A NEW FKIEND CARDINAL MORONE. 3 



and strengthened high respect for Cardan in the mind of 

 the learned Cardinal Morone. Morone was one of the 

 most notable of the great men who had a home in Milan, 

 stood high in the favour of the Pope, and was at that 

 time president of the Council of Trent, with the history 

 of which famous conclave his name is throughout asso- 

 ciated intimately. 



Morone the elder, father to Jerome's friend, had been 

 one of the shrewdest and most unscrupulous of Italian 

 diplomatists ; he was chancellor to the last Sforzas, and 

 closely, though by no means creditably, mixed up with 

 Milanese public affairs when Jerome was a boy. His 

 career in Milan closed with capture and imprisonment 

 under the custody of Constable Bourbon. That check to 

 his career was trifling. When Bourbon wanted money 

 for his troops, and raised it by ransoms, Hieronimo 

 Morone bought his liberty for twenty thousand florins, 

 and moreover attached himself very adroitly to his late 

 enemy, so that he became his counsellor and secretary. 

 He even played a selfish game so well, that, after the 

 death of Bourbon before the walls of Rome, he kept his 

 own position in the army. This shrewd man had been 

 one of the chief mediators in obtaining the liberty of the 

 Pope Clement VII, and, in gratitude for that service, 

 his son Giovanni received, at the age of twenty, and just 



B2 



