he had attained his seventh year, but sorrow only laid aside one shape to reappear and vex him in another 4 . When the boy had first been brought to Milan, he had lodged with his aunt and mother in the Via dell' Arena 5 , by the Pavian gate, and they had afterwards removed 1 See a curious example in page 2, note 1. He evades there and everywhere the direct statement that his mother was married, but in that passage leads up to the inference that she had been married pri- vately. In the same spirit he says, when he relates his exclusion from the College of Physicians on the ground of illegitimacy, that he was rejected * suspicione oborta quod (tarn male a patre tractatus^spurius essem." De Consolatione, Lib. iii. p. 75. That his tenderness was not towards himself is shown by the whole tenor of his life. He would, for himself, rather have taken a perverse pleasure in the proclamation of a fact that rubbed respectability against the grain. 2 See especially De Util. ex Adv. Cap. Lib. iii. p. 430. 3 De Propr. Vit. p. 12. 4 "Mala sors minime me deseruit, infortunium commutavit non sustulit." De Propr. Vit. p. 13. . 5 De Propr. Vit. cap. xxiv. p. 92. SON AND SERVANT. 15 into a street called Del Maino, opposite the citadel, where they were in the house of Lazzaro Soncino 1 , a physician. A physician was a very fitting landlord for the boy, at any rate ; and it may possibly have been to the representa- tions of Lazzaro Soncino that the child was indebted for the resolve taken by his friends that he was to be flogged no longer. Very soon after this resolve was taken, a great change took place in the arrangements that existed among the high powers that presided over the boy's worldly destiny. Clara Micheria, with Margaret, her sister, removed to a lodging in the Via dei Rovelli, which they shared with Fazio Cardan 2 . Some semblance of a home, as childhood is accustomed to interpret home, was now, for the first time, placed within the knowledge of the young pupil of sorrow. Father and mother dwelt under one roof with him ; the home meant little more. It was no place of laughter, or caresses, or of childish sport. Fazio needed an attendant who should walk about with him while he was engaged upon his daily business, carrying his books and papers, or whatever else the learned lawyer needed to take with him when he went abroad. To this work the work of a servant Clara's child was put without delay 3 . Margaret and Clara being 1 De Propr. Vit. cap. xxiv. p. 92. 2 De Propr. Vit. p. 13, comp. with p. 92. 3 " Inde" (ab octavo) " loco servi patrem ad decimum nonum annum perpetuo comitabar." De Consolatione (ed. Ven. 1542), Lib. iii. p, 74. 16 JEROME CARDAN. settled, to their satisfaction doubtless, in the lodging of the great mathematician and jurisconsult, the fragile boy of seven years old was ordered daily to attend upon his father when he.went abroad; so young and weak of body, taken from a life of close confinement to be put to work that involved severe and constant bodily exertion 1 . With weary limbs and throbbing head, the little fellow daily toiled after his father, revolving in his mind such thoughts as suffering and sickness teach to children who have been trained in no school but theirs. The boy I am compelled to speak of him as boy, or child, or little fellow, because, though he had now lived in the world for seven years, it does not appear that he had yet been christened the boy was contemplative 2 . Minds that are born rich, that possess a soil originally fertile, gain very often by the griefs of a tormented childhood ; these increase for after-seasons the producing power they are as the torments of the plough. It is not so with the barren-minded who are born to sorrow and neglect ; ? what little growth there is in them the plough uproots, and there is only a dry life year by year until the end. The Yet how delicately he seeks often to veil the recollection of his father's harshness ! As, for example, when he refers to it thus : " Ex hoc in paternam, ut tune rebar, servitutem duram transii." De Ut. ex Adv. Capiend. Lib. iii. p. 428. 1 De Propr. Vita Liber, p. 13. 2 " Caepi quam primum cogitare an via esset aliqua ut immortales evaderemus." De Libris Propriis. Liber ultimus. Opera cura Spon. Vol. i. p. 96. SORROW AND SICKNESS. 17 child of Fazio Cardan inherited much innate power: from his father, aptitude for exact learning ; from his mother, much vivacity of wit. During these years of early hard- ship, though he sickened and suffered, he was forced into communion with his own mind by the want of sympathy abroad, and a development was taking place that was not indeed healthy, but that had such charms in it as might have been attractive even to the intellect of Fazio, if the mathematician could have known how to work out the problem that was offered to him in the spirit of his child. He did not work it out ; and so, during the summer days, under a southern sky, the bey struggled unnoticed behind his father through the hot streets of Milan. Intellect at seven years old rarely suggests to any child that fruit should not be eaten until it is ripe ; and when the child has a disordered stomach it will fasten upon green things with the relish of a caterpillar. In the midst of his fatigue and sickness, when his body was quite ready for another outbreak of disease, the son, or foot-page, of the learned Fazio Cardan, then commencing his eighth year, at a time when an epidemic, if not pestilence, was raging in the town, ate secretly a great feast of sour grapes 1 . They supplied the one thing that was needed to produce an outbreak of the fever that had long been waiting for some slight exciting cause. Dysentery and 1 De Propr. Vita, p. 14.; VOL. I. C 18 JEROME CARDAN. fever seized the child, and between them they were kill- ing it 1 . The old geometer he was then sixty-four years old had learned to feel that there was something to be valued in his boy, therefore both physic and divinity were summoned to his aid. Two physicians, Barnabo della Croce and Angelo Gira 1 , and one saint, St. Jerome, were called into request. The old man was accustomed to assert that he enjoyed a favour which had been conferred on Socrates and others in being benefited by the society and advice of a familiar demon 2 . He did not apply, however, to the demon for a prescription in his son's case, but more piously devoted him to the most holy and most happy St, Jerome, whom he elected to be his godfather and his tutelary saint, upon condition that St. Jerome, by his intercession, would procure the boy's return to health 1 . Why Fazio chose Jerome for his saint it is not possible to tell; but it happened that he was lodging in the house of one Ermenulfo 3 , who had Girolamo for his own baptismal name, and I am inclined to think that Ermenulfo as men in our day recommend to one another their own tea- dealers or tailors recommended to the lodgers his own patron saint. The boy recovered, and the father, 1 De Propr. Vita, p. 14. 2 He said it had attended him for thirty-eight years. De Ut. ex Adv. Cap. p. 428. De Propr. Vit. p. 14. 3 De Propr. Vit. cap. xxiv. p. 92. There may he something to the purpose in the fact, that there was a large religious house dedicated to St. Jerome situated between the Pavian and Vercelline gates. VOWED TO A SAINT. 19 faithful to his promise, caused him to receive the name of Girolamo, or Jerome 1 . This took place in the eighth year of the boy's life. Up to my eighth year, says Cardan, I had often beaten at the gates of death, but those within refused to open to me 2 . He was newly risen from his bed in May of the year 1509. In the same year, on the 14th of the same month, the French gained a victory over the Venetians near the Adda. Jerome Cardan remembered afterwards that he was recovering from that most serious attack when the French celebrated their triumph at Milan for the battle of the Adda, and that he was then permitted to go to the window and look out upon the spectacle. Thin, pale, and very thoughtful, little Jerome leaned against the open window, and from the gloom of his own chamber looked down on the helmets, swords, and banners of the military pageant, glittering along the street under the light of the May sun. While the noise of military music and the tramping of the horses shook the whole house in which they lived, how little did it come into the thoughts of Fazio Cardan, Aunt Margaret, or Clara, that the glitter and the bustle of the triumph out of 1 DePropr. Vit. p. 14. 2 De TJtiL ex Adversis Capiend. pp. 427, 428. The summary there given is touching: " Inde lac prsegnantis hausi, per varies matrices lac- tatus ac jactatus, hydrope, febribus, aliisque morbis conflictatus sum, donee sub fine octavi anni ex dysenteria ac febre usque ad mortis limina perveni; pulsavi ostium, sed non aperuerequi intro erant." C2 20 JEROME CARDAN. doors were but a parade of folly; that the recovery of health by their weak boy would interest posterity much more than anything that had been done or would be done by the strong army out of doors. For war, that can be noble, was in those days altogether witless, and the pen-work even of the worst dunce among philosophers could scarcely fail to display more sense than the sword- work of the cleverest among the captains. HOLY MONITIONS. 21 CHAPTER III. CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH ARE VANITY. MARGARET of Austria : daughter of Maximilian ; sister of the Archduke Philip; aunt of Charles, then Duke of Luxembourg, afterwards Emperor Charles V; governor, for her nephew, of the Netherlands ; widow of Jean of Castille the son of Ferdinand ; widow also of Philibert of Savoy: acting on behalf of Maximilian and Ferdinand, had at Cambray concluded a league with the Cardinal d'Amboise, who acted on behalf of the Pope and of the King of France. By this league it was agreed to enlarge the borders of the French king's Milanese territory, by cutting off and appropriating the borders of the territory of the too prosperous Venetian republic. In the year 1509 the head of the Church began the enterprise by issuing monitions which bestowed the coveted lands on the first neighbour who seized them. Louis XII, King of France, entered Italy with thirty thousand men, and was allowed to cross the river Adda by which his Milanese duchy was parted from Venetian ground. On the other 22 JEROME CARDAN. side a battle was soon fought near a village called Agna- dol, the Venetians were routed, and without more contest driven into Venice. The campaign, therefore, was soon ended. This was the victory of the Adda celebrated by a triumphal entry into Milan in the eighth year of Jerome Cardan's life. Louis XII, predecessor of King Francis I. of France, was a monarch of whom it is just to speak respectfully. He sought the welfare of his people. When, on the occasion of this brief Venetian campaign, he found his warfare so soon ended that he should not need the special taxes he had levied, he remitted them, and left the money in the pockets of his subjects. He detested all the arts which darkened counsel by a multitude of words, and ex- pressed frequently so great an aversion to the sight of a lawyer's bag 1 , that had the little Jerome, when he saw the king pass by under his window, known of the existence of that strong point in his character, he would have spent some part of his recovered health in lusty cheering. Who had so full a right as little Jerome to cheer kings who hated lawyers' bags ? The great delicacy of health which followed the child's illness procured for him exemption from the task of carry- 1 " Kien n'offense plus ma vue que la rencontre d'un procureur charge de ses sacs." Words of Louis XII, quoted by Anquetil from Claude Seyssel, Bishop of Marseilles, a subject who was much in the king's company. WOUNDED IN ALL WAYS. 23 ing the bag of Fazio, and from all serious labour for a time 1 . During this period of convalescence, when he was living in the street Dei Maini, the weak boy fell from a ladder with a hammer in his hand, and was taken up with a serious wound, in which the bone was injured at the upper part of his forehead, on the left side 2 . The scar left by the wound remained visible throughout the whole of his after-life 2 . He had recovered from this blow, when one day, as he was sitting on the threshold of his father's door, a tile fell from the roof of a high adjoining house, and wounded him on the top of his head, again on the left side 3 . When Jerome was in tolerable health, his father fagged him ; when sickness gave him liberty to idle, these accidents disturbed his rest. He had no breast at home that he could lay his head upon in perfect peace ; he saw passions at work about him, or felt them at work upon him from the first, chafing his fresh heart, and checking the free outward current of his thoughts. His wit was of the quickest, and his nature sensitive ; he felt every slight, and soon began to brood over the wrongs he suffered, to pre- serve in stillness his own thoughts of impatience at in- justice, and acquired that unwholesome self-consciousness that is too often forced into the minds of clever children, not only by too much praise, but also by unjust neglect. 