24 JEROME CARDAN. 



All the compulsions put upon Alciat had been profit- 

 able to him. The Emperor had made him a Count 

 Palatine ; the Pope would have created him a Cardinal, 

 but that honour being incompatible with the continued 

 practipe of his very lucrative profession, he did not at all 

 see why he should hurt his income by accepting it. He 

 became, therefore, an apostolic protonotary instead. 



In 1547, when Cardan was at Pavia with two such 

 men as Alciat and Vesalius for friends and colleagues, the 

 jurist was arranging a complete edition of his works. 

 He had come to the end of those wanderings which he 

 had himself boastfully compared to the travels of the sun, 

 who traverses all parts to light and warm them. He was 

 tormented with gout, not the result, as in Cardan, of a 

 bad constitution, but the price of his great dinners, for 

 he was a mighty eater. The two gouty professors could 

 condole together. Alciat suffered most. He was at last 

 wholly unable to walk, and was afflicted in his hands as well 

 as feet ; but the immediate cause of his death was a fever. 



If he had not been tortured by the gout, Jerome thinks 

 that his friend must have been the happiest of men. He 

 surpassed in his calling all predecessors, and was entitled 

 to Cicero's praise of Scaevola as the best orator among 

 lawyers, the best lawyer among orators; that praise, too, 

 the physician observes, was not only true, but also 

 undisputed. Apart from the gout, his felicity was 

 without equal; he had incomparable erudition, stores 



