CARDAN'S COUNSEL TO HIS CHILDREN. 39 



Delay is the handle to denial. 



Visit nobody while he is eating, or while he is in bed. 



The misfortunes of others, if they do not tell you of 

 them, do not seem to know." 



Then follows a short chapter on Wisdom, and then a 

 chapter entitled " What Books are to be Read." It is 

 remarkable that from this chapter he omits some of his 

 own favourites, but he is putting down his precept, not 

 his practice. 



" * These authors only are worthy to be read, because 

 the life of man is long enough to read them in ; but, if 

 more be taken, some of these have to be left, and so there 

 is made an exchange of gold for brass. 



In Poetry : Homer, Virgil, Horace. 



In Grammar : Priscian. 



In Rhetoric : Cicero, Quintilian. 



In History : Xenophon's Anabasis, the Catiline of 

 Sallust, Suetonius, Argentonius, Voyages to the Indies, 

 Plutarch's Lives, and Cario's Compendium. 



In Mathematics : Euclid, Apollonius, Archimedes, Vi- 

 truvius, Ptolemy. 



In Medicine : Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, Rhases 

 for his copiousness; Dioscorides, Pierre Bellon, Gesner, 

 Vesalius. 



In Physics : Aristotle, Theophrastus, Plotinus, Plu- 

 tarch. 