1 De Propr. Vit. p. 14. 2 De Util. ex Adr. Capiend. p. 428. De Propr. Vit. pp. 14, 15. 3 De Propr. Vita Liber, p. 15. 24 JEROME CARDAN. He who was mocked so often, he would beat through the bands they tied about his heart, he would do some great thing that should command the homage due to his nature, not the less because he was a child. At the beginning of Jerome's tenth year 1 , his father moved to another house in the same street, which he occupied for three years, and during those three years Jerome again carried the lawyer's bag, Fazio insisting upon the use of the child's service with great pertinacity, the mother and the aunt con- senting 1 . The position of young Jerome was, however, about this time improved ; his father had certainly grown kinder 1 , warmed very probably towards him by the signs of intel- lect that he exhibited, and by ,the readiness with which he picked up information, even about the geometrician's darling studies 2 . There came also two nephews of Fazio, one after the other, who shared Jerome's labour, either serving in his place, or lightening his work, so that some- times he was not called upon to go abroad at all, or, if he went, he would not have so much to do 1 . Then there were other changes of abode 1 ; first to the Via del Cusani, and afterwards, until the completion of his six- teenth year, Jerome lived with his father in the house of a relation, Alessandro Cardan. 1 DeFropr. Vita Liber, p. 15. 2 De Ut. ex Adv. Capiend. Lib. iii. p. 429. THROBS OF THE HEART 25 It was at the time when, as Jerome tells us, the first down was coming on his chin 1 , that the premature death of a young relative, Nicolo Cardan, gave a fixed object to the tumult of his thoughts. Nicolo died at the age of thirty 3 , and his place knew him no more. The young philosopher began, therefore, to reflect upon the shortness of life, and to inquire by what means he might be able to provide something worthy to be remembered by posterity ; it pained him to think that, after a life spent without pleasure in the flesh, he should go down into the grave and be forgotten 2 . When he had recovered from the terror into which he had been thrown by witnessing the young man's death, he occupied himself in the writing of a treatise On the Earning of Immortality 2 . The sense of power, without which no genius can bear fruit, was rooted firmly in Cardan. The slights and sor- rows that had made the outer world in childhood and in youth seem vanity, had driven him to contemplation of that inner world from which there was no pleasant voice to call his thoughts. Self-contemplation, constantly pro- voked and never checked, acquired a feverish intensity. After the death of his friend Nicolo, when Jerome, with warm passions, found himself at home but half a son, and 1 " Cum adhuc ephebus essem." De Sapientia Libri V. &c. &c. (ed. Norimb. 1543) p. 420. 2 De Libris Propriis (ed. Lugd. 1557), p. 10. 26 JEROME CARDAN. out of doors regarded as a questionable comrade 1 , a young man with no lawful parents and no prospects, hearing his mother reproached coarsely for his birth 3 , holding the posi- tion of a servant, with no visible means of escape from it, we feel that there is something touching in the pride of loneliness on which his heart depended for its solace: "As much as it was permitted me," he tells us afterwards, "I lived to myself; and, in some hope of future things, despised the present 3 ." Jerome had been instructed by his father 4 in reading, writing, and arithmetic, in geometry, in some astrology, and had learnt also in the same company to chatter Latin; but he was nineteen years old 5 before Fazio consented to his earnest wish that he might study thoroughly that language then the only tongue used by ] the learned and endeavour to make use of his abilities. The taste for mathematics communicated to him by his father, Cardan always retained. When in his fresh youth he became eager to obtain a name that should not die, and must 1 But, he says : " Ubi adeptus literas Latinas, statim etiam in urbe nostra cognitusTuL" De Vita Propria, cap. xxxii. p. 138. 2 " Apud patrein longam servitutem sustinui, et pro spurio ab illo jactatus, etiam indecora matri simul audiebam." Dial, de Morte. Opera, Tom. i. p. 676. 3 "Itaque quam licuit vixi mihi; et in aliqua spe futurorum praesen- tia sprevi." De Propr. Vit. cap. ix. p. 42. 4 De UtiL ex Adv. Capiend. p. 428. De Propr, Vit. cap. xxxiv. p. 155. 5 De Libris Propriis (ed. Lugd. 1557), p. 9. BOY- AUTHOR. 27 needs sit down at once to write a treatise, and so make the best beginning that he could of the career to which his aspirations tended, there was no subject that lay nearer to his mind than the geometry he gathered from his father's teachings and his father's books. The boy, therefore, worked diligently at a little book in his own language, since he could write no Latin, wherein he taught how and why, the latitude and longitude of two places or stars being known, their true distance from each other may be calculated 1 . This little treatise was divided into chapters, and was chiefly founded on a book of Geber's 1 . Having achieved this his first work, Jerome was rather proud to lend it to a friend, Agostino Lavi- zario, of Como. To the disappointment of posterity, and the chagrin of the author, Lavizario died of plague, and Jerome's manuscript could never be recovered 3 . But the zeal of the young aspirant for immortal honours had not been content with labour on a single work 3 ; another book had been commenced about the same time, more original in its design, and more ambitious, more peculiarly characteristic. As Cardan grew, his restless- ness increased. He felt aggrieved when, at the age of eighteen, full of strong powers and strong passions, he still found himself compelled into a half-menial position, 1 De Libris Propriis (ed. Lugd. 1557), p. 9. ~ De Libris Propriis (ed. 1557), pp. 9, 10. DeL.P. Liber ult. Opera, vol. i. p, 96. 3 De SapientiaLibri V. &c. &c. (ed. Norimb. 1543) p. 431. 28 JEROME CARDAN. and denied the education for which he was thirsting. His want of proper standing had become more obvious, and the reason of it, with a galling frequency, was on the lips of his companions. His health was bad, his home was uncongenial, out of doors he was in a wrong position. He had become proud, and so sensitive, that his spirit suffered pain from any but the gentlest touch. Worldly advancement seemed impossible, restlessness became reck- lessness, and the neglected youth turned all the energy that was not spent in nursing his ambition upon games of chance. He brought his acquired taste for mathematics to the gaming-table, and calculated nicely probabilities in cards and dice 1 . When, afterwards, a sure object in life presented itself, quitting the company of gamblers, he pursued it steadily; but in the hopeless, miserable years of energy that saw no outlet, and of reckless discontent, there was no game played in his day with dice at which Jerome Cardan did not become proficient. Meanwhile, the philosophic bias was not weaker than the passions of those miserable years. The young gambler's experiences were all treasured for a philosophic use, while scientific calculations were submitted to the test of practice; for this other work, begun in early youth, and finished at the age of twenty-three, was nothing less than an original and elaborate treatise on the science that belongs to 1 De Propria Vita, p. 16. The authority remains the same for all succeeding facts, until its change is indicated by another reference. DICE. A LOST LEGACY. 29 games of chance. The idea was a shrewd one, and the execution of it curiously brought into play all the charac- teristic features of its author's life. It displayed much of the knowledge he had acquired from the old geome- trician Fazio, the philosophic powers that had grown and strengthened in the midst of all misfortune and neglect, and the love of dice that represented the im- patient and ill-regulated spirit that so much want of sympathy had by this time begotten. We who have seen the growth of this one child from the knees of its hired mothers, and the hand of its hard Aunt Margaret, up to a youth of galling servitude, refuse to be harsh judges now. If we could trace back the stories of the men who sin against us or before us in the world, perhaps we should refuse to be harsh judges ever. There is no truth in scorn, and there is no sadder aspect in the life of Jerome Cardan than the feeling which impelled him to say, " I have lived to myself, and in some hope of future things I have despised the present." A rare example of the contempt of things present was offered during Jerome's youth by Fazio, his father. Fazio, who was, it should be remembered, seventy- four years old when his son's age was eighteen, had two nephews, sister's sons, little younger than himself; and of these, one was a Franciscan friar, and the other a tax-gatherer; one a Pharisee, the other a publican. The friar, seventy years 30 JEROME CAEDAN. old, was named Evangelista ; the other nephew, Ottone Cantone, the tax-gatherer, was very rich, and when on his death-bed offered to bequeath his wealth to the young Jerome. It was the one worldly gift that fortune offered to him in his early life, a bequest by which he would have been enabled to obtain for himself education, and to carry out his most ambitious schemes of study. Fazio, however, acting on his son's behalf, refused the legacy, declaring that the money was ill-gotten. The despised publican died, therefore, intestate, and his property passed into the hands of his surviving brother, the friar, who, being forbidden to acquire wealth for himself, of course devoted it to pious uses. The geometer's contempt of wealth did not include a contempt of the homage he might earn to himself from younger relations, as a man who would leave one day a will behind him 1 . Jerome's health being delicate, it pleased his father to excite the reverence of other young- men in the family, by telling them that in the event of his son's death this or that one of them would be his heir. It was a weak way of boasting, and hazardous withal; for in those days, although it was not much more likely than it is now that young men would allow generous blood to take a jaundice from exposure to such influ^ encing, yet there were thousands of calculating fathers 1 De Util. ex Adr, Capiend. p. 429. DOMESTIC DISCORD. 31 not indisposed to carve out a fortune for themselves or for their children with the knife of the assassin, or to find quiet means of hastening the decease of any sickly youth by whom their way was cumbered. This manner of talking, therefore, on the part of the old man, not only vexed Jerome, but also seriously alarmed his mother, and was the occasion of much violent altercation between Fazio and Clara. They even agreed to separate. In one of these quarrels the passionate woman fell down in a fit, striking her head violently against a paving-stone, and lay for three hours insensible, and foaming at the mouth 1 . The son diverted the attention of his parents from the dispute, of which he was the centre, by simulating a religious zeal, betaking himself to the Franciscans 2 , and making suddenly a bold push to secure for himself proper instruction. His mother, however, would not suffer that he should hide himself from her under the monk's cowl 3 . Having denied to him that easy opportunity of getting forward in the world which the legacy of Ottone Cantone would have afforded, it would have been cruel indeed had Fazio continued to withhold from his son those elements of education that were necessary to his labour for his own subsistence. Jerome had learnt no trade or profession, 1 De Util. ex Adv. Capiend. p. 429. 2 Ibid. De Consolatione, p. 74. 3 " Metuentis matris orbitatem precibus exoratus pater," De Con- solatione, p. 74. 32 JEROME CARDAN. and both from his nature, and from the imperfect training he had hitherto received, it was evident that he could earn his living only as a scholar. The old man also had not failed to recognise the good abilities his boy possessed, while it was certain that his quick wit could be turned to no account, that he might as well not think at all among philosophers, while he was unable to write his thoughts in Latin. At length, therefore, when he was nineteen 1 years old, he was, for the first time, released from bondage in his father's house, and sent to study at a university. 