150 JEROME CARDAN 



a testimony that, sharp as may have been the vexation 

 brought upon Jerome Cardan by my trifling censures, 

 the grief which now afflicts me on account of his death 

 is ten times sharper. For, even if Cardan living should 

 have been a terror to me, I, who am but a single unit 

 in the republic of letters, ought to have postponed my 

 own and singular convenience to the common good, 

 seeing how excellent were the merits of this man, in 

 every sort of learning. For now the republic is bereft 

 of a great and incomparable scholar, and must needs 

 suffer a loss which, peradventure, none of the centuries 

 to come will repair. What though I am a person of 

 small account, I could count upon him as a supporter, a 

 judge, and (immortal gods) even a laudator of my lucu- 

 brations ; for he was so greatly impressed by their 

 weighty merits, that he deemed he would best defend 

 himself by avoiding all comment on the same, despair- 

 ing of his own strength, and knowing not how great his 

 powers really were. In this respect he was so skilful a 

 master, that he could assuredly have fathomed the depths 

 of every method and every device used against him, and 

 would thereby have made his castigation of myself to 

 serve as an augmentation of his own fame. He, in 

 sooth, was a man of such quality that, if he had deemed 

 it a thing demanded of him by equity, he would never 

 have hesitated to point out to other students the truth 

 of those words which I had written against him as an ac- 

 cusation, while, on the other hand, this same constancy 

 of mind would have made him adhere to the opinions 

 he might have put forth in the first instance, so far as 

 these opinions were capable of proof. I, when I ad- 

 dressed my Exercitations to him during his life to him 

 whom I knew by common report to be the most in- 

 genious and learned of mortal men was in good hope 



