288 JEROME CARDAN 



caccio well, and his literary insight was clear enough to 

 perceive that the future belonged to those who should 

 write in the vulgar tongue of the lands which produced 

 them. 1 



Perhaps it was impossible that a man endowed with 

 so catholic a spirit and with such earnest desire for 

 knowledge, should sink into the mere pedant with 

 whom later ages have been made acquainted through 

 the farther specialization of science. At all events 

 Cardan is an instance that the man of liberal education 

 need not be killed by the man of science. For him the 

 path of learning was not an easy one to tread, and, as it 

 not seldom happens, opposition and coldness drove him 

 on at a pace rarely attained by those for whom the 

 royal road to learning is smoothed and prepared. For 

 a long time his father refused to give him instruction in 

 Latin, or to let him be taught by any one else, and up to his 

 twentieth year he seems to have known next to nothing 

 of this language which held the keys both of letters and 

 science. He began to learn Greek when he was about 

 thirty-five, but it was not till he had turned forty that 

 he took up the study of it in real earnest ; 2 and, writing 

 some years later, he gives quotations from a Latin 

 version of Aristotle. 3 In his commentaries on Hip- 

 pocrates he used a Latin text, presumably the transla- 

 tion of Calvus printed in Rome in 1525, and quotes 

 Epicurus in Latin in the De Subtilitate (p. 347), but in 

 works like the De Sapientia and the De Consolatione he 

 quotes Greek freely, supplying in nearly every case a 

 Latin version of the passages cited. These treatises 



1 "At Boccatii fabulas mine majus virent quam antea : et Dantis 

 Petrarchaeque ac Virgilii totque aliorum poemata sunt in maxima 

 veneratione." Opera, torn. i. p. 125. 



2 Ibid., torn. i. p. 59. 3 De Vita Propria, ch. xii. xiii. pp. 39, 44. 



