right side? If indeed it had not fared with him
thus, after his son's death, he would at once have passed out of this
life, whereby many and great evils might have come to pass. He was freed
also from another troublesome ailment. In sooth, so many and so mighty are
the wonderful things which had befallen him, that I, who am very intimate
with him (and he himself thinks the same), am constrained to believe that
he is attended by a genius, great and powerful and rare, and that he is
not the master of his own actions. What he would have, he has not; and
what he has, he would not have chosen, or even wished for. This thing
causes him much trouble, but he submits when he reflects that all things
are God's handiwork." The speaker ends by saying that he never heard of
any others thus attended, save this man, and his father before him, and
Socrates.[238]

But it is in chapter xlvii. of the _De Vita Propria_, which must have been
written shortly before his death, that he lets the reader see most plainly
how strong was the hold which this belief in a guardian spirit of his own
had taken upon him. "It is an admitted truth," he writes, "that attendant
spirits have protected certain men, to wit, Socrates, Plotinus, Synesius,
Dion, Flavius Josephus, and myself. All of these have enjoyed prosperous
lives except Socrates and me, and I, as I have said before, was at one
time offered many and favourable opportunities for the achievement of
happiness. But C. Caesar the dictator, Cicero, Antony, Brutus, and Cassius
were also attended by mighty spirits, albeit malignant. For a long time I
have been persuaded that I too had one, but by what method it gave me
intelligence as to events about to happen, I could not exactly ascertain
until I reached the seventy-fourth year of my age, the season when I began
to write this record of my life. I now perceive that when I was in Milan
in 1557, when my genius perceived what was hanging over me--how that my
son on that same evening had promised to marry Brandonia Seroni, and that
he would complete the nuptials the following day--it produced in me that
palpitation of the heart of which I have already made mention, a weakness
known to my genius alone, a manifestation which served to simulate a
trembling of the bed."

Cardan writes at length to show that the mysterious knocking which he and
Rodolfo Sylvestro had heard during his imprisonment at Bologna, the
peasant who entered his bed-chamber saying "_Te s