his old age, for he notes that Simone Sosia, who
had been his _famulus_ at Pavia in 1562, was still in his service at Rome.

In reviewing the machinations of his enemies to bring about his dismissal
from the Professorship at Bologna, Cardan indulges in the reflection that
these men unwillingly did him good service, that is, they procured him
leisure which he might use in the completion of his unfinished works, and
in the construction of fresh monuments which he proposed to build up out
of the vast store of material accumulated in his industrious brain. The
literary record of his life in Rome shows that this was no vain saying. He
was at work on the later chapters of the _De Vita Propria_ up to the last
weeks of his life; and, scattered about these, there are records of his
work of correction and revising. While telling of the books he has lately
been engaged with, he wanders off in the same sentence to talk of the
dream which urged him to write the _De Subtilitate_, and of the execution
of the _Commentarii in Ptolomaeum_, during his voyage down the Loire. In
1573 he seems to have found the mass of undigested work more than he could
bear to behold; for, after making extracts of such matter as he deemed
worth keeping, he consigned to the flames no less than a hundred and
twenty of his manuscripts.[239] Before leaving Bologna he had put into
shape the _Proxenata_, a lengthy collection of hints, maxims, and
reflections as to everyday life; he had re-edited the _Liber Artis Magnae_,
and had added thereto the treatise _De Proportionibus_, and the _Regula
Aliza_. He also took in hand two books on Geometry, and one on Music, and
this last he completed in 1574. On November 16, 1574, he records that he
is at that moment writing an explanation of the more abstruse works of
Hippocrates, but that he is yet far from the end of his task.

In the _De Libris Propriis_ he gives a list of all his published works,
and likewise a table of the same arranged in the order in which they ought
to be read. He apologizes for the imperfect state in which some of them
are left, and declares that the sight of his unfinished tasks never fails
to awaken in his breast a bitter sense of resentment over that loss which
he had never ceased to mourn. "At one time I hoped," he writes, "that
these works would be corrected by my son, but this favour you see has been
denied to me. The desire of my enemies was not to make an end of him, but
of me; not by gentle m