THE CATASTROPHE THE ORPHAN GRANDSON. 239 



never healed his grief; even his reason was impaired by 

 it. "I was told," he says, "that some of the senators 

 privately confessed that they condemned my son with the 

 hope that through grief I might perish or go mad ; how 

 barely I escaped one of those ends God knows." The 

 narrowness of the escape is visible in all his after life. 

 He could write still, according to the habit of the philo- 

 sopher, and be beguiled from sorrow by the pen, though 

 into his books, upon whatever theme they were com- 

 posed, there almost always crept through some chapter or 

 paragraph, a cry of wailing for his child. But in his 

 conduct in society he was no longer always master of his 

 reason. Mistrust became habitual ; he seems to have felt 

 like a stag at bay, and seen in nearly all his neighbours 

 hounds watchful for an undefended spot upon him into 

 which to fix their teeth. Superstitions darkened heaven 

 for him like a night, and through the midst of the night 

 there came in every form the voice of the old man 

 lamenting for his son. Sometimes it took the form of 

 verse. One metrical effusion, which seems to have arisen 

 naturally out of the first sense of bereavement, Cardan 

 published in a philosophic treatise, to the writing of 

 which he at once betook himself, as to an opiate. It was 

 a book that he undertook for the expressed purpose of 

 supplying medicine to sorrow. In it he printed not only 

 his Latin verses, but the notes for harp music, to which 



