128 JEROME CARDAN. 





hereafter that his tenderness towards a miserable child 

 forms one of the main features of his life. He claims for 

 himself, and that also justly, the merit, that if he attracted 

 to himself few friends, he never broke a friendship, and 

 that if he found himself forsaken for a time by one of 

 those few friends, he never used unkindly, whether as 

 public accusation or as private taunt, knowledge obtained 

 in confidential intercourse 1 . He had a rugged love of 

 truth and justice; he remembered benefits, and when af- 

 fronted could afford deliberately to abstain from seizing 

 any offered opportunity of vengeance. He governed his pen 

 better than his tongue, and carefully restrained himseli 

 from carrying into his books the heat he could not check 

 in oral disputation. He left enemies unnamed, and 

 though he now and then is found devoting some impa- 

 tient sentences to writers who had treated his opinions 

 rudely, yet it seems at first sight absolutely wonderful 

 that a man so sensitive and so irascible, so beset by harsh 

 antagonists as the weak-bodied Jerome, should have filled 

 so many volumes with philosophy and so few pages with 

 resentment. The wonder ceases when a closer scrutiny 

 displays the difference in intellectual and moral weight 

 between Cardan and most of his opponents. 



1 De Vita Propr. cap. xiv. pp. 67, 68. And for the next facts. 



