A HEART IN COBWEBS. 219 



was there to urge all that an advocate could say, not to 

 express his individual opinions. He had exerted all the 

 wit of which he was master and all his powers of dis- 

 putation such powers as he had spent once for sport on 

 an encomium of Nero in the manufacture of a formal 

 and elaborate defence. It was not for him to consider 

 what arguments he himself thought tenable, but what 

 arguments might by any chance weigh upon any person 

 who had a voice in his son's fate. He understood the 

 casuistry of the schools, and practised it. His speech for 

 his son, of which an outline is here given, contains much 

 strange folly that the world has now outgrown. How 

 completely the puerilities of the old logicians were a part 

 of their own sober and earnest life, how little they saw 

 what was absurd in their established way of arguing, 

 may be gathered even from the brief outline of this 

 speech, in which a scholar of the sixteenth century, 

 although a man of quick wit and strong feeling, handled 

 a question of the very gravest moment to himself. 



Seven things, he said 1 , were to be considered in the 

 case: public example, the deed, the instrument, the cause 

 of the deed, the mode of doing, the person, and external 

 circumstances. He arranged his argument under these 

 heads. 



1 What follows is a reduced outline of Cardan's speech for his son, 

 published at the end of the first edition De Ut. ex Adv. Cap. (Basil, 

 1561), where it fills forty pages. 



