JEROME CARDAN 253 



owing to Cardan's wayward mental habit, there is no 

 saying in what corner of the ten large folios which 

 contain his writings some pregnant and characteristic 

 sentence, picturing effectively some aspect of his nature 

 or perhaps exhibiting the man at a glance, may not be 

 hidden away. 



It must not be inferred, because Cardan himself and 

 his critics after him, have laid such great stress upon his 

 vices and imperfections, that he was devoid of virtues. 

 The most striking and remarkable of his merits was his 

 industry, but even in this particular instance, where his 

 excellence is most clearly manifest, he is constantly 

 lamenting his waste of time and idleness. Again and 

 again he mourns over the precious hours he has spent 

 over chess and dice and games of chance. In his 

 counsels to his children, he compares a gambler to a 

 sink of all the vices, and in writing of his early life at 

 Sacco he describes himself as an idle profligate, and tells 

 how he entirely neglected his profession. If indeed such 

 monstrous cantles were cut out of his time through 

 idleness he must, though his life proved a long one, have 

 possessed extraordinary power of rapid production ; for 

 the huge mass of his published work, without taking 

 any account of the many manuscripts he burned from 

 time to time, would, in the case of most men, represent 

 the ceaseless labour of a long life. And the corpus is 

 not great by reason of haste or want of finish. He has 

 recorded more than once how it was ever his habit to 

 let his work be polished to the utmost before putting it 

 in type. The citations with which his pages bristle 

 proclaim him to be a reader almost as voracious and 

 catholic as Burton ; and Naude, with the watchfulness 

 of the hostile critic in his heart and the bookworm's 

 knowledge in his brain, would have been ready and able 



