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The same week after we went to see Mr. Evans. When we came to his house, he, having been drunk the night before, was upon his bed, if it be lawful to call that a bed whereon he then lay; he roused up himself, and, after some compliments, he was content to instruct me in astrology; I attended his best opportunities for seven or eight weeks, in which time I could set a figure perfectly: books he had not any, except Haly de judiciis Astrorum, and Orriganus's Ephemerides; so that as often as I entered his house, I thought I was in the wilderness.
The school-master brought out a work of the Greek philosopher with which was bound up the Ptolemæi Libri de Judiciis. Cardan fastened upon it at once, and wanted to buy it, but the school-master insisted that he should take it as a gift. He declares that his Commentaries thereupon are the most perfect of all his writings. The book contains his famous Nativity of Christ. Opera, tom. i. p. 93.
And finally, while the Upper House is presided over by the palatine, the lower is regulated and kept in order by an official personage who bears the somewhat lengthy title of Personalis presentiæ Regiæ in judiciis locum tenens. He must be of noble birth, of course, and is likewise President of the High Court of Justiciary.
Now to conclude this part with a word de judiciis, or of the constitution or course of courts; it is a discourse not otherwise capable of being well managed but by particular examples, both the constitution and course of courts being divers in different governments, but best beyond compare in Venice, where they regard not so much the arbitrary power of their courts as the constitution of them, whereby that arbitrary power being altogether unable to retard or do hurt to business, produces and must produce the quickest despatch, and the most righteous dictates of justice that are perhaps in human nature.
The Commentary on Ptolemæi de Astrorum Judiciis, the writing of which beguiled the tedium of his voyage down the Loire on his journey to Paris in 1552, is a book upon which he spent great care, and is certainly worthy of notice.
In reference to each book the author has left a statement of the reasons which impelled him to undertake his task, the most cogent of which were certain dreams. Soon after he had begun to write the De Astrorum Judiciis he dreamt one night that his soul, freed from his body, was ranging the vault of heaven near to the moon, and the soul of his father was there likewise.
In 1554 Cardan published also with Petrus of Basel the Ptolemæi de astrorum judiciis with the Geniturarum Exempla, bound in one volume, but he seems to have written nothing but a book of fables for the young, concerning which he subsequently remarks that, in his opinion, grown men might read the same with advantage.
He had quarrelled violently with the physicians over the case of Count Borromeo's child which died, and with Borromeo himself, and, almost immediately after this, he published his book, De Astrorum Judiciis, a step which tended to identify him yet more closely with Astrology, and to raise a cry against him in Milan, which he declares to be the most scandal-mongering city in the Universe.
De Vita Propria, ch. xxxii. p. 101. Nunc cum ipsa gens per se humanissima sit atque supra existimationem civilis, tu tamen tantum illi addis ornamenti, ut longe nomine tuo jam nobilior evadat." De Astrorum Judiciis, p. 3. Geniturarum Exempla, p. 411. Edmund Dudley, the infamous minister of Henry VII. Geniturarum Exempla, p. 412.
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