138 JEROME CARDAN. 



Quick-witted, versatile, and candid. Cardan rarely 

 suffered himself to be deceived into a respectful treat- 

 ment of his own defects. Of his love of dice the best he 

 could say in excuse was that " Philosophers may play, 

 but Wise Men are as kings enjoying higher pleasures 1 ." 

 By skill in dice he even eked out his subsistence in the 

 first days of his poverty at Milan, and perhaps earned 

 more at the gaming-table than at the bedside; for on the 

 hint of his rivals, it was soon a subject of discourse in 

 Milan the most frivolous of scandal-tattling cities 3 , as 

 he found reason to call it that Cardan was too intent on 

 mathematics to be very conversant with medicine. In 

 his office of lecturer he had then been interpreting Vitru- 

 vius 3 , and it was quite certain that his studies in con- 

 nexion with his duties under Thomas Plat's endowment 

 were of a kind to be regarded by the jealous public as 

 incompatible with the thoughts which are supposed to 

 revolve eternally in the minds of practising physicians. 

 A physician even in our own day cannot acquire reputa- 

 tion in any branch of literature or science that does not 

 bear directly upon tongues and pulses, without forfeiting 

 a portion of the practice that he might have gained with 



^ $ 



ease if he had been a duller man, or if he had but hidden 



1 De Paupertate. 



2 " In urbe omnium nugacissima, et quae calumniis maxime patet." 

 De Libr. Propr. (1557) p. 32. 



3 De Sapientia, &c. p. 425. 



