312 JEKOME CARDAN. 



exactly when and where it did for the attainment of the 

 required result. Such things do not happen to every man." 



Jerome Cardan was not forbidden to exercise his profes- 

 sion during those last days at Rome ; but at the period to 

 which this last incident refers, after his seventy-fifth year, 

 he had abstained from all labour for the sake of money, 

 unless he liked the people with whom it was desired that 

 he should deal 1 . 



Looking back upon the life that was almost completed, 

 and conscious that its leading events had all been more or 

 less revealed in his past writings, either by scattered hints 

 or by brief narratives, Cardan, in the book upon himself 

 which occupied his latest leisure, and was the summing 

 up of his intellectual accounts with this world, rather pre- 

 supposed a knowledge of his career than engaged himself 

 upon the composition of a distinct autobiography. Brief 

 narrations in earlier writings had been so contrived, that, 

 as he said when giving one of them, *' What I have told 

 elsewhere diffusely I tell shortly here ; what I have told else- 

 where shortly I tell here at length 2 ." In the last book, there- 

 fore, devoted wholly to his life 3 , there is one short chapter 



1 De Vita Propria, cap. xxiii. 



2 De Ut. ex Adv. cap. ii. 112. 



3 It was first published in 1643 by Gabriel Naudaeus, who prefixed to 

 it a judgment on Cardan that has done much to disseminate a false 

 opinion of his character. The same "judgment of Naudaeus" is un- 

 luckily prefixed also to Cardan's collected works. Its narrow reason- 

 ings hare therefore influenced most readers of Cardan's last book. 



