172 JEROME CARDAN. 



face like any king's. Yes, like an emperor's. There is 

 no king or emperor who has so grand a way as he had. 

 Look at me; I resemble him in every respect perfectly, 

 the aquiline nose. I was but eight years old when I held 

 my little sister at her baptism, and on the same day 

 my father gave me the birch birched me, his fellow- 

 sponsor. My sister is a poor creature, a beast 1 ." 



A terrible man was Julius Caesar Scaliger when he 

 girded up his loins to birch Jerome Cardan. He believed 

 that he had a familiar demon his son says a devil 2 that 

 urged him to write and gave him understanding. He 

 had two daughters I do not know which of them was 

 the beast but they must have differed from each other 

 much ; one died a nun, the other died the widow of two 

 husbands 3 . His sons all had the spirit of the family. One 

 of them, Constant, was called, commonly, the Gascon 

 Devil. He was so terrible, said Joseph Justus, that once 

 when he engaged for sport in lance practice with eight 

 Germans, he killed some, hurt others, and fled to Poland, 

 where he was armed afterwards by Stephen, the king, but 

 destroyed by the envy of the nobles. They stabbed him 

 during a hunt. My brother Leonard, too, was killed by 



1 Scaligerana (ed. cit), p. 229. " .... II estoit terrible et crioit 

 tellement . . . ." 



2 " Erat Daernoniacus, habebat diabolum ut credebatur." Ibid. p. 233. 



3 Ibid. p. 228. 