1 De ConsoL p. 74. De Propr. Vit. p, 16. MIND AND MATTER. 33 CHAPTER IV. ILLS OF THE FLESH THE STIPEND OF THE HUNDRED SCUDI. THE spirit of the young Cardan, housed within its temple of the flesh, suffered, in contact with the world about it, such discouragements. The story of his outer life up to his nineteenth year is told in the preceding chapters. We must now put a finger on his pulse. The day may come when somebody shall teach us how to estimate the sum of human kindness that proceeds from good digestion and a pure state of the blood the dis- putes and jealousies that owe their rise entirely to the livers of a number of the disputants or how much fret- fulness, how many outbursts of impatience, how much quick restlessness of action, is produced by the condition of the nervous matter. Such calculations, though we cannot make them in the gross, we make, or ought to make, instinctively when we become intimate with indi- viduals. The physical life of a man cannot be dissociated fairly from his intellectual and moral life, when we at- tempt to judge him by the story of his actions. In the VOL. I. D 34 JEROME CARDAN. case of Jerome Cardan, it is more than commonly essen- tial that we know a little of the body that he carried to his work, for its unsoundness influenced his conduct and caused many a wise man to shrug his shoulders, both among contemporaries and long afterwards, and even to this day, over the question, " Had he not madness in his composition 1 ?" As there are few, even of the rosiest among us, who have bodies absolutely free from all trace of disease or malformation, perfect health of body being a most rare condition, so it is with perfect health of mind. Every excess of one class of ideas over the just proportion in- volves loss of balance. Before reasoning can master the 1 " Verum extremes amentia fuit, imo impiae audaciae," reported Thuanus, in the History of his own time, Lib. Ixii. Tom. iii. p. 462, ed. Lond. 1733. Gabriel Naude', a famous bookworm, wrote an elaborate but shallow criticism on Cardan, which he prefixed to the book de Vita Propria, first edited by him in 1642. As an analyst of character Nau- daeus does not shine ; but this criticism, based on a minute knowledge of his whole works, being bound up with the only one of Cardan's books usually read, has been taken for just by, I think, every succeeding writer. He says, speaking of ..." gravissimorum virorum judicia, qui Cardanum miras de seipso fabulas concitasse, et insanienti proximum vixisse. Et hercle non video quid aliud existimari possit de homine qui" . . . qui . . . qui . . . &c. The quotation down to " qui denique " would be a page too long. Bayle, gathering his information about Cardan from other writers, and without having read more than a single book, which forms about a hundredth part of Cardan's works, delivers judgment thus: "We must not say of him that his great Wit had a mixture of Madness, but, on the contrary, that his Madness had a mix- ture of great Wit. His Wit was only an appendix, an accessory to his Madness." For my own part, I decline to affirm of any man that he is mad or not mad. Strange things are said and done all over the world daily. PHYSICAL LIFE. 35 unknown, or wit can dazzle us before there can exist a Howard or a Milton a mind must have swerved out of that horizontal line on which all faculties stand written at an equal altitude. That Cardan's mind was not well balanced we have already seen while noting its relations in the days of youth with the surrounding world. Much of the eccentricity displayed in it was caused, un- doubtedly , by the condition of the frame in which it had been set. That part of our history his physical life up to the year in which he joined a university, we therefore proceed now to consider. In infancy, Cardan was fat and red; in boyhood, lean, with a long, white face, and reddish hair. He grew fast, so that he had attained at the age of sixteen his full stature. Of the plague that caressed him at the breast of his first nurse mention has been already made. His health was at all times infirm. He was born with a slight ente- rocele, inherited from Fazio, his father. Throughout life he was vexed by the occasional outbreak of cutaneous eruptions and by nervous itchings 1 . Between his fourth and his seventh year 2 the excitement of his nervous sys- tem caused a condition perhaps not altogether rare in children: phantoms haunted him. On account of his 1 De Vita Propr. cap. vi. and li. for the preceding details. 2 De Vita Propr. cap. xxxvii. p. 160. Sprengel attributes to his early illnesses the vividness of imagination by which Cardan was always characterised. D2 36 JEROME CARDAN. weak health, and specially in consideration of the fact that during those years, and for some time afterwards, his legs from the knees downwards never became warm in bed until the morning 1 , he was not required to rise; in- deed, he was required not to rise until the end of the second hour after sunrise 2 . Fazio himself, it should be observed, was not himself then out of bed 3 . .; .During the last hour or two of morning rest, lying awake, the boy commonly saw figures, that were colourless, and seemed to be built up of rings of mail, rising out of the right corner of the bed 4 . The figures, following each other in a long procession, were of many kinds houses, castles, animals, knights on horseback, plants, trees, musical in- struments, trumpeters in the attitude of blowing, groves, woods, flowers, and wild shapes that represented nothing he had ever seen before these figures rising out of the right-hand corner, and describing an arch, descended into the left-hand corner, and were lost. Jerome had pleasure in this spectacle, and made a secret of it. On one occa- sion, when his eyes were fixed intently upon the proces- sion, his Aunt Margaret asked whether he saw anything; but he believed, he tells us, that if he revealed the mys- 1 De Vita Propr. cap, xxxvii. p. 29 and pp. 161, 162. 2 Ibid. p. 11 and p. 160. 3 ' Somno matutino indulgere permisit, nam et ipse ad tertiam diei horam decumbebat." De Ut. ex Adv. Cap. p. 428, 4 De Vita Propr. p. 160. GOBLINS. 37 tery, whatever caused the spectacle would be offended, and that he should see the show no more 1 . Therefore he did not answer her. Between his seventh and twelfth year 2 the child, who slept between his mother and Aunt Margaret, disturbed them almost nightly with his crying, caused by severe palpitation of the heart, which ceased when he advanced in years 3 . The coldness of his ex- tremities sometimes gave place to a profuse sweat. The nervous irritation endured by the delicate boy, who was rudely exposed all day long to the harsh exactions and unruly tempers of his old father, the lawyer, and the women who had charge of him, marred his unwholesome sleep with vivid dreams 2 . As often as a hundred times there came before him in his dreaming, night after night, at intervals, a cock with red wings, at whose appearance 1 " Quamvis adeo puer, mecum cogitabam, si fatebor indignabitur quicquid causam praebet hujus pompae, subtrahetque hoc festura." De Vita Propria, cap. xxxvii. p. 161. This account fits accurately to my own experience. During the same period of childhood I rarely fell asleep till I had received the visit of a crowd of visionary shapes that were not by any means agreeable. I had also, during that period, holi- day phantoms, in the beauty and the mystery of which I took delight, and concerning which I had in the strongest degree the same childish belief that is mentioned in the text, that "si fatebor indignabitur quicquid causam praebet hujus pompac, subtrahetque hoc festum." I add this note because there are some autobiographical statements in the writings of Cardan touching upon what used to be considered supernatural matters that are liable to question by the sceptical, or misinterpretation by the credulous. It would be unjust not to employ the best means that I have of proving in this place the good faith of Cardan's statements. 2 De Vita Propr. p. 29. 38 JEROME CARDAN. the child trembled with the fear that it would speak, until it did speak, in a human voice, threatening words that took no hold upon his memory 1 . There were none by to understand the beatings of the young heart and the ponderings of the excited mind. Sometimes the child was labouring in the diseased heroic vein; at seven years old aweary of the world and cogi- tating suicide. Cardan, when he confesses this in after- life, adds a suspicion that the same has occurred to other men, although they do not like to tell it in their books 2 . There were none by to understand the vague emotions that were, even in youth, to grow into the form of hunger for undying fame; the busy brain, that was perpetually cogitating many and large things, revolving also things that were impossible 3 . The aspirations of the fevered mind were mingled 1 De Vita Prop. p. 162, 2 " Laboravi interdum amore Heroico, ut me ipsum trucidare cogi- tarem; verum talia etiam aliis accidere suspicor; licet hi in libros non referant." De Vita Propria, p. 31. The preceding sentences make it probable that Cardan applies this statement to his whole life; the sentence before which it is placed favours, however, the belief that he is referring to his childhood only. I adopt the latter view, because I know that in the early years of childhood this feeling is connected closely with the physical condition already described. There is nothing in it but a wild love for the mystery of death. I can call to mind no instance of suicide committed by a child. 3 "Cerebri calidi, addictus cogitationi perpetuo: multa ac maxima, et etiam quae esse non possunt revolvens." De Vita Propria, cap. xiii. p. 58. FEVER. 39 always with some fear of early death. His mother never thought he would live long 1 . In youth, to all the other ailments Jerome suffered, there was added a dull, red swelling on the left breast, which occasioned for some time a dread of cancer 3 . In the year before his departure for the university, when he was eighteen years old, he suffered also a dangerous attack of illness. He had been rambling through an August day among the suburbs and gardens of Milan, and when he came home falsely ac- counted for his absence by saying that he had dined with a friend of his father's, Agostino Lanizario. It is the same Lanizario who played the part of friendly critic upon Jerome's early writings. After this walk the youth was seized with a violent attack of illness 3 . For three days he was in a fever, having only water for his food, and medi- cine compounded by his father, who was not only lawyer but physician also, which medicine he was to take four times a day. An anthrax formed and broke over the first false rib on the left side 4 . He thought in his de- lirium that he was on the bed of Asclepiades, rising and falling constantly between the floor and ceiling. He be- came possessed of the belief that he should die. His malady was closed by a violent sweat that resulted in the youth's recovery, but his health, as I before said, re- 1 De Vita Propr. p. 29. 2 Ibid. p. 31. 3 Ibid. p. 28. * De Util. ex Adversis Cap. p. 431, 40 JEROME CARDAN. rnained always infirm ; it was best when he was troubled with a cough 1 . Jerome Cardan, whose stature was completed at the age of sixteen, was, at the age of nineteen, when he went to Pavia, of the middle height and somewhat narrow- chested. He had a fair complexion, with a slight tinge of red on his white, small and oblong face, yellow hair, with a strong growth of it in beard under the chin, small, intent eyes, a projecting under lip, large upper front teeth, and a harsh voice, which, although loud, was not distinct at any distance. The hind part of his head was narrow 2 . Cardan tells us that when he became famous, and painters came from a distance to take his picture, his features proved to be so commonplace, that it was impossible to express them in a way that would enable any one to know him by his portrait. That is a very modest method of putting the incompetence of artists who omit the animating spirit when they paint the form, but Jerome was only too completely free from any pride either in his own form or in its coverings. In his mind he had pride, which he took no trouble to conceal. His character was fixed in a contempt of money, a disregard not only of surrounding trifles, but even of the more important furnishings of 1 "Turn maxime sanum me existimera, cum tussi rauceclineque laboro." De Vit. Propr. p. 26. 2 Ibid. pp. 24, 25, for this and the next fact. ASPIRATION. 