In 1575 we encounter the first decided symptoms of an unsettled mind in querulousness and morbid suspicion, augmented, we may well believe, by the vexations attendant upon the revision of his now completed epic. He thought, and with justice, that he had written a truly religious poem, and he now found the ecclesiastical reaction demanding by the mouth of Silvio Antoniano, a type of the Roman Catholic Puritan of that ungenial day, that it should be adapted to the reading of monks and nuns. Solerti, his chief modern biographer, seems inclined to consider "his two years' warfare with bigotry and pedantry" the principal cause of his insanity; Carducci rather accuses his Jesuit education. Both were actual causes, more potent and malignant than his sentimental attachment to Leonora; but in truth the germ of insanity had always been latent in his brain, and the special occasion of its manifestation was comparatively immaterial.
Happily, as Settembrini justly distinguishes, it was not obscuration or decay, but exalted tension of the mind, and left the power of thinking and writing almost unimpaired, except under the influence of violent paroxysm. The disorder assumed the special form of morbid suspicion, a constant dread of inimical machinations, and self-accusation of imaginary heresies. He fled from Ferrara only to return; and at length (July 1579) a frenzied attack upon a retainer of the court necessitated his confinement as a lunatic. He would not have been subjected to the indignity of chains in our day, but the psychiatry of that age knew no better, and the best proof that its methods were not utterly perverse is the speedy restoration of his reason in a much greater measure than could have been hoped. At first he was
