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. 



