1 40 JEROME CARDAN 



protector could not exchange a word, and only managed 

 to make each other understand by signs, and that very 

 imperfectly. The boy was resolute to go on while 

 Cardan wanted to be rid of him ; but his conscience 

 would not allow him to send him home unless he should, 

 of his own free will, ask to be sent, and by way of giving 

 William a distaste for the life he had chosen, he records 

 that he often beat him cruelly on the slightest pretext. 

 But the boy was not to be shaken off. He persisted in 

 following his venture to the end, and arrived in Cardan's 

 train at Milan, where he was allowed to go his own way. 

 The only care for his training Cardan took was to have 

 him taught music. He chides the unhappy boy for 

 his indifference to learning and for his love of the com- 

 pany of other youths. What with his literary work 

 and the family troubles which so soon fell upon him, 

 Cardan's hands were certainly full ; but, all allowance 

 being made, it is difficult to find a valid excuse for this 

 neglect on his part. William grew up to be a young 

 man, and was finally apprenticed to a tailor at Pavia, 

 but his knavish master set him to work as a vinedresser, 

 suspecting that Cardan cared little what happened so 

 long as the young man was kept out of his sight. 

 William seems to have been a merry, good-tempered 

 fellow ; but his life was a short one, for he took fever, 

 and died in his twenty-second year. 1 



Besides chronicling this strange and somewhat pathetic 

 incident, Cardan sets down in the Dialogus de Morte his 

 general impressions of the English people. Alluding to 

 the fear of death, he remarks that the English, so far as 



1 Opera, torn. i. p. 119. Cardan here calls him "Gulielmus 

 Lataneus Anglus adolescens mihi charissimus." In the De Morte, 

 however, he speaks of him as " ex familia Cataneorum " (see last 

 page). 



