s faculties adequately disciplined for the production of the best
work, he seems to have realized with sharp regret that the time before him
was so short, and that whatever fresh fruit of knowledge he might put
forth would prove of very slight profit to him, as author. Writing of his
replies given to certain mathematical professors, who had sent him
problems for solution, he remarks that, although he may have a happy knack
of dispatching with rapidity any work begun, he always begins too late. In
his fifty-eighth year he answered one of these queries, involving three
very difficult problems, within seven days; a feat which he judges to be a
marvel: but what profit will it bring him now? If he had written this
treatise when he was thirty he would straightway have risen to fame and
fortune, in spite of his poverty, his rivals, and his enemies. Then, in
ten years' space, he would have finished and brought out all those books
which were now lying unfinished around him in his old age; and moreover
would have won so great gain and glory, that no farther good fortune
would have remained for him to ask for. Another work which he had begun
about the same time (1558) was the treatise on _Dialectic_, illustrated by
geometrical problems and theorems, and likewise by the well-known logical
catch lines _Barbara Celarent_. During the summer vacation of 1561 he
returned to Milan, and began a _Commentary on the Anatomy of Mundinus_,
the recognized text-book of the schools up to the appearance of Vesalius.
In the preface to this work he puts forward a vigorous plea for the
extended use of anatomy in reaching a diagnosis.[201] He had likewise on
hand the _Theonoston_, a set of essays on Moral subjects written something
in the spirit of Seneca; and, after Gian Battista's death, he wrote the
dialogue _Tetim, seu de Humanis Consiliis_. In the year following, 1561, a
farther sorrow and trouble came upon him by the death of the English
youth, William. If he was guilty of neglect in the case of this young
man--and by his own confession he was--he was certainly profoundly grieved
at his death. In the Argument to the _Dialogus de Morte_ he laments that
he ever let the youth leave his house without sending him back to England,
and tells how he was cozened by Daldo, the crafty tailor, out of a premium
of thirty-one gold crowns, in return for which William was to be taught a
trade. "But during the summer, Daldo, who had a little farm in the
country, to