180 JEROME CARDAN. 



my trifling castigations was not greater than rny sorrow 

 at his death. 



" For even if his life had been a terror to me, yet so 

 great was his merit in all departments of letters, that I, 

 who am but a citizen of the literary world, ought to have 

 preferred the common good to my own personal con- 

 venience. For the republic of letters is bereft now of a 

 great and incomparable man: and has endured a loss 

 which perhaps no after centuries may know how to repair. 

 I, who am but a private man, have lost a witness and a 

 judge, and even (immortal gods !) an applauder of my 

 lucubrations: for he approved of them so much, that he 

 rested all hope of his own defence in silence, despairing 

 of his own power, ignorant of his own strength : for in 

 strength and power he so much excelled, that there could 

 escape his knowledge no possible way in which my casti- 

 gations might have been turned to the increase of his own 

 celebrity. 



" But he was so great a man as to be able to show to 

 students that if he had judged truly, he would have seen 

 the truth of all the things that I had written contrary to 

 his own doctrine; if he had felt otherwise, the same pre- 

 sence of mind would have determined him to confirm 

 what he had once asserted, so far as he had asserted what 

 could be confirmed. I who in that mind and hope wrote 

 to this man, of whom I heard commonly that he was, of 



