142 JEROME CARDAN. 



Pope's liking for astronomy, and therefore took pains to 

 suit the humour of his Holiness with two books, of which 

 one was a Supplement to the Almanacs, the other was a 

 sensible technical work, with a title that might be con- 

 sidered startling " Emendation of the Celestial Move- 

 ments, by Jerome Cardan." They were both written in 

 fifteen days, and duly taken by Archinto; but they pro- 

 duced no supplement to the poor scholar's income, or emen- 

 dation of his daily fare. He spent the other two months 

 of his holidays in the preparation of an elaborate work 

 on Arithmetic, which occupied his mind so thoroughly 

 that problems and solutions filled his very dreams. Thus 

 even in his dreams he found hints for his book; and 

 the subject being thus suggested to him, an inquiry into 

 the subject of dreams, and a treatise upon them, closed the 

 year. 



Cardan was thirty-five years old, and up to this date, 

 though an indefatigable author from his youth up, not a 

 sentence of his writings had been printed. At last, how- 

 ever, the great day was near when for the first time he 

 should talk to the whole world in print, and ascertain 

 whether he could really make it worth men's while to 

 pay attention to his talking. 



Mention was made in a former chapter of a college 

 friend, Ottaviano Scoto 1 , to whom Jerome had lent some 



1 De Libris Propriis (ed. 1557), p. 29. De Lib. Propr. Lib. ult. 

 Opera, Tom. i. p. 102, for the succeeding narrative. 



