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 unquestionably maniacal; but his state gradually became one of apparent sanity infested by delusions, to which many of the painful particulars alleged in his letters are to be ascribed. One prevailing hallucination was the frequent visitation of a familiar spirit, with whom he held long dialogues. His treatment improved with his mental condition; though sometimes, by the inattention of his custodians, as we must think, short of necessary food, he had comfortable apartments, was allowed to carry on an extensive and apparently uncontrolled correspondence, and produced enough excellent work, chiefly prose dialogues, to prove at least the enjoyment of numerous lucid intervals. At length, in July 1586, he was permitted to retire to Mantua. Alphonso appears to have behaved becomingly to the poet, considered merely as an unhappy vassal: it is no special reproach to him to have been neither an Alexander the Great nor a Wolfe to rightly appraise the comparative worth of the _Jerusalem Delivered_ and the ducal crown of Ferrara.