With Michael Scot’s account of his own fate Pipini joins another curious matter, that of the _cervilerium_.[248] This was a plate or cap of steel meant to be worn under the ordinary covering of the head as an additional defence, and the chronicle says that Scot invented and wore it that he might be safe from the danger he foresaw. Taking this together with the prophecies, both general and personal, we can find no better explanation than that which bids us see in the whole what indicates a case of ecstatic melancholy such as would seem to be the sad heritage of not a few finer natures sprung of the stock from which Michael Scot descended. We hear the same sad note in the strange jingle he wove so long before in the preface of his _Physionomia_: ‘Nos ibimus ibitis, ibunt. Omnia pereunt, praeter amare Deum,’ and one would fain hope that in his frequent fits of depression Scot may have indeed found rest in what he thus declares to be the only abiding portion of the soul. The wild account of his illness at Cordova, and of the dreams which then visited him is not to be neglected in this connection. Perhaps the cloud then first fell which in after-years returned upon him with such redoubled gloom. Thus the traits of Scot’s youth fit well the picture we are now constrained to form, and the whole gives promise that here at last we may have touched upon the man himself as he was, physically, mentally, and spiritually. A slight worn body spent with arduous study, like a sheath which the sword has almost broken through; a soul possessed with the sense of Divine things, yet sad, and subject to strange illusions; a conscience morbidly awake and painfully scrupulous; a mind to which almost every branch of knowledge was familiar, and not incapable of striking out here and there in a path of its own: if these be not Michael Scot, scholar in the court and courtier in the schools, then it may safely be said that no indications exist which can ever reveal to us this striking personality as he lived and moved in the world.