41 life, and his whole energy was bent upon the working ] out for himself with his mind of glory after death 1 . Boy as he was, he was at work upon his treatise on the Earning of Immortality; upon his treatise on the True Distances of Objects, based upon an old volume of Geber's, upon Triangles, that he had found among his father's books ; upon his treatise on Games of Skill and Chance ; and upon other youthful undertakings 2 . From the first he was unable to confine his mind to labour on a single topic. He did not sit down to \vork out his immortality of fame by writing a great book ; he began at once with three or four books. He was never throughout life checked in the commencement of a new literary labour, by the reflection that he might have four or five unfinished works already in hand 8 . Book- writing was pleasure, and he could not easily deny himself any addition to a pleasure that he loved. Though miserably trained into impatience, there was a strain of youthful joyousness in Cardan's mind when he arrived at manhood. The most prevailing of his sensual pleasures was a love of music 4 . He was not 1 " Conternptor pecunise, glorias post obitum cultor, mediocria etiam nedum parva omnia spernere solitus." 2 De Libris Propriis (ed. 1557), p. 10. 3 "Multa et varia scrips!, neque enim mens tandiu intenta uni negocio esse potest." De Libris Propriis (ed. 1557), p. 12. 4 " Laetus, voluptatibus deditus, Musicae praecipue." De Vita Propr. cap. li. 42 JEROME CARDAN. physically bold, but he had from the beginning practised himself in sword exercise, then an art necessary to all men who desired long life, and he had exercised his body well in running and leaping. He could not ride decently, nor swim, and was afraid of fire-arms. Abso- lutely a coward he was not, for in his restlessness it was one of his favourite amusements to face at night the dangers of the street, wandering about, contrary to law, armed, having his face concealed by a black woollen veil 1 . Firm in the midst of all his restlessness, determined resolutely to mount upwards, not in worldly circumstance but in the ranks through which only intellect can rise, his spirit ever burning with an inextinguishable desire for an immortal name 2 , Jerome Cardan left Milan to commence his university career. Agostino Lanizario had faith in the young author, and besought his aged father to consult the future prospects of the youth. Clara Mi- cheria added her prayers to the same effect, stimulated by her son's declared intention, for the love of study, to become a monk if he might become a student in no 1 De Vita Propr. cap. viL p. 32, for the preceding details. 2 " Hoc umim sat scio, ab ineunte setate me inextinguibili nominis immortalis cupiditate flagrasse." De Libris Propriis. " Cupiditas mea gloriae, inter tot et adversa et impedimenta, stolida non tantum stulta. Non tainen unquarn concupivi gloriam aut ho- nores, imo sprevi : cuperem notum esse quod sim, non opto ut sciatur, qualis sim." De Vita Propria, cap. ix. p. 42. SENT TO THE UNIVERSITY. 43 other way 1 . Jerome, ill-trained as he had been, with all his oddities and faults, was a good son. The life of Fazio was now declining ; Clara was much younger than the old geometrician, and must turn naturally after the old man's death to her son Jerome for protection. Let him, therefore, before it was too late, be enabled to earn bread. Fazio, though he had acquired some property, was far from being rich. He had lent money too carelessly, and been but too indifferent a steward of his own resources. The main prop of his income as a juris- consult was a stipend of a hundred scudi, from a lecture- ship in Milan, which could one day be obtained also by Jerome, if he were qualified to take his father's place 3 . Clara had, therefore, good reason for backing with her prayers Jerome's demand for education. Jerome declared obstinately that if he were not sent to Pavia for instruc- tion, he would run away from any situation into which he might be put ; and thus the old man was at length entreated and compelled to yield 3 . 1 " Dii boni! florem liunc universum setatis, et sine voluptate, et sine studiis transegi. Cum vero neque patrem cogere possem, nee fraudare honestum ducerem,nec praecibus impetrare valerem : religion! tandem, amore studiorum, tradere me volui. Inde metuentis matris orbitatem prcccibus exoratus pater, in Gymnasium dimisit." De Consolatione, Lib. iii. p. 75, 2 De Vita Propr. cap. x. p. 48. 3 " Atque ita precibus matris et amici praedicti, minisque meis, ut qui omnino abire quoquo destinaveram, discessum in Academiam sequent! anno impetravi." De Libris Propriis. 44 JEROME CARDAN. Jerome Cardan, therefore, being as well or as ill-fitted for the career lie sought as may be supposed of a youth minded as he was, and troubled as he was with fleshly ailments, set out at the age of nineteen for Pavia, provided in an ungrudging way by his father with respectable re- sources 1 . So far as studies were concerned, the exact curriculum of his preparatory education may be briefly told. In addition to reading and writing, Fazio had taught him rudiments of arithmetic when he was a little boy, and had instructed him, when he was nine years old, in some of the world's mysteries, magical lore very pro- bably, whence obtained Jerome never discovered. Soon afterwards the geometrician taught his son some principles of Arabian astrology, a kind of study that must have done much to confirm the little fellow's dreaminess of nature, and then finding that his recollection of dry facts was bad, endeavoured to instil into him a system of artificial memory, in which endeavours he did not succeed 2 . After Jerome's twelfth year, he had been taught to say by heart the first six books of Euclid, not to understand them, and he had been aided carelessly with a few books and scanty verbal information and advice in the study of geometry and dialectics 3 . At the cost of his mother, who had a 1 " Honesto cum viatico." De Ut. ex Adv. Cap. p. 429. - De Vita Propr. cap, xxxiv. p. 155. De Ut. ex Adv. Cap. p. 428. 3 "Pater jam ante concesserat ut Geometric et Dialectic opera darem, in quo quanquam praeter paucas admonitiones, librosque, ac licentiam, nullum alium auxilium praebuerit." De Consol. p. 75. PREPARATORY TRAINING. 45 woman's appreciation of such matters, Jerome had also received instruction in music, which, as a social amuse- ment, consisted in those days chiefly of part singing and choruses. This Clara had furnished to her son without his father's knowledge 1 . Fazio himself, who had no lack of power for facetious conversation, and was great among his friends as a teller of anecdotes, fables, and marvels of all kinds, being particularly full of stories about demons 2 , and claiming an especial demon of his own, aided the con- stant growth of superstitious feeling in the apt mind of his pupil. Other things Jerome had learnt for his own plea- sure. With his father's help he had become so well versed in dialectics, that before he went to Pavia he earned some pocket-money for himself by giving private lessons in that study 3 . Of Latin he knew no more than he had acquired in conversation with his father ; but to write Latin, as I have said before, was the great object of his young desired At Pavia, Cardan was placed under the care of Giovanni Ambrosio Targio, in whose house he resided without any companion. At the close of the academic year he re- turned to Milan. He- had made good use of time, for in the succeeding year after his return to Pavia, where he 1 De Ut. ex Adv. Cap. p. 429. 2 " Conversatio sua baud aspernanda, facetus, jucundus, miraculomm et fabularum recitator, multa de daemonibus recitabat, qure quam vera essent nescio, certe ea historia et admirabilis et pulchre conficta, mirum in modum me oblectabat." De Ut. ex Adv. Cap. p. 429. 3 Ibid. 46 JEROME CARDAN. again lodged with Targio, he disputed publicly with very great success, and was a teacher in the Gymnasium of the first books of Euclid. He even undertook for a few days to discourse upon dialectics in the place of the appointed teacher, Brother Romolo Serveta ; and afterwards he took for a short time a class of elementary philosophy on behalf of a physician named Pandolfo 1 . He was evi- dently working hard, learning to read and write Latin, not by the ordinary way of grammar rules, but by prac- tice and by native tact, with books and dictionaries 2 . The years of study now commenced were years of happiness to the young student. He worked hard, partly to make up for lost time, partly in fear that he might be recalled by his father if ill-tidings of him were sent home 3 . At Pavia he was master of him- self, and between the sessions, when he went home to Milan, he assumed the right of managing his own affairs. His mode of studying was suited to his tastes, though perhaps not exactly orthodox. The common course of a day's study was as follows 4 : After a morning's work he walked in the shade outside the town- walls ; then he dined ; then he gave up his time to music. The young philosopher then took his fishing lines and went a-fishing under shelter of the groves and^ woods not far beyond 1 De Vita Propr. p. 16, for the preceding details. 2 Ibid. cap. xxxiv. 3 De Consol. p. 75. 4 De Vit, Propr. cap. xl. - STUDENT AT PAVIA. 47 the gates of Pavia. A philosopher who means to be immortal must needs think as well as read and write. Cardan could either think or read while he was fishing. He took out with him also into the woods writing materials, and so studied and worked under the thick green leaves, among the wild flowers, throughout the summer afternoon, dreaming ambitious dreams, and fairly striving to fulfil his best desires. At sunset he returned into the town, where his behaviour was not always orderly. Dice and the draught-board had their charms for him ; a restless night spent wandering about the streets after a day of music was, in his view, a simple kind of relaxation. In this way Cardan worked hard, and made rapid progress. Having embraced medicine as his profes- sion, he had begun a treatise on the DifFerings of Doctors 1 . In the year following his second academical course, re- maining at home in Milan because the presence of war caused the schools of Pavia to be closed 2 , he wrote fifty sheets of mathematical Commentaries. These sheets, I may here add, he lent to Ottaviano Scoto : Ottaviano lost them. Jerome Cardan had embraced medicine as his profes- sion. What was to become, then, of the stipend of the hundred scudi ? He had thrown it aside as dust in the balance of his thoughts. The choice of a profession was not 1 De Sapientia, &c. &c. p. 420. 2 " Tertio anno Mediol: mansi bello impeditus, quo ne Academia fre- quentaretur prohibitum est." De Sapientia, &c. p. 421. 48 JEROME CARDAN. to him a money question. Regarding it, however, even in that light, when his father and Clara pleaded to him the importance of this lectureship, and the honours and emoluments that were to be attained by all good juris- consults, the youth felt that his father's standing in the world was but a bad endorsement of their plea. Juris- prudence, he remarked, had done but little for his father Fazio 1 , though he had been lauded as the knower of all things in that book of his on Peckham's Perspective To that book, and the laudation in it, Jerome refers, noting how very false the praise was, since his father's knowledge was confined to few ideas, and none of those his own. Law studies had contracted his rnind not enlarged it. Eager, therefore, for the best kind of mental cultivation as the basis of his future immortality, the young philoso- pher, after he went to Pavia, was not long in determining that he would never follow in his father's steps. Medicine had recommended itself to Cardan as the pursuit most likely to beget a philosophic mind. As a physician, he could not only keep over his own feeble health a reasonable guardianship and he desired long- life but he should also be more fairly on the path to an immortal fame. The studies that belong to medicine, he reasoned 2 , stand upon surer ground than studies that 1 " Parum ilium etiam absque impedimenta profecisse viderem." De Vit. Propr. cap. x. p. 49. 2 Nothing could be saner than this reasoning: "In eo instituto a prima aetate mansi, ut vitae consulerem: studia autem medicinse magis CHOICE OF A PROFESSION. 