VISIONS AND GHOSTS. 299 



was d'Avalos or the Cardinal Sfondrato, the lion was the 

 college, and Hephaestion was Luca della Croce. Ghosts 

 of the dead came to the bedside of the excitable and ner- 

 vous man. In 1537, a year after her death, his mother 

 stood at the foot of his bed in the scarlet dress she used to 

 wear when occupied in household avocations. She came 

 to call him to her. Did she not know that she was dead? 

 he asked. She did, and summoned him to come to her 

 next year. But he had work to do, and did not wish to 

 leave it. An accident, a narrow escape from serious hurt 

 or death, in the succeeding year, was the fulfilment of that 

 warning. There was an old college friend, also, who has 

 been named on a former page, Prosper Marinon, a friend 

 who had died in the flower of years, and with whom 

 Jerome had formerly discoursed of ghostly things, and of 

 the state of the soul after death. Prosper Marinon had 

 come to his bedside, also a year after death, and he too being 

 asked, had said that he knew himself to be dead, and had 

 stooped down over his old friend, and kissed him on the 

 lips. A second time, later in Cardan's life, the ghost of 

 Prosper Marinon visited at night his old companion. 



Such visions were a portion of his bodily infirmity. His 

 flesh was tainted from the first with evil humours, and the 

 gout, which appeared soon after he removed to Pavia, was 

 no more than a link in a long chain of maladies produced 

 at one time by the irritable state of his nervous system, 



