ce of keen insight and busy observation of mankind, while some are
distinguished by a touch of humour rare in his other writings. He bids his
children to be careful how they offend princes, and, offence being given,
never to flatter themselves that it has been pardoned; to live joyfully as
long as they can, for men are for the most part worn out by care; never to
take a wife from a witless stock or one tainted with hereditary disease;
to refrain from deliberating when the mind is disturbed; to learn how to
be worsted and suffer loss; and to trust a school-master to teach
children, but not to feed them. One of the dicta is a gem of quaint
wisdom. "Before you begin to wash your face, see that you have a towel
handy to dry the same." If all the instances of prodigies, portents,
visions, and mysterious warnings which Cardan has left on record were set
down in order, a perusal of this catalogue would justify, if it did not
compel, the belief that he was little better than a credulous fool, and
raise doubts whether such a man could have written such orderly and
coherent works as the treatise on Arithmetic, or the book of the Great
Art. But Cardan was beyond all else a man of moods, and it would be unfair
to figure as his normal mental condition those periods of overwrought
nervousness and the hallucinations they brought with them. In his old age
the nearness of the inevitable stroke, and the severance of all earthly
ties, led him to discipline his mind into a calmer mood, but early and
late during his season of work his nature was singularly sensitive to the
wearing assaults of cares and calamities. In crises of this kind his mind
would be brought into so morbid a condition, that it would fall entirely
under the sway of any single idea then dominant; such idea would master
him entirely, or even haunt him like one of those unclean spectres he
describes with such gusto in the _De Varietate_. What he may have uttered
when these moods were upon him must not be taken seriously; these are the
moments to which the major part of his experiences of things _supra
naturam_ may be referred. But there are numerous instances in which he
describes marvellous phenomena with philosophic calm, and examines them in
the true spirit of scepticism. In his account of the trembling of the bed
on which he lay the night before he heard of Gian Battista's marriage, he
goes on to say that a few nights after the first manifestation, he was
once more conscio