49 belong to law. Law treats of local custom, medicine of truths common to the whole world, and to all ages. Medicine is the nobler as well as the safer ground, he said, on which to build a lasting fame, since its inquiries are concerned only with pure reason, with the eternal law of nature, not with the opinions of men. Swayed by such arguments the bold student determined to give up every design of following upon his father's track, and abandoned expectation of his stipend of a hundred scudi. Fazio, failing now in health, withdrew his opposition, and Jerome, having missed one academic course while the armies concerned in the quarrel between Charles V. and Francis I. were creating more than common tumult in the country, went in the next year, he being twenty- three years old, not again to Pa via, but to Padua. Absence had softened the feelings of old Fazio towards his son 1 . Very soon after his first departure, reconcilia- tion had been effected between Fazio and Clara; and al- though the old man, during the four last years of his life, maintained a morose countenance 2 , his last days proved huic proposito conducebant quam legum: et ut propiora fini, et ut orbi communia toti, et omnibus saeculis : tamen ut candidiora, ac quae ration! (seternse naturae legi) non hominum opinionibus inniterentur : ideo haec ipsa amplexatus sum, non jurisprudentia." De Vit. Propr. p. 47. " Desiderium augente absentia mortuus est pater." De Consola- tione, p. 75. 3 " Supervixit quatuor ferine annis, msestus semper vixit ut declara- Terit quantum me amaret." De Ut. ex Adv. Cap. p. 430. VOL. I. E 50 JEROME CARDAN. that he regarded his boy with a real affection. It was in the beginning of the year 1524 that Jerome first went to the University of Padua, and early in August of the same year he returned with a fellow- townsman, Gianangelo Corio, to Milan 1 , where the old jurisconsult was languish- ing in mortal illness. Jerome, since he had become a Latin scholar, had acquired social respect among his fellow-townsmen 2 , and his father was then so much in- terested in the progress of his studies that he would not suffer him to wait upon the sick bed. Plague was in the town, and the youth's life was precious 3 . Jerome, he said, was on the point of taking the degree of bachelor in arts 4 , and Fazio, though near death, commanded him to go back ; declaring, indeed, that he should feel the happier if he did not detain him from his studies 5 . The youth, therefore, went back to Padua. He must have gone back to vacation work, for he had remained a month at Padua after the close of the academic session on the 30th of June, and the long vacation did not end until All Saints'- 1 De Vit. Propr. p. 16. 2 Ibid. p. 138. 3 De Consol. p. 75. 4 De Vit, Propr. p. 17. Such a degree was not much favoured in Italy. It was sought in Cardan's time chiefly by those who could not afford much expense or trouble, and in the next century was rarely sought at all in Padua, after the establishment of " the Venetian College," by which the doctorate was made readily accessible to all poor scholars. Gymnasium Patayinum J. P. Tomasini, p. 200 and p. 194. 5 De Vit. Propr. p. 17. DEATH OF FAZIO. 51 day, the 1st of November 1 , when the learned Paduans opened the academic year with great solemnity and pomp. Soon after his return, Jerome received news of his father's death. Fazio died of old age, after eight days of abstinence from food, upon a Sabbath-day, the 28th of August 3 . His son, who was warm-hearted, had loved him ; but there is more of literary vanity than filial love in the epitaph, of course a Latin one, with which he marked his grave. Thus the sense of the inscription ran : To FAZIO CARDAN, JURISCONSULT. DEATH IT WAS THAT I LIVED, LIFE IT WAS DEATH THAT GAVE, THERE REMAINS THE MIND ETERNAL, CERTAIN GLORY, REST 3 . He died in the year 1524, Oct. 28, in the eightieth year of his age. JEROME CARDAN, PHYSICIAN, TO HIS PARENT AND POSTERITY. 1 See J. P. Tomasini Commentar. de Gymn. Patavin. Lib. i. pp. 150 4, for the complete University Calendar, formerly regulating work-days and holidays at Padua, 2 De Vit. Propr. p. 17. Dialogus Tetim. Opera, Tom. i. p. 672. " Tetim. At Pater, quomodo obiit ? Ram. Honeste, et ex senio." 3 These two motto lines are in the original a bad hexameter and a pentameter; the whole inscription being: " Facio Cardano, I.C. Mors fuit id, quod vixi, vitam mors dedit ipsa, Mens seterna manet, gloria tuta, quies. Obiit anno M.D.XXIV. iv. Kal. Sept. Anno JStatis Ixxx. Hyeronymus Cardanus, Medicus, Parenti Posterisque." The inscription is given by Tomasini (Elog. part i. Patav. 1630) from the church of St. Mark, in Milan. Jerome himself was eventually buried under it beside his father, as is testified by Tomasini and Thuanus. E2 52 JEROME CARDAN. Until there shall be one trumpet sounded over all the graves, we shall most likely continue to blow trumpets of our own in this way. A clever man must be more pious than clever who omits the temptation, when he has the power, to display his cleverness upon a tomb. By Cardan, who was more clever than pious, no such omission would be made. How should his piety prevail? The holiness of home, all sacredness of motive and true worthiness of action, had been unknown to the little Jerome when he was a child. He had grown up contemned and neglected, seeing much of evil passion, trained as a child in astro- logy, and strengthened in every tendency to superstition. The religion of his time was ceremonial and full of super- stitious practices. Jerome was superstitious. He was careful to perform religious rites ; he prayed to God and to the Virgin Mary, but more particularly to St. Martin, whom he was taught by a dream to regard as a protector under whom he would enjoy a somewhat quieter and longer life 1 than he could have obtained under any other saint. There can be no doubt that this was a direct slight offered to St. Jerome. Cardan was not behind his age, but he was not before it, when, as he tells us, he was accustomed from childhood to look up to heaven with this prayer: " Lord God, of Thine infinite goodness, give me long life and wisdom, and health both of mind and body 2 .'' 1 De Vita Propr. cap. xxii. p. 87. 2 Ibid. p. 66. KELIGIOX. 53 His body was ailing, his mind wanted health; he feared lest, by a premature close to his life, he might be pre- vented from leaving to posterity such proofs of wisdom as might win for him undying praise. He sought praise as the end of his existence, and exercise of intellect as the most worthy means to such an end. Ambition to produce the utmost good, to develop every talent and apply it carefully to that work in which it would do all that it could be made to do in aid of the real progress of humanity, glorified the life of the obscure French potter, Bernard Palissy 1 , really the best of Cardan's philosophical contem- poraries. Cardan, who won to himself in his own lifetime world-wide fame, was conscious of no higher motive to exertion than anxiety to be remembered as a great phi- losopher. But that was no mean care. Because the superstition of Cardan did not at all times take an orthodox complexion, he has been ranked on more than one occasion among atheists. Thus, for ex- ample, he was set down by Theophilus Raynaud, in his treatise on good and bad books 2 , as the first atheist of the 1 " Je n'ai trouve rien meilleur que de suivre le conseil de Dieu . . II a command e a ses heri tiers qu'ils eussent a manger le pain au labeur de letir corps et qu'ils eussent a multiplier les talens qu'il leur avoit laissez par son Testament. Quoi considere je n'ay voulu cacher en terre les talens qu'il luy a pleu me distribuer," &c. Palissy to the Marshal Montmorenci. 2 " Homo nullius religionis ac fidei, et inter clancularios atheos se- cundi ordinis a3vo suo facile princeps." Father Reynaud De bonis ac malis Libris, quoted by Bayle in his Dictionary. 54 JEROME CARDAN. second order. He records, however, emphatically among the experiences of his life the acquisition, even through trouble, of a firm trust in the wisdom of the divine dispo- sition of events. He had observed, he says, the efficacy of prayer, and recognised the importance of invoking aid from God out of the Scriptures, and of seeking, he adds I quote his exact words " that He would teach me to do His will, because He is my God 1 ." As a religious sentiment, at least, this thought lay at the bottom even of those blind superstitions or clear-sighted comments which the orthodox disdained and set aside as pagan. 1 De Vit. Propr. cap. xxiii. p. 90. LEGACIES AND LAWSUITS. 55 CHAPTER V. JEROME CARDAN. GRADUATE IN MEDICINE HIS LIFE AT SACCO, AND THE STRANGE ADVENTURE OP HIS MARRIAGE. FAZIO CARDAN left a house and some provision for his son, although it seems to have been very small, and liable to much dispute 1 . He had been too ready to allow to other men the use of his possessions. Part of his little store, placed in the hands of insolvent people, had been lost; part, supplied to princes and great men, was to be re-demanded only at great risk, and hardly to be recovered after endless labour. When recovered, it was always re- paid without interest 3 . Litigation, however, was then common ; and we are carried back fairly into the spirit of the time when we read that after his father's death Jerome had first a lawsuit with Alessandro Castillione for some woods, afterwards with members of his father's family, and then with the Counts Barbiani. Jerome eventually gained his point against Castillione, who had one of his 1 " Patrimoniurn quod minimum erat." De Consol. p. 75. De Vita Propr. cap. xxviii. 2 De Ut. ex Adv. Cap. p. 428. 56 JEROME CARDAN. own relations for a judge, and compelled him, after a long struggle, to pay all the money about which a question had arisen. The dispute with the Barbiani was continued over many years 1 . To Clara Micheria there remained also, after the death of Fazio, so much provision for her maintenance as would enable her to buy a house 2 . She could also in some way earn money, for it was by her industry and solicitude incredible solicitude her son entitles it that Jerome, when left by the death of his father poor and helpless, was main- tained at the university 3 . It does not appear that Jerome and his mother were at all times happy in each other, but that Clara, notwithstanding all her sins of temper or of principle, had a woman's power of self-sacrifice, and a mother's strength of love for Jerome, is what I think does appear, not indistinctly. Towards his father, Jerome's heart yearned many years after the old man had passed away, when the son could look back into his youth, for- getting for a time its deprivations, remembering only the gentle words and deeds of the geometrician, who had, he thought, been kinder to him than his mother. Of him he could then write, when the feeling rose naturally in his heart, words of emotion full of a love and gentleness, with 1 Dial, de Morte. Opera, Tom. i. p. 676. 2 De Vit. Propr. p. 92. 3 " Ipse inops, ac auxilio omni destitutus, diligentia et solicitudine matris incredibili sustentabar." Dial, de Morte. Opera, Tom. i.p. 676. PARENT AND CHILD. 57 which he seems to have been able to regard his father only. " My tears arise," he says, " when my mind ponders upon his good-will towards me. But, father, I will give what satisfaction I am able to your merits and your piety. And while these leaves are read, your name and virtue shall be honoured. For he was incorruptible and truly holy 1 ." At other times, in softened mood, we find him speaking of his old relation to his father during childhood, as " what I at that time thought to be hard servitude." At other times he writes the simple truth, but not re- sentfully. Matthew Curtius, a physician of some note in his day, v> r as professor of the theory of medicine in Padua, be- tween the years 1524 and 1530 3 . He encouraged Car- dan greatly with his kindness, even condescending to hold public disputation with him. A compliment dear to the 1 De Ut. ex Adv. Cap. pp. 349, 350. 2 Riccoboni de Gymnas. Patavin. Lib. i. p. 21. Cardan de Vit. Propr. cap. xxxiv. p. 155. Curtius of Pavia taught also at Florence, Bologna, and Pisa. He wrote on Venesection in Pleurisy, on the quality of water, and also, among other things, edited Mundinus, the peg-book upon which anatomists had hung comments for years, until Vesalius achieved a revolution in their science. Curtius was fifty years old, and in the height of his reputation, when Cardan studied under him. His salary at Padua had been twice raised. He died in 1544, aged seventy. Brief details are given concerning him by Tomasini and Papadopoli in their records of the University of Padua, and more by Ghilini, whom I know only as cited in a work invaluable for the infor- mation it gives about forgotten men who were in any degree famous in the sixteenth century, " Zedler's Universal Lexicon aller Wissenschaf- ten und Kiinste." 