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 



