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The earliest work of his that has reached us is the Dialogus de caussis corruptae Eloquentiae, composed under Titus, or early under Domitian.
Florence Wilson accompanied, as tutor, Cardinal Wolsey's nephew to Paris, and published at Lyons in 1543 his De Tranquillitate Animi Dialogus. Rose's Biog. Dict. xii. 508. When Johnson visited Boswell in Edinburgh, Mrs. Boswell 'insisted that, to show all respect to the Sage, she would give up her own bed-chamber to him, and take a worse. Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 14. See post, April 18, 1778.
A little later Archbishop Egbert of York, in his Dialogus de Institutione Ecclesiastica, though more cautiously, admits that when one of two married persons is infirm the other, with the permission of the infirm one, may marry again, but the infirm one is not allowed to marry again during the other's life.
Besides chronicling this strange and somewhat pathetic incident, Cardan sets down in the Dialogus de Morte his general impressions of the English people. Alluding to the fear of death, he remarks that the English, so far as he has observed, were scarcely at all affected by it, and he commends their wisdom, seeing that death is the last ill we have to suffer, and is, moreover, inevitable.
The tentative suggestion of Bishop Stubbs that it may have been written by Richard Fitz Neal, the author of the Dialogus de Scaccario, is now generally regarded as inadmissible. The work begins in 1170, and from a date a year or two later is evidently contemporaneous to its close in 1192, with perhaps a slight interruption at 1177.
Jacques Charmolue recalled him wholly to a sense of reality by addressing to him this question: "Come, now, master, when will you come to aid me in making gold? I am impatient to succeed." The archdeacon shook his head, with a bitter smile. "Master Jacques read Michel Psellus' 'Dialogus de Energia et Operatione Daemonum. What we are doing is not wholly innocent." "Speak lower, master!
The work next in order of priority is the Agricola, a biography of his father-in-law, composed near the commencement of Trajan's reign, about 98 A. D. The talent of the author has now undergone a change; he is no longer the bright flowing spirit of the Dialogus, who acknowledged the decline while making the most of the excellences of his time; he has become the stern, back-looking moralist, the burning panegyrist, whose very pictures of virtue are the most withering rebukes of vice.
To my astonishment Magna Charta and the Dialogus de Scaccario were thoroughly good reading. The answer to "Quod est murdrum" was a thrilling revelation of what the Norman Conquest was and was not. I understood; and what is more delightful than that? There were even good courses, I found, in such apparently univiting a feast as "The Constitutions of Clarendon."
At the head of the court historians stood the treasurer, Richard Fitz Neal, the author of the Dialogus, who in 1172 began a learned work in three columns, treating of the ecclesiastical, political, and miscellaneous history of England in his time a work which some scholars say is included in the Gesta Henrici II that was once connected with the name of Benedict of Peterborough.
Between 1477 and 1499 he printed Virgil's Eclogues, Cicero's De Senectute and De Amicitia, Horace's Ars Poetica, the Axiochus in Agricola's translation, Cyprian's Epistles, Prudentius' poems, Juvencus' Historia Euangelica, and the Legenda Aurea: also the grammar of Alexander with the commentary of Synthius and Hegius, Agostino Dato's Ars scribendi epistolas, Aesop's Fables, and the Dialogus Creaturarum, the latter two being moralized in a way which must surely have pleased Butzbach.
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