58 JEKOME CARDAN. young man at the outset of his medical career, was the exclamation of the president before whom he argued some forgotten thesis against a forgotten doctor. The president, struck by Cardan's acuteness, asked who the youth was, and being told, exclaimed, " Study, O youth, you will excel Curtius 1 ." At the close of the year made memorable by his father's death, Jerome Cardan obtained from his university the honour of being appointed Rector of the Gymnasium 2 . He very truly says, that the seeking of that office by him was a most desperately foolish deed 3 . The office was, in fact, the lordship of the university, a post so costly to the holder, that in those days of wars and taxes, and of social disorganisation in North Italy, nobody could be found willing to hold it. It was in abeyance at the time when Jerome Cardan, a clever, penniless, disreputable young scholar of twenty-four, maddened by difficulties, and by a belief that he was impotent for life (his sorest care), plunged desperately into its responsibilities, willing to drown one care in another. The University of Padua, founded in the thirteenth 1 De Libris Propriis : " Stude, o juvenis, Curtium superabis." Stupebant omnes, adds Cardan. 2 De Libr. Propr. (ed. 1547) p. 11. Lib. Ult. Op. Tom. i. p. 97. 3 " Stulte vero id egi, quod Rector Gymnasii Patavini effectus sum, turn cum inops essem, et in patria bella maxima vigerent et tributa intollerabilia. . . . Deus! quid te ad hoc compulit? Ira certe et insania . . ." De Ut. ex Adv. Cap. p. 430. STUDENT AT PADUA. 59 century, had been supported by the Princes of Carrara till their power rotted. Then the Gymnasium was placed, together with the town, in 1405, under the shield of Venice, the town keys and seal being presented in that year to Michael Steno. The liberality of the Venetians caused the university to prosper greatly, and it owed much in the first years of its dependence upon Venice to the liberality of rectors 1 . Until the year 1550, there were two rectors yearly appointed, who held divided rule, the university itself being divided between artists (followers of theology, philosophy, and physic) and jurisconsults. As the affairs of the two classes were separate, each had its rector. Jerome, we have seen, joined the artists, not the jurisconsults, who had then for their own use a distinct 1 The best accounts of the University of Padua in its good old times are, I believe, the six books of Commentaries on the Paduan Gymna- sium, by Antonio Riccobone (Patavii, 1598), the Paduan Gymna- sium, in five books, by the Bishop J. P. Tomasini (Utini, 1654), and the History of the Paduan Gymnasium, by Nic. Comn. Papadopoli (Venet. 1726). I have used these as my authorities, Riccobone lived partly in Cardan's time, but Tomasini's work is more serviceable, in- asmuch as it is full of those minute details which give life to our knowledge of the past. It is quite the best work of the three. The two volumes of Papadopoli, Abbot of St. Zenobius, and Professor at Padua of Canon Law, are of great service as an elaborate appendix to the others. He made it his business not only to compile afresh (drily enough), but to supply from the university records the omissions that occurred in the lists of rectors, professors, &c., published by the two first-named writers. He gives also a brief account of every Paduan who had been famous, including, of course, Cardan. Cardan's name, however, as of one who had held office in the university, does not occur in any of the lists given by these chroniclers. 60 JEROME CARDAN. university building. After the year 1550 an union was effected, and the university was governed by one rector, chosen alternately, if possible, from among the artists and the lawyers 1 . It was not possible always to maintain a strict rotation ; it was even sometimes necessary to look abroad for a man "illustrious, provident, eloquent, and rich," by whose munificence the university could profit. The rector was, indeed, the chief magistrate of the university, who decided judicially disputes among the students and professors on fixed court days, who over- looked the working of the entire system, and saw that the teachers did their duty properly; but his administrative labours were lightened by the aid of a pro-rector, who did the real work, while of the rector himself no more was required than to be munificent. Scholars who would be dukes hereafter were the men thought most proper for the office. So indeed they were, for often rich men, daunted by the heavy demand made by it upon their purses, used the right of refusal granted to them. In the next century the rectorate was shunned so universally, that the office ceased almost wholly, the chief dignitary being the pro- rector, of whom work was required rather than money. For seven years before the year 1515, wars in the district had caused the closing of the University of Padua. 1 Papadopoli Hist. Gymn. Pat. Lib. i. cap. v. p. 7, for preceding de- tails. Tomasini, Lib. i. ch. xix. to xxii. for those next following. RECTOR. 61 After it was re-opened, the prevalent confusion and dis- tress made it impossible to find men who would add to all their other worldly loss the burden of the rector's office. For about ten years after that date, therefore, says a chronicler of the university 1 , there were no rectors. In 1526 there is set down the name of one, and there was one in each of the two succeeding years. In 1529 there was again a rector for the jurisconsults, and another for the artists. The year, therefore, of Cardan's rectorate, 1525, is considered blank, and although Jerome, after two ballots, by a majority of one 2 , obtained leave to assume the responsibilities which every wise man declined, he took none of the honours of the office. It entitled him at once 3 to the degree of doctor without trouble or expense,, but the degree was shortly afterwards refused to him. I do not think that he was enrolled as a citizen of Padua, and I am sure that he was not admitted at Venice into the equestrian order. He seems, in fact, to have received none of the rector's privileges, and he was accounted nobody by the university, his year of office being called 1 Papadopoli, vol. i. pp. 95, 96. The list of rectors is there interrupted thus at the year 1508. "Re Gymnastica intermissu ob Cameracense bellum, mox restituta anno MDXV, a restitutione per annos circiter decem Rectoribus caruit Gymnasium." The list is then resumed at the year 1526. 2 Cardan de Vit. Propr. p. 17. 3 The succeeding particulars concerning the office of Rector of the Gymnasium at Padua in the sixteenth century, are from Tomasini's first book, ch. xix. to xxii. 62 JEROME CARDAN. the last of the ten years in which there was no rector. We may feel assured, also, that the bishop and the local magistrates, and his brother the town rector, did not come in state to visit the new dignitary, and that he did not go with due solemnity as a true rector ought to go after his election to the cathedral, escorted by two hundred spearmen, accompanied by the officials of the university on horseback, and by fife-players, and whatever else is noble. I even doubt whether they clothed him as a rector should be clothed in summer robes of scarlet silk, and winter robes of purple silk and hung the badge over his back, covered with gold and precious stones. If all these forms were properly gone through by the learned Paduans in honour of the young adventurer who undertook to preside over them, that journey of the desperate young Jerome, clothed in purple and gold, and surrounded by spearmen, to the solemn hearing of high mass, would form as odd a picture of times out of joint as any man could easily imagine. That the professors and dignitaries of the university came solemnly to dinner at Cardan's expense I can believe. That the students flocked together to the great inaugural entertainment he was bound to give them, and to any of his other little official dinners, I am sure. Wild dinners they must have been, for Jerome looked back upon the RECTOR. 63 year when he was rector as a year of " Sardanapalan life," a blot upon his past for which he had to make atone- ment 1 . And who found the money to support him in his false position who paid for the mock-majesty of Rector Sardanapalus ? The widow at Milan. His mother we do not know how worked for him, and by her self- denial and solicitude he was enabled 2 to sustain the charges that he had so foolishly and recklessly incurred. Perhaps she was proud of his distinction, unsubstantial as it was, but proud or not, she was his mother. Except his mother's help, he had no means of income but the gaming- table 3 . Cardan had not at the university a large circle of friends. Except when he sought wild pleasure in a game of chance, or men with whom to sing, he was, in his studies and his recreations, almost a recluse; he thought that few who might be his companions were virtuous, none truly learned, and with a false cynicism he regarded social intercourse as waste of time. Yet he had formed in his youth a friendship, based upon community of tastes In chapter xiii. p. 59 of the De Vita Propr. Liber, he speaks of ance due " ut vita Sardanapalece quam anno quo praefui Gymnasio tavino egi, flagitia purgaverim." 2 " Matris tamen sollicitudine effectum est, ut pondus impensarum, quamvis segre, sustinuerim." De Ut. ex Adv. Cap. p. 430. 3 " Studentium Rector creatus, nihil prius cum haberem, totum tamen illud nihil consumpsi. Nee ullum mihi erat reliquum auxilium, nisi latrunculorum ludus." De ConsoL p. 75. 64 JEROMD CARDAN. for dice and music, with one Ambrose Varadeus; after- wards he had found a friend at Pavia in Prosper Mari- non. A pallid youth, Ottaviano Scoto, of Venice, who lost fifty sheets of Cardan's early efforts as an author, was a friend with whom the young student was upon familiar terms of lend and borrow as to books anil money 1 . This was his closest intimacy ; out of it sprang one of the leading events in his after-life. Another of his close friends was Gaspardo Gallearato. Love of pleasure coun- teracted, in a great degree, Jerome's desire to play the misanthrope. In society he had also the satisfaction of rasping any tender point in a discussion. As much through love of argument as malice he perversely advo- cated the opinions that were most distasteful to his com- pany 2 , and loved a single combat of the tongue, in which it appears that he never failed to silence his opponent, for he could bring into play not only a quick wit and a rare amount of ready knowledge, but he could assume also a tone so rude and overbearing that few who had contested with him once would court a second battle. Though the natural gifts and acquirements of Cardan were disfigured by harsh feeling towards others and an obtrusive consciousness of self, it is curious to observe how 1 De Vit. Propr. cap. xv. p. 68. 2 " Illud inter vitia mea singulare et magnum agnosco, et sequor, ut liberitius nil dicam quam quod audientibus displiceat, atque in hoc, sciens ac volens, persevero." De Vit. Prop. cap. xiii. p. 60. ESCAPE FROM DROWNING. 65 in his mind the vanity of the scholar was combined with, and perhaps, indeed, formed but a part of, a most rare candour in self-confession. Desiring and expecting an immortal fame, Jerome was thoroughly determined to enable all posterity to know what manner of man he was. Revelations of himself are to be found scattered through- out the huge mass of his writings : those revelations are collected here into a narrative, and we have had reason already, as we shall have more reason hereafter, to wonder at the unflinching way in which the Milanese philosopher must have performed self- dissection, when he laid bare so much that was corrupt in his own. nature to the public gaze. To nobody was he so merciless as to himself; he scorned the men who, being dark within, study to show a brilliant outside to the world, and going over, as he always did, into a state of bold antagonism, he hung out every one of his misdeeds, and all that he found rotten in himself, for popular inspection. Readily confessing cowardice, Cardan tells of a storm on the Lago di Guarda, in which he was nearly drowned. It was in the year in which he was rector, at a time when he was forced by want of funds to make an expedition homeward 1 . He had pushed off into the lake, unwillingly enough, with a few companions, and they had on board 1 *' Pecuniarum exigendarum causa." De Ut. ex Adv. Cap. p. 430. To make work for his mother. VOL. I. F 66 JEROME CARDAN. the boat some horses. Their sail was torn, they had their mast broken, lost also their rudder and one of their two oars, when night came on. At last they came ashore at Sirmione, when they were all despairing of a rescue, Cardan most of all. They came ashore in good time, for very few minutes afterwards, when they were housed safely in their inn, a fierce burst of the storm arose, which their disabled boat could by no chance have weathered. The iron hinges of the windows in the inn were bent by it. Jerome, who had been out of doors a confessed coward, tells philosophically how all his valour came to him when a fine pike was brought to table, and he supped joyously, though his companions could not eat. The only youth, except Cardan, who had an appetite, was he whose rashness led the party into danger, and whose courage found a safe way out of it 1 . But the scholar who was bold over his supper, and cared little for the howling of the wind outside, may have lost something of his boldness when the lights were out and the loud wind at night hindered him from sleep- ing. His philosophy had comprehended studies that gave strength to superstition. Astrologers had predicted from his horoscope that he would not live to be older than forty or forty-five ; and he, believing them, took no pains in the management of his inheritance to reserve any 1 De Vit. Propr. cap. xxx. p. ill. SPIRIT-KNOCKING. 