aling of the fountain. He
counts it rare fortune to have been born in such an age, and rhapsodizes
over the flowery meadow of knowledge in which his generation rejoices, and
over the vast Western world recently made known. Are not the artificial
thunderbolts of man far more destructive than those of heaven? What praise
is too high for the magnet which leads men safely over perilous seas, or
for the art of printing? Indeed it needs but little more to enable man to
scale the very heavens. With his mind thus set upon the exploration of
these new fields of knowledge; with the full realization how vast was the
treasure lying hid therein; it was only natural that a spirit so curious
and greedy of fresh mental food should have fretted at the piteous brevity
of the earthly term allowed to man, and have rated as a supreme evil that
old age which brought with it decay of the faculties and foreshadowed the
speedy and inevitable fall of the curtain. Cicero on the other hand had
been nurtured in a creed and philosophy alike outworn. The blight of
finality had fallen upon the moral world, and the physical universe still
guarded jealously her mighty secrets. To the eyes of Cicero the mirror of
nature was blank void and darkness, while Cardan, gazing into the same
glass, must have been embarrassed with the number and variety of the
subjects offered, and may well have felt that the longest life of man ten
times prolonged would rank but as a moment in that Titanic spell of work
necessary to bring to the birth the teeming burden with which the universe
lay in travail. Here is one and perhaps the strongest reason of his hatred
of old age; because through the shortness of his span of time he could
only deal with a grain or two of the sand lying upon the shores of
knowledge. Cicero, with his more limited vision, conscious that sixty
years or so of life would exhaust every physical delight, and blunt and
mar the intellectual; ignorant both of the world of new light lying beyond
the void, and of the rapture which the conquering investigator of the same
must feel in wringing forth its secrets, welcomed the gathering shades as
friendly visitants, a mood which has asserted itself in later times with
certain weary spirits, sated with knowledge as Vitellius was sated with
his banquets of nightingales' tongues.

Cardan with all his curiosity and restless mental activity was hampered
and restrained in his explorations by the bonds which had been impose