218 JEEOME CARDAN. 



The feeling of the President Rigone was strongly 

 against the criminal. Jerome hoped for merciful inter- 

 vention from the governor, who was his patient 1 , and for 

 help from the great men who were his patients and his 

 friends ; it is, however, natural that they should have felt 

 unable to extend any of their friendly feeling to his son. 

 It is not easy or desirable to mitigate the universal detes- 

 tation due to a man who can poison his wife while she has 

 a ten-day infant at her breast. For Jerome, the miserable 

 father, we may feel true sympathy ; for Gianbatista none. 

 Jerome himself, though he struggled painfully on his. 

 behalf, only excused the offence when he stood up formally 

 to be the young man's advocate. The physicians said, 

 and he believed, that his son's wife had not died of 

 poison ; since, therefore, many a foul crime had by help 

 of interest been favoured with a lenient sentence, Cardan, 

 having as fair a right as any man to favour, thought 

 himself entitled to expect, not that, his son would be 

 acquitted, but that he would be condemned simply to 

 exile. To condemn him to the galleys would be cruelty, 

 he thought ; to kill him would be murder. 



Through all his after sorrows Jerome Cardan never 



wrote angrily of the Seroni family. He was not really 



the apologist of crime. Standing before the senate in the 



character of advocate, to plead for the life of his son, he 



1 Evidence of this will appear fully in the sequel. 



