CARDAN DEAD AND ALIVE. 179 



celebrated book. In what temper an answer was pre- 

 pared will presently be stated. In the mean time, no 

 answer having come to the hands of Julius Scaliger after 

 the lapse of many months, I think it must have been 

 some jester practising on the vanity of the disinherited 

 Prince of Verona, quintessence of Xenophon and Massi- 

 nissa, who told him that the renowned philosopher of 

 Milan had expired under the terrors of his criticism that 

 Cardan was dead, and that his death was caused by the 

 Exercitations. Scaliger believed it, and what was more 

 unlucky, acted upon his belief. He thought reparation 

 due to the public for the harm he had unintentionally 

 done, and put forth an oration which was published with 

 some letters of his 1 , and which, as an illustration of vanity, 

 belongs to the curiosities of literature. Cardan survived 

 by seventeen years the author of the succeeding funeral 

 harangue : 



" When the cruelty of fate had pressed on me so 

 miserably that with my private glory was combined the 

 bitterness of public grief, and my efforts so eminent and 

 laborious were followed by a calamity so dire : I thought 

 that I must not neglect to leave a testimony to posterity 

 that the distress of mind occasioned to Jerome Cardan by 



1 Julii Caesaris Scaligeri Epistolse aliquot nunc primum vulgata?. 

 Accedunt prseterea alia quasdam opuscula, &c. Tolosae. Typ. Kay- 

 mundi Colomerii, 1620. It was published as an appendix to the Cice- 

 ronian Orations of Erasmus, and the attack of Scaliger upon them. 



N2 



