WRITING FOR THE FIRE. 281 



abjure his tankard. He both practised it again and 

 wrote of it again ; twice again in successive works he 

 discussed, among others, his own horoscope. In doing so 

 for the last time, when the events of his life lay chiefly in 

 the past, his comment upon it, and upon all nativities 

 by which it was influenced and modified, became so 

 elaborate that it assumed by itself almost the proportions 

 of a book. He returned then thoroughly to his astro- 

 logy, for how could he forswear it while he believed the 

 science to be true, and there were yet kings to urge that 

 he would exercise his skill in it on their behalf? 



In the same year, 1543, Jerome had begun the writing 

 of a life of Galen, which it does not appear that he ever 

 finished. He also laboured at a book on the art of Meto- 

 poscopy, illustrated with numerous physiognomical draw- 

 ings. He wrote other matter, much that he has himself 

 designated as prodigious folly, on the hint of which he 

 expressed his opinion, and that no foolish one, that there 

 is in the mind, as in the body, a necessity for getting rid 

 of waste, that the active literary man must write things 

 for the fire as well as for the press. Such a work was 

 Cardan's " Convivium," or treatise on Example in Love. 

 In the same year, stirred by the restless spirit that would 

 never suffer him to be content with one work at a time, he 

 was engaged in philological research, and wrote a dialogue 

 in his own tongue upon a comparison between the respec- 