67 provision for old age. Illusions of the senses, to which he was subject, strengthened his belief in supernatural appearances, and his own nervous, dreamy nature caused him to convert at times the memory of common events into some hazy impression of the wonderful. I have not thought it Avorth while to collect together all the stories of this kind related by Cardan ; but two may serve here as examples. At Pavia, one morning while in bed, and again while dressing, Jerome heard a distinct rap as of a hammer on a wall of his room, by which he knew that he was parted from a chamber in an empty house. At that time died his and his father's friend, Galeazzo Rosso 1 . The disciples of certain impostors who in our own day have revived a belief in spirit-knockings in New York, may be referred to the works of Cardan for a few enunciations of distinct faith in such manifestations. A more curious example will occur hereafter. In the present instance, Cardan, who is never destitute of philo- sophic candour, owns that he was unable to prove any strict correspondence of time between the death of Eosso and the knockings in his room. It is enough for us 1 De Vit. Propr. cap. xliii. p. 222. I quote the passage for the benefit of Rappists: " Quod mihi accidit dum studerem Papise, ut mane quodam, antequam expergiscerer ictum in muro senserim; vacuum erat habitaculum quod loco illi erat contiguum: et dum expergiscerer, et postea alium, quasi mallei, et quod eadem hora resperi intellexerim obiisse Galeazium de Rubeis amicum singularem, et de quo tarn multa, non id referam in miracula," F2 68 JEROME CARDAN. simply to note how frequently the ear as well as the eye is deluded, when the nervous system is in a condition that appears to have been constant with Cardan. The sounds heard by him at Pavia portended no more than is meant by the flashes of light which sometimes dart before our weaned eyes. We do not find greater difficulty in perceiving with how much ease Jerome may in lapse of time have fallen into the belief that a supernatural event marked his first experience in Latin. " Who was the man," he says, u who sold me a Latin Apuleius when I was, I think, about twenty years old, and instantly departed? I bought it without judgment, for its gilded binding ; but the next morning found that I could read it. Almost at the same time I acquired the power of understanding Greek, Latin, French, and Spanish, that is to say, so that I could understand books in those languages, though un- able to speak them and ignorant of their grammar 1 ." There is nothing in this superstitious suggestion incon- sistent with the record left by Cardan of the time spent by him in acquiring languages and studying their gram- mar. In his early college days he bought a Latin Apuleius. He had been superficially practised in Latin by conversation with his father, and the language differs not so greatly from Italian as to make it wonderful that 1 De Vit. Propr. p. 225. THE MAGIC APULEIUS. 69 any youth of quick and ready wit should find that he could make out at once the general sense of a Latin story. Any shrewd man acquainted with Italian can scramble at first sight through the meaning of a Spa- nish book, and of French, another allied tongue, young Jerome must have picked up a great number of hints from the French armies that overran his native district. After the purchase of his Apuleius, the student may have prided himself much on the discovery of the great deal that he could extract from books in these languages, before they had become, or when they had not long become, matters of systematic study. The seller of the Apuleius could be looked back to at last from a distance of time as though he had been one of the legendary beings who come into the market-places to sell magic books, and then are seen no more. The impression would accord well with his superstitious fancy ; he himself would very soon believe it, and could easily let Greek slip in- sensibly into the list of tongues miraculously placed within his power. It is no proof of deliberate untruth that Cardan has put down among the mysteries of life this vague impression in one place, but does not the less candidly relate elsewhere the pains with which he toiled along the usual paths of study. Those paths led him, at the beginning of the year 1526, to the attainment of one object of ambition. He was in 70 JEROME CARDAN. that year laureated Doctor of Medicine. His admission to the dignity was not, however, easily accorded/ Having been presented by his teachers, and proved himself before the bishop orthodox and loyal, it was the duty of Cardan, as of any other candidate, to defend publicly four theses, two of them selected by himself. His opponents in dis- cussion were, as usual, the junior doctors; afterwards he himself, with those by whom he was presented, having withdrawn, his admission or exclusion was determined by a ballot 1 . Jerome had been at first rejected, in spite of his rectorship perhaps even because of it by a compact body of forty-seven dissentients. On account of his birth, disgrace attached to his name; his love of dice, and various irregularities, must certainly have brought him into much disfavour, while his obstinate and disputatious method of asserting his opinions, and his contempt of custom, must have scandalised many of the magnates of the university. He was rejected twice; but when he made his third effort, the adverse voices were reduced to nine 2 , and he was admitted Doctor of Medicine, and re- ceived with due solemnity the open and shut book, the barette, the ring, and the kiss. The open book signified things known to him that he was authorised to teach ; the closed book signified the knowledge that it yet remained 1 The details concerning the installation of a doctor here given are from Tomasmi, Lib. i. cap. xlvii, pp. 159, 160. 2 De Vit. Propr. p. 17. DOCTOR OF MEDICINE. 71 for him, and was his business, to acquire. The barette was of an ecclesiastical form, and signified that he was consecrated as a priest to science, and by its name (bi-rect), twice right, some thought it also signified that teachers ought to be correct in practice as in theory. By the ring he was espoused to his profession. The kiss was the symbol of the brotherhood to which he was admitted, and the peace and harmony that should prevail among all fellow-labourers in art or science. Then in the cathedral he was ushered by the bedel formally from a seat by his presenters to a seat by the prior, further symbolising that, as a man of learning, he was qualified to sit among the princes of the earth. So Jerome was made a doctor in the famous University of Padua. He was then twenty- five years old. Having obtained this qualification. Cardan, without loss of time, proceeded to establish himself in practice. An opening was found for him at Sacco, to which place he went, by the advice and with the help of a zealous friend, a physician of Padua, Francisco Buonafede 1 .'j3uona- fede had been a warm promoter in the university of Car- dan's claim to a degree. He himself held rank at Padua between the years 1524 and 1526 as the first of the two extraordinary professors of the Theory of Medicine, his i De Ut. ex Adv. Cap. Lib. iii. p. 431. De Libris Propr. (1557) p. 12. 72 JEROME CARDAN. colleague being Peter Maynard, of Verona. Buonafede next became the second extraordinary professor of Prac- tical Medicine, in which department he became senior professor in 1539 1 . He was a man of great worth, who felt towards the young student disinterested friendship, for Cardan had not attended any of his lectures 2 . Sacco is a small town, about ten miles from Padua and twenty -five from Venice. Battle and murder, plague, pestilence, and famine, de- terred Cardan from residence at Milan. During the six or seven years spent by him at Sacco, his own district was devastated by a succession of those evils that charac- terised in most parts of Europe the low social condition of the age. W hile Jerome pursued his studies at the uni- versity, the slaughter committed by the plague in his own district had been merciless. In 1522 fifty thousand of the Milanese died of the plague in four months. In 1524 there had been fierce plague, and by the fortune of war Milan had twice bowed to a new master. In 1526 and 1527, while Cardan dwelt at Sacco, Milan suffered under scarcity, that was made more distressing by the added burden of intolerable taxes. In 1528 disease and pesti- lence again broke out, and were less fearful in their ravages only because they had already swept off a large 1 Gyran. Pat. Riccoboni, p. 23. Tomasini, p. 314. 2 De Vit. Propr. p. 18. The same authority covers the facts stated in the succeeding paragraph. OPENING FOR PRACTICE. 73 part of the population of the district. In 1529 the miserable wars abated, and Cardan made an attempt to fix himself in Milan, for he regarded that town as his proper home. The attempt failed, as will presently be shown, and the adventurer having returned to Sacco, con- tinued to live there during three or four more years. ' At Sacco, in which town he began to reside by way of omen perhaps on his birthday 1 , that is to say, on the 24th of September (1526), Cardan established himself in a house of his own, practised his profession, gambled, spent his money, and had no lack of holiday friends. (The belief, founded on his horoscope, that he would die in middle age, and a desponding sense of inability to marry, caused the young physician to care little for the morrow. The consciousness of impotence had weighed upon him for about four years when he went to Sacco, and continued unabated until he was more than thirty years of age 2 . It was the greatest trouble of his life during those years which formed, in other respects, the happiest part of his existence. To feel, or to confess, that he was absolutely happy was not in the nature of Cardan. The conditions necessary to true happiness were absent from his mind. To the child whose character is forming the accidents of 1 De Libris Propr. (ed. 1557) p. 13. A work entitled " Epidemia " begins thus: " Anno MDXXVI. die xxiv. Septembris qua mihi nata- lis fuit, contuli me in Saccense oppidum." 2 De Ut. ex Adv. Capiend. Lib. ii. cap. 9. 74 JEROME CARDAN. outer life are events of real importance, happy or unhappy in themselves, but in the man whose character is formed the outer life is subject to the inner. I have taken pains, as I thought just, to call attention to those incidents of Cardan's youth which had a baneful influence upon his character. The child Jerome it was right to handle ten- derly, but now that he has grown up, and has come out into the world to take his part in it as independent worker, he must run alone, for he is too old to be nursed by a biographer. In his own morbid way Cardan tells us that as there are short giants and tall pigmies, so when he says that he spent at Sacco happy days, we must understand them to have been happily wretched 1 . He enjoyed games of chance, indulged his love of music, rambled through a beautiful country, dined and studied indolently. No- body molested him, he spent his money and he had his friends, he was respected, visited by gay Venetian nobles. The magnates of the town associated with him, he kept open house, and men gathered about him, prompt enough to own that Jerome Cardan was a great philoso- pher. This cheerful bit of Cardan's life extended over five years and a half, commencing in September, 1526, and ending in the month of February, 1532, not very 1 De Vita Propr. cap. xxxi. p. 129. The authority remains the same until there occurs a fresh citation. LIFE AT SACCO. 