entary Philosophy. At
the end of his twenty-second year the country was convulsed by the wars
between the Spaniards and the French under Lautrec, which ended in the
expulsion of the last-named and the establishment of the Imperial power in
Milan. Another result of the war, more germane to this history, was the
closing of the University of Pavia through lack of funds. In consequence
of this calamity Jerome remained some time in Milan, and during these
months he worked hard at mathematics; but he was not destined to return to
Pavia as a student. The schools there remained some long time in
confusion, so in 1524 he went with his father's consent to Padua. In the
autumn of that same year he was summoned back to Milan to find Fazio in
the grip of his dying illness. "Whereupon he, careful of my weal rather
than his own, bade me return to Padua at once, being well pleased to hear
that I had taken at the Venetian College the Baccalaureat of Arts.[35]
After my return to Padua, letters were brought to me which told me that he
had died on the ninth day after he had refused nourishment. He died on the
twenty-eighth of August, having last eaten on Sunday the twentieth of the
month. Towards the close of my twenty-fourth year I was chosen Rector of
the Academy at Padua,[36] and at the end of the next was made Doctor of
Medicine. For the first-named office I came out the victor by one vote,
the suffrages having to be cast a second time; and for the Doctorate of
Medicine my name had already twice come forth from the ballot with
forty-seven votes cast against me (a circumstance which forbade another
voting after the third), when, at the third trial, I came out the winner,
with only nine votes against me (previously only this same number had been
cast for me), and with forty-eight in my favour.

"Though I know well enough that affairs like these must needs be of small
account, I have set them down in the order in which they came to pass for
no other reason than that I give pleasure to myself who write these words
by so doing: and I do not write for the gratification of others. At the
same time those people who read what I write--if indeed any one should
ever be so minded--may learn hereby that the beginnings and the outcomes
of great events may well be found difficult to trace, because in sooth it
is the way of such things to come to the notice of anybody rather than of
those who would rightly observe them."[37]

Padua cannot claim for it