Two or three of Cardan's treatises are in the _materna lingua_, but he
wrote almost entirely in Latin, using a style which was emphatically
literary.[286] His Latin is probably above the average excellence of the
age, and if the classic writers held the first place in his estimation--as
naturally they would--he assuredly did not neglect the firstfruits of
modern literature. Pulci was his favourite poet. He evidently knew Dante
and Boccaccio 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.[287]

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;[288] and, writing some years later, he gives
quotations from a Latin version of Aristotle.[289] In his commentaries on
Hippocrates he used a Latin text, presumably the translation 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 bristle with
quotations, Horace being his favourite author. "Vir in omni sapientiae
genere admirandus."[290] As with many moderns his love for Horace did not
grow less as old age crept on, for the _De Vita Propria_ is perhaps fuller
of Horatian tags than any other of his works. It would seem somewhat of a
paradox that a sombre and earnest nature like Cardan's should find so
great pleasure in reading the elegant _poco curante_