244 JEROME CARDAN. 



Unwillingly retaining his professorship, Cardan be- 

 took himself assiduously to the writing of books. The 

 work on the Uses of Adversity, which he had commenced 

 in his most prosperous days, was nearly finished ; and he 

 completed it with a chapter upon Grief, of which the 

 text was a narrative of his son's story, and the moral was a 

 philosophical, or it should rather be said scholastic, enforce- 

 ment of arguments, to show that this was no real cause of 

 sorrow to his father. His stoicism was not more genuine than 

 his adhesion to some of the arguments that he had thought 

 proper to the disputation in his son's defence. The book 

 was published, and the defence spoken by Cardan for his 

 son was printed at the end of it, together with a frag- 

 ment of the young man's writing " Upon Fretid Foods," 

 and a fatherly laudation of his skill as a physician, which, 

 in the case of certain Spaniards, had enabled him to effect 

 a cure that even Jerome had in vain attempted. The 

 work on the Uses of Adversity was divided into four 

 books, of which the first treated generally of all kinds of 

 adversity, and of the preparation of the mind against 

 imminent ills; the second treated of bodily adversity, as 

 deformity, disease, age, death; the third book treated of 

 adversity in fortune, as through poverty, envy, exile, 

 anger of princes, prison ; and the last book treated of 

 adversity through one's relations, as through wife and 

 children. It was thus naturally closed with the history 

 of his misfortune through his son. The whole work is 



