than the confession of his
passion for costly penholders, gems, rare books, vessels of brass and
silver, and painted spheres.[176] In this brief season of ease and
security, there were no flaming portents in the sky to foretell the cruel
stroke of evil fortune which was destined so soon to fall upon him.

Cardan has left a very pathetic sketch of his own miserable boyhood in the
strangely ordered home in Milan, with his callous, tyrannical father, his
quick-tempered mother, and the superadded torment of his Aunt Margaret's
presence. Fazio Cardano was a man of rigorous sobriety, and he seems
moreover to have atoned for his early irregularities by the practice of
that austere piety which Jerome notices more than once as a characteristic
of his old age.[177] The discipline was hard, and the life unlovely, but
the home was at least decent and orderly, and no opportunities or
provocations to loose manners or ill doing existed therein. In Cardan's
own case it is to be feared that, after Lucia's death, the affairs of his
household fell into dire confusion, in spite of the presence of his
mother-in-law, Thadea, who had come to him as housekeeper--her husband,
Altobello, having died soon after the marriage of his daughter with
Cardan. He was an ardent lover of music, and, as a consequence, his house
would be constantly filled with singing men and boys, a tribe of somewhat
sinister reputation.[178] Then, when he was not engaged with music, he
would be gambling in some fashion or other. After lamenting the vast
amount of time he has wasted over the game of chess, he goes on: "But the
play with the dice, an evil far more noxious, found its way into my house;
and, after my sons had learned to play the same, my doors always stood
open to dicers. I can find no excuse for this practice except the trivial
one, that, what I did, I did in the hope of relieving the poverty of my
children."[179] In a home of this sort, ruled by a father who was
assuredly more careful of his work in the study and class-room than of his
duties as paterfamilias, it is not wonderful that the two young men, Gian
Battista and Aldo, should grow up into worthless profligates. It has been
recorded how Cardan, during a journey to Genoa, wrote a Book of Precepts
for his children,[180] a task the memory of which afterwards wrung from
him a cry of despair. There never was compiled a more admirable collection
of maxims; but, excellent as they were, it was not enough to wri