148 JEROME CARDAN 



you and salute you in my name, and bear to you my 

 gratitude, not only for the various gifts I have received 

 from you, but likewise because my health is well-nigh 

 restored, the ailment which vexed me is driven away, 

 my strength increased, and my life renewed. Wherefore 

 I rate myself debtor for all these benefits, as well as 

 this very body of mine. For, from the time when I 

 began to take these medicines of yours, selected and 

 compounded with so great skill, my complaint has 

 afflicted me less frequently and severely ; indeed, now, as 

 a rule, I am not troubled therewith more than once a 

 month ; sometimes I escape for two months." l 



In the following year (1555) Cardan's daughter Chiara, 

 who seems to have been a virtuous and well-conducted 

 girl, was married to Bartolomeo Sacco, a young Milanese 

 gentleman of good family, a match which proved to 

 be fortunate. Cardan had now reached that summit of 

 fame against which the shafts of jealousy will always be 

 directed. The literary manners of the age certainly 

 lacked urbanity, and of all living controversialists there 

 was none more truculent than Julius Caesar Scaliger, 

 who had begun his career as a man of letters by a fierce 

 assault upon Erasmus with regard to his Ciceronianus, 

 a leading case amongst the quarrels of authors. Erasmus 

 he had attacked for venturing to throw doubts upon the 

 suitability of Cicero's Latin as a vehicle of modern 

 thought ; this quarrel was over a question of form ; and 

 now Scaliger went a step farther, and, albeit he knew 

 little of the subject in hand, published a book of 

 Esoteric Exercitations to show that the De Subtilitate of 

 Cardan was nothing but a tissue of nonsense. 2 The book 



1 Opera, torn. i. p. 93. 



2 Cardan notices the attack in these words " His diebus quidam 

 conscripserat adversus nostrum de Subtilitate librum, Opus ingens. 

 Adversus quern ego Apologiam scripsi." Opera, torn. i. p. 117. 



