14 JEROME CARDAN. 



received, and the amount of which would fluctuate, but 

 which might be said to make, together with the other sum, 

 an income of eight hundred crowns. There was offered 

 to him, in addition to this salary, free maintenance for 

 himself and a household of five, together with allowance 

 for three horses. That he would have from the king, and 

 more he might receive as a physician, from the courtiers 

 or other Danes who came to him for counsel. 



Jerome was not to be tempted. He remained at Pavia. 

 The climate of Denmark, he said, was cold and moist, 

 and would not suit his sickly constitution. The people of 

 Denmark he considered to be almost barbarous, a race of 

 turbulent men, not more congenial to his mind than their 

 soil would be to his body. In Denmark he seems to have 

 felt that he would have been almost banished from that 

 republic of letters in which he had always hoped to 

 become a laurelled citizen. He urged strongly the heresy 

 of the Danes, that they used rites and precepts very dif- 

 ferent from those of Rome, and that he should be compelled 

 either to give up the religion of his country, which he cer- 

 tainly would never do, or to live openly at variance with 

 those about him, and estranged from the consolations of 

 his Church. He took no part in the quarrel between 

 Catholic and Protestant, and he philosophised upon 

 eternal things with a surprising boldness ; but though he 

 ran the risk of being called by his own Church an impious 



