ing worse than death. Young men, leaders of armies, courted death in
battle to win the favour of their sovereigns; wherefore he, a decrepit old
man, might surely await his end with calmness. He then wanders off into a
long disquisition on the philosophy of Polybius, and forgets entirely to
set down further details of his imprisonment, or to explain the cause
thereof.

Pius IV. had died at the end of 1565, and had been succeeded by Michele
Ghislieri, the Cardinal of Alessandria, as Pius V. Like his predecessor,
the new Pope was a Milanese by birth, but in character and aims the two
Popes were entirely different. Pius. V. identified himself completely with
the work of the Holy Office, and straightway set in operation all its
powers for the extirpation of the heretical opinions which, on account of
the easy-going character of the late Pope, had made much progress in
Italy, and nowhere more than in Bologna. Von Ranke, in the _History of the
Popes_, gives an extract (vol. i. p. 97) from the compendium of the
Inquisitors, which sets forth that "Bologna was in a very perilous state,
because there the heretics were especially numerous; amongst them was a
certain Gian Battista Rotto, who enjoyed the friendship and support of
many persons of weight, such as Morone, Pole, and the Marchesa Pescara
(Vittoria Colonna). Rotto made himself very active in collecting money,
which he distributed amongst the poor folk of Bologna who were heretics."

It will be remembered that in 1562, while he was waiting in Milan for the
appointment as Professor at Bologna, Cardan submitted his books to the
Congregation of the Index for approval. He was known to be a
fellow-citizen and friend of the reigning Pope: the _corpus_ of his work
had by that time reached a portentous size, wherefore it is quite possible
that the official readers may have been lenient, or cursory, over their
work; but when Pius V., the strenuous ascetic foe of heresy, stepped into
the place of the indolent Pius IV., jurist and politician rather than
Churchman, it is more than probable that certain amateur inquisitors at
Bologna, fully as anxious to work Cardan's ruin as to safeguard the faith,
may have busied themselves in hunting through his various works for
passages upon which to base a charge of unorthodoxy. Such passages were
not hard to find. There was the horoscope of Jesus Christ, which
subsequently affronted the piety of De Thou. There was the passage already
noticed in w