His melancholy increased with the irritation caused by political events, by unwearied study, and the physical weakness produced by his systematic abstinence. He was happy in the society of the countess of Albany, and that of his dear friend, the abbate Caluso: but many long hours he spent by himself in gloomy reverie. The bitterness and asperity of his mind was thus increased, and his dislike of society prevented the beneficial action of sympathy and mutual forbearance. He considered