CARDAN AND THE AFFIDATI. 259 



been at its height, Cardan was asked to aid in the esta- 

 blishment of this academy. He did so most unwillingly; 

 he was indignant still against his libellers, morbidly sensi- 

 tive to shame, and perceptibly affected in his mind by 

 his son's fate. Even the just homage to his reputation 

 stung him as an insult. " Before all things," he wrote in 

 his old age 1 , " they took care that he for whom his country 

 was to blush, and his family, and the senate, and the 

 colleges of Milan and of Pavia, the whole body of his 

 colleagues and his pupils, should enter the Accademia 

 degli Affidati, in which there were several good theo- 

 logians and two princes", the Duke of Mantua and the 

 Marquis Pescara. And when they found that it was hard 

 to get me there, they forced from me my consent by 

 threats. What could I do, overwhelmed by the terrible 

 fate of my son ? I had exhausted the whole strength 01 

 adversity ; at length I acquiesced, chiefly because they 

 promised, after a few days definitely fixed, to accept the 

 resignation of my office as a lecturer." Then, after a few 

 angry apostrophes relating to a period when Jerome felt 

 himself to be at war with all mankind, he relates how he 

 observed, when he passed through the doors of the academy, 

 a beam so placed that a person might be killed by falling 

 over it. He questioned whether that was not another foul 

 design upon himself; and his chief occupation in the 

 1 De Vita Propria, cap. xxx. 



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