ASSUMED CUKES OF CONSUMPTION. 169 



and if Jerome afterwards, handling himself roughly as 

 usual, declares that an important step in his life was 

 determined by the lie he told about the healing of con- 

 sumptive patients, and that he never profited so much by 

 any single truth as by that falsehood 1 , he certainly shows 

 no decrease of candour. Yet mendacity in this instance 

 was one of the great charges made against poor Jerome by 

 his first posthumous critic of any note, Gabriel Naude 2 , 

 who has been followed thoughtlessly by later writers. 

 Bits of truth are the basis of error. Dreadful accounts of 

 Cardan have been founded upon isolated passages found 

 in his works ; but from a scrutiny of all the statements 

 made by him about himself, arranged and collated with a 

 fair amount of care, there can result only, as this narrative, 

 if it be worth anything, will show, a confirmation of his 

 claim to be regarded as a scorner of untruth. He does 

 not by any means lay claim to the whole group of car- 

 dinal virtues, but he can see through respectability and 

 all its cheats. It may be as much out of the pride of an 

 ill-used philosopher, as out of the spirit of a Christian, 

 that he speaks the truth, but it is truth that he does 

 always speak, and nothing else. " I think," he says, " that 



1 De Libris Propriis. Lib. ult. Opera, Tom. i. p. 136. 

 ' 2 " Mendacissimum ilium fuisse deprehendi, et ab hoc vitio reliqua 

 demum velut e fonte promenasse, quae a nonnullis deliramenta vocan- 

 tur, non levibus de causis existimo." Naudaeus in the De Cardani Ju- 

 dicium, prefixed by him to the book De Vita Propria. 



