304 JEROME CARDAN. 



so deep a loathing of all books 1 , whether his own or those 

 of other men, that he could not endure to think of them, 

 still less to look at them. And that feeling, he said, 

 remained while he was then writing. I know, he added, 

 no reason for this, excepting melancholy. 



But there was reason for the melancholy. An ancient 

 hope dwelt in his memory while he was arranging his 

 books in expectation of approaching death. " My hope," 

 he wrote in the end 2 , " had been, that after my death they 

 would be edited for me by my son, but that comfort is 

 gone. They wished to destroy not him but me." 



Nearly all his writings in the last years of his life were 

 contemplative or admonitory ; he dealt in advice or philo- 

 sophic meditation. The chief exception was a copious 

 work on the interpretation of dreams, which, together with 

 the dialogue by which he had intended to immortalise 

 the English boy, was published nine years after his death 

 at Basle 3 . One of the last of his writings was a dialogue 

 between himself and his father's ghost, in which his mind 

 reverted to the days of his youth, while he explained the 

 sorrows of his age, and received comfort from the other 

 world. But there was hard comfort in one sentence that 

 he placed upon his father's lips : " What of your sons? 



De Vita Propria, cap. lii. 



3 De Libris Propriis. Lib. lilt. Op. Tom. i. p. 121. 



a Somniorum Synesiorum, Libri iv. &c. 4to. Basle, 1585. 



