294 JEROME CARDAN. 



M. De Thou relates, in the history of his own times 1 , 

 that he saw at Rome the great Cardan, walking about the 

 streets, not dressed like any other person, had often won- 

 dered at him and had spoken with him. He records at 

 the same time the character he bore : that he was " a 

 madman of impious audacity, who had attempted to sub- 

 ject to the stars the Lord of the stars, and cast our 

 Saviour's horoscope." 



Immediately after Cardan's death, and during the suc- 

 ceeding century, this charge of impiety attached to him, 

 and he who had taken so much pains to remain on good 

 terms with the Church, was known traditionally as a man 

 who had blasphemously calculated the nativity of Christ 

 (Naudaeus shows that he was not the first astrologer who 

 did so), and was occasionally named as a rank atheist. 

 Now it appears from De Thou that a character of this 

 kind attached to Jerome when he lived at Rome; and at 

 the same time it is a fact, that, with all his extravagant 

 freedom of self- revelation, any mention of such imputa- 

 tions has been carefully excluded from his works. We 

 detect their existence indirectly in one or two sentences, 

 already cited, as when Cardan at Pavia, dreading evil, 

 thought that passages in his own books might be twisted 

 to his hurt, and wrote a letter to Rome dutifully sub- 



1 Thuanus, Lib. Ixii. Tom. iii. p. 462, ed. Lond. 1733. 



