JEROME CARDAN 277 



torum ad filios Libellus a long list of aphorisms and 

 counsels, many of which give evidence of keen in- 

 sight and busy observation of mankind, while some are 

 distinguished by a touch of humour rare in his other 

 writings. He bids his children to be careful how they 

 offend princes, and, offence being given, never to flatter 

 themselves that it has been pardoned ; to live joyfully 

 as long as they can, for men are for the most part worn 

 out by care ; never to take a wife from a witless stock 

 or one tainted with hereditary disease ; to refrain from 

 deliberating when the mind is disturbed ; to learn how 

 to be worsted and suffer loss ; and to trust a school- 

 master to teach children, but not to feed them. One of 

 the dicta is a gem of quaint wisdom. " Before you begin 

 to wash your face, see that you have a towel handy to 

 dry the same." If all the instances of prodigies, por- 

 tents, visions, and mysterious warnings which Cardan 

 has left on record were set down in order, a perusal of 

 this catalogue would justify, if it did not compel, the 

 belief that he was little better than a credulous fool, and 

 raise doubts whether such a man could have written 

 such orderly and coherent works as the treatise on 

 Arithmetic, or the book of the Great Art. But Cardan 

 was beyond all else a man of moods, and it would be 

 unfair to figure as his normal mental condition those 

 periods of overwrought nervousness and the hallucina- 

 tions they brought with them. In his old age the 

 nearness of the inevitable stroke, and the severance of 

 all earthly ties, led him to discipline his mind into a 

 calmer mood, but early and late during his season of 

 work his nature was singularly sensitive to the wearing 

 assaults of cares and calamities. In crises of this kind 

 his mind would be brought into so morbid a condition, 

 that it would fall entirely under the sway of any single 