75 many weeks after his marriage. He had enjoyed fairly his student life, but to the years spent at Sacco he looked back often afterwards. They contracted in his memory into a single happy thought, a thought to which, at night, his pleasant dreams frequently led him. lie studied while at Sacco indolently, or at any rate his study produced small immediate results. During the six years spent there his mind was at work, but that was a period rather of growth than produce. Cardan himself says, discontentedly, " During all the six years that I practised my art in that town, with great labour I pro- duced but little profit to myself, much less to others." (Yet he was by no means wholly without practice 1 .) " I was impeded by crude thoughts and restless studies, my wit not working smoothly or to good effect 2 ." His writ- ten work during that period, except an essay upon Chei- romancy, an art in which Cardan had more faith than a modern gipsy, was entirely medical. It consisted of three hundred sheets, upon the Method of Healing ; a treatise to the extent of thirty -six sheets, on the epidemic that prevailed in his neighbourhood during the whole time of his residence at Sacco ; a treatise on the Plague. The treatise on the Plague was lost, and there were two other treatises destroyed also by the misdeed of a cat, 1 De Consolatione, p. 75. 3 De Libris Propriis. Liber ultimus. Opera, Tom. L p. 97. 76 JEROME CARDAN. one De Re Venerea, the other upon Spittle 1 . The three hundred sheets upon the Method of Healing, Cardan proposed to arrange in four books, putting into the fourth the remedies for the compound diseases. Of the early works of Cardan, and of the teachings found in them, it will be my duty to speak more at large in the succeeding chapter. Two persons Jerome names especially as having been his friends while he lived at Sacco. One of these, Paolo Illirico, was a druggist, with whom he came very naturally into con- tact. His other friend was Gian Maria Mauroceno, a Vene- tian noble 2 . This may or may not be the same senator who was concerned in the disreputable quarrel next to be re- lated, but the hero of it was more probably a nobleman named Thomas Lezun, who is elsewhere mentioned 3 . I shall best illustrate the bold way in which the philoso- pher speaks evil of himself, by putting down the worst part of this tale in his own words. They, however, who are familiar with the personal records that have been left to us by men of the world who lived and acted in the spirit of the sixteenth century, will know that the rude passion of Cardan was very little out of harmony with the coarse temper of the times 4 . ' De Sapientia, &c. p. 422. De Libris Propriis (ed. 1557), p. 13, where he says of the two spoilt treatises, " ambo hi libri corrupt! sunt urin. felis." The same fact he records again elsewhere. 3 De Propr. Vita Liber, cap. xv. 3 Liber de Ludo Alese. 4 1 may suggest a recollection of the Memoirs of Cellini. FOUL PLAY. 77 " When I was at Venice," Jerome tells us 1 , "at the festival of the birth of the Virgin, I lost my money at cards, and on the next day what remained; but I was in the house of the man with whom I played. When, therefore, I noticed that he used foul play, I wounded him in the face with a poniard, but slightly. There were present two youths of his household, and two spears were hanging from the rafters, and the house-door was fastened with a key. But when I had taken from him all his money, both his own and mine, having won back early that morning, and sent home by my boy the clothes and rings that I had lost to him on the preceding day, I flung back to him, of my own accord, some of the money, because I saw that he was wounded." Having achieved so much, Cardan pointed his sword at the two servants, and threatened death to them if they did not unlock the door and let him out. Their master, balancing the cost in his own mind, and finding, says Jerome, that what he had now lost was not more than he had previously taken, bade that his assailant should be suffered to go unmolested. The fierce passions awakened in the gambler made such scenes no doubt sufficiently familiar, and the Venetian either was conscious that he had provoked an attack, by being guilty of the charge upon which it was founded, or he was a hospitable, kindly man. He took 1 De Vita Propria, cap. xxx. 78 JEROME CARDAN. the dagger-thrust in friendly part and bore no malice, for there is a sequel to the story. On the same day, while Cardan was wandering about, with arms under his clothes, endeavouring to avoid the wrath of the chief magistrate for his assault upon a senator, after dark his feet slipped and he fell into one of the canals. By clinging, in his struggle, to the oars of a passing boat, he obtained rescue at the hands of the rowers, and was dragged on board. He found on board his adversary, with a fillet round his face, who covered him not with reproaches, but with a dry suit of his own clothes. After he had dwelt two years in Sacco, Cardan, never strong in health, was attacked by tertian fever, ending, however, on the seventh day. A year afterwards, in 1529, there being a slight remission of the plague and tumult in Milan, Jerome, summoned by letters from his mother 1 , returned to his own town, and there endeavoured to obtain his enrolment among the members of the College of Physicians. But the old stain of illegitimacy clung still to him in the company of those men who had known him as a boy. The respectable body of the physicians of Milan would admit no bastard into their society, and they rejected him, upon a suspicion of illegitimacy based, as its victim tells us, upon the ill-treatment he had expe- 1 De Consol. p. 75. REJECTED AT MILAN. 79 rienced from his father 1 /' When Cardan is relating facts, the neglect of his son by the geometrician cannot be kept out of sight; when he expresses feelings, however, a senti- ment of filial affection, and a tender recollection of the old man's latest sympathies, prompt nothing but panegyric of the dead. His rejection by the physicians of his own town for the reason assigned, inflicted a fresh hurt upon the sickly spirit of the young philosopher. He entreated also, while in Milan, for some satisfactory adjustment of his claims against the powerful Barbiani family 2 ; but from the Bar- biani he obtained no settlement. He found his mother also sullen ; and having experienced in Milan insult and disappointment, with much bodily and mental toil, he went back to Sacco in a hectic state, half convalescent from a desperate complaint. He had been oppressed at Milan with worldly cares, the sense of which was rapidly supplanted by the expectation of death 3 . Cough, ulcers, and foetid expectorations, caused all who were about him 1 De Consol. p. 75. 2 De Vita Propr. p. 18. 3 De Propr. Vit. p. 19. De Consol. p. 76, where he writes "In- terim vero cogita quae curse qua3 tristitise animum meura vexare de- buissent. Hinc paupertas maxima, illinc mater flens orbitatem et suam miseram senectutem, turn memoria contumaciae affinium, inju- riae ut rebar medicorum, minae potentis " (t. e. of Count Barbiani, who no doubt had borrowed money of Fazio) " desperatio salutis, nullus amicus. Quiescens indigebam necessariis, laborare non poteram : men- dicare turpissimum erat." On the same pages will be found authority for the succeeding facts . 80 JEROME CARDAN. for a long time to consider that the life of Cardan was already near its close. He was thus seriously ill for seven months, wanting necessaries. Nevertheless, by the inter- cession, he tells us, of the Blessed Virgin perhaps through abstinence from medicine, for he took none ; per- haps, he hints, because he was reserved for better things Jerome recovered. There were many years to come through which a busy philosophic mind had work to do in the unwholesome chamber of his body. The spirit would have been more healthy had it dwelt in wholesome flesh. In more than one place we are told by Cardan that his mind suffered at times pain so intense that he was glad to relieve it by applying counter-irritation to his body. He would beat his thighs with a switch, bite his left arm, pinch tender bits of skin, would fast, and endeavour by such means to produce a flow of tears, for he was relieved greatly by weeping, but was frequently unable to obtain for himself that method of relief 1 . The appearance of Cardan in his manhood well ac- corded with the temper of his mind 2 . He had thin arms and unequal hands, the left hand being elegantly formed with shapely nails, the right hand clumsy and ill-shapeii. His forehead was broad, and there was little hair upon the temples; in later and graver years he wore a skull-cap on 1 De Vita Propr. cap. vi. p. 30; cap. xiv. pp. 65, 66. 2 Ibid. cap. v. p. 24; cap. xxi. pp. 84, 85, for the next statements. ECCENTRICITIES. 81 a shaven head. His beard was yellow and forked. His gait was clumsy, for he paid little or no heed in walking to the way that lay before him, and his pace and bearing varied with his thoughts. It was now fast, now slow, now upright, now with bowed head, as variable as the gestures of a child. In his speech he was too copious and too deficient in amenity 1 . He was very fond of fishing 2 . He had a taste for cats and dogs and little birds, so that he even names them with history, music, and other things that adorn this transitory scene, placing them in his list between liberty and temperance on the one side, and on the other side the consolation of death, and the equal ebb of time over the happy and the wretched 3 . Among his follies he numbers an inability to part with living things that have been established once under his roof. " I re- tain," he says, " domestics that are not only useless to me, but that I am told also are a scandal to my house; I keep even animals which I have once accepted, goats, lambs, hares, rabbits, storks, so that they pollute me the whole house 4 ." A more natural taste in a philosopher, an extravagant 1 De Vita Propr. p. 59. 2 Ibid. p. 80. 3 He speaks of quicquam boni quo adornes hanc scenam, and gives for example " musicaB auditus, oculorum lustratio, sermones, fabulae, historiae, libertas, continentia, aviculae, catuli, feles, consolatio mortis, communis temporis transitus miseris cequalis ac beatis, casuum et fortunes" De Propria Vita Lib. cap. xxx. 4 De Propria Vita Lib. cap. xiii. pp. 60, 61. VOL. I. G 82 JEROME CARDAN. taste for the purchase of books, can scarcely be named as a peculiarity 1 . More characteristic, in the same way, of the philosopher whose ruling passion was an eagerness for everlasting fame, was a delight in expensive writing mate- rials, a desire to lavish money on the instruments by use of which his name was to be made immortal 2 . A per- sonal peculiarity which lasted for about two years while he was at Sacco, Jerome regarded as a portent. His skin exhaled a strong odour of sulphur 3 . As a practi- tioner of medicine, Cardan, very wisely indeed, consider- ing the science of the time, trusted more to experiment and observation than to his own wisdom or the knowledge of his art. As a philosopher, apart from dice and cards, he professed and felt tender regard for time, the economy of which he recommended by some such proverb as that many mouthfuls make a bellyful 4 . Not only when pro- fessedly at work, but also when riding, walking, eating, or awake in bed, there were analyses and distillations going on within the laboratory of his brain. He con- sidered it a good and wise thing to court the acquaint- ance of old men, and to seek knowledge in their society. He also, in a spirit of the truest philosophy, considered it 1 " Profusus in emendis libris." De Vit. Propr. cap. xxv. p. 94. 2 De Vit. Propr. cap. xviii. p. 80. 3 De Serum Varietate (ed. Basil. 1557), Lib. viii. cap. 43, p. 316. 4 " Multa modica faciunt unum satis." De Vit. Propr, cap. xxiii. p. 90. All that is stated in this paragraph depends for authority on the same chapter in the Liber de Vita Propria. EVIL OMENS. 83 liis duty to observe everything, and suppose nothing to have been fortuitously made by nature " by which means," he hints, and we can readily believe, " I have be- come richer in knowledge than in money." Recovered from his wasting illness, writing, trifling, and enjoying again his position in the little town of Sacco, when he had completed his thirtieth year, towards the end of the year 153 1 1 , the young physician married. Be- fore the event, he tells us 2 , looking back to it from a later date, and colouring his narrative with superstition, before the event a quiet dog howled with unusual pertinacity ; ravens sat upon the house-top and croaked more than they were wont; bundles of sticks broken by a boy emitted sparks of fire. At that time Cardan, newly and suddenly 3 relieved from the sense of incompetence to marry by which he had for ten years considered himself doomed to remain single, dreamed of a lovely maiden dressed in white. His 1 De Vit. Propr. p. 19. 2 De Vit. Propr. cap. xli. pp. 209, 210: " Cum anno MDXXXI. canis modesta ulularet praeter consuetudinem assidue : corvi insiderent domus vertici crocitantes praeter solitum, puer cum fascicules lignorum frangeret, erumpebant ignis scintillae, duxi uxorem inexpectato." 3 " Minim dictu," he says (de Lib. Prop. Lib. ult.) " ut flatim e galli naceo factus sim gallus, et ex 6Xa