Before he quitted Scotland there had come to him letters from the English Court entreating him to tarry there some days on his way home to Italy, and give his opinion on the health of Edward VI., who was then slowly recovering from an attack of smallpox and measles. The young King's recovery was more apparent than real, for he was, in fact, slowly sinking under the constitutional derangement which killed him a few months later. Cardan could hardly refuse to comply with this request, nor is there any evidence to show that he made this visit to London unwillingly. But he soon found out that those about the Court were anxious to hear from him something more than a statement of his opinion as to Edward's health. They wanted, before all else, to learn what the stars had to say as to the probable duration of the sovereign's life. During his stay in Scotland Cardan would certainly have gained some intelligence of the existing state of affairs at the English Court; how in the struggle for the custody of the regal power, the Lord High Admiral and the Lord Protector, the King's uncles, had lost their heads; and how the Duke of Northumberland, the son of Dudley, the infamous minion of Henry VII. and the destroyer of the ill-fated Seymours, had now gathered all the powers and dignities of the kingdom into his own hands, and was waiting impatiently for the death of Edward, an event which would enable him to control yet more completely the supreme power, through the puppet queen whom he had ready at hand to place upon the throne. An Italian of the sixteenth century, steeped in the traditions of the bloody and insidious state-craft of Milan and the Lombard cities, Cardan would naturally shrink from committing himself to any such perilous utterance: all the more for the reason that he had already formed an estimate of the English as a fierce and cruel people. With his character as a magician to maintain he could scarcely keep entire silence, so he wrote down for the satisfaction of his interrogators a horoscope: a mere perfunctory piece of work, as we learn afterwards. He begins by reciting the extraordinary nature of the King's birth, repeating the legend that his mother was delivered of him by surgical aid, and only lived a few hours afterwards; and declares that, in his opinion, it would have been better had this boy never been born at all. "Nevertheless, seeing that he had come into this world and been duly trained and educated, it would be well for mankind were he to live long, for all the graces waited upon him. Boy as he was, he was skilled in divers tongues, Latin, English, and French, and not unversed in Greek, Italian, and Spanish; he had likewise knowledge of dialectics, natural philosophy, and music. His culture is the reflection of our mortal nature; his gravity that of kingly majesty, and his disposition is worthy of so illustrious a prince. Speaking generally, it was indeed a strange experience to realize