with public exercises of penance, and with innumerable practices
which strongly excited the imaginations of its votaries, certainly
brought the mind to a very favourable state for the reception of a
nervous disorder. Accordingly, so long as the doctrines of
Christianity were blended with so much mysticism, these unhallowed
disorders prevailed to an important extent, and even in our own
days we find them propagated with the greatest facility where the
existence of superstition produces the same effect, in more
limited districts, as it once did among whole nations. But this
is not all. Every country in Europe, and Italy perhaps more than
any other, was visited during the middle ages by frightful
plagues, which followed each other in such quick succession that
they gave the exhausted people scarcely any time for recovery.
The Oriental bubo-plague ravaged Italy sixteen times between the
years 1119 and 1340. Small-pox and measles were still more
destructive than in modern times, and recurred as frequently. St.
Anthony's fire was the dread of town and country; and that
disgusting disease, the leprosy, which, in consequence of the
Crusades, spread its insinuating poison in all directions,
snatched from the paternal hearth innumerable victims who,
banished from human society, pined away in lonely huts, whither
they were accompanied only by the pity of the benevolent and their
own despair. All these calamities, of which the moderns have
scarcely retained any recollection, were heightened to an
incredible degree by the Black Death, which spread boundless
devastation and misery over Italy. Men's minds were everywhere
morbidly sensitive; and as it happened with individuals whose
senses, when they are suffering under anxiety, become more
irritable, so that trifles are magnified into objects of great
alarm, and slight shocks, which would scarcely affect the spirits