JEROME CARDAN 249 



cursory student. Passages like these arouse the sus- 

 picion that Maude* knew books better than men, that at 

 any rate he did not realize that men are to be found, 

 and not seldom, who take pleasure in magnifying their 

 foibles into gigantic follies, and their peccadilloes into 

 atrocious crimes ; while the rarity is to come across one 

 who will set down these details with the circumstantiality 

 used by Cardan. There is one defect in the De Vita 

 Propria an artistic one which Naude does not notice, 

 namely, that in his narrative of his early days Cardan 

 often over-reaches himself. His show of extreme ac- 

 curacy destroys the perspective of the story, and, in 

 his anxiety to be minute over the sequence of his 

 childish ailments, the most trivial details of his uneasy 

 dreams, and the cuffs he got from his father and his 

 Aunt Margaret, he confuses the reader with multi- 

 tudinous particulars and ceases to be dramatic. But 

 the hallucinations which he nourished about himself 

 were not all the outcome of senility. In the De Varietate, 

 the work upon which he spent the greatest care, and 

 the product moreover of his golden prime, he gives an 

 account of four marvellous properties with which he was 

 gifted. 1 The first of these was the power to pass, when- 

 ever the whim seized him, from sense into a kind of 

 ecstasy. While he was in this state he could hear but 

 faintly the sound of voices, and could not distinguish 

 spoken words. Whether he would be sensitive to any 

 great pain he could not say, but twitchings and the 

 sharpest attacks of gout affected him not. When he 

 fell into this state he felt a certain separation about the 

 heart, as if his soul were departing from that region and 

 taking possession of his whole body, a door being opened 

 for the passage of the same. The sensation would begin 

 1 De Varietate^ p. 314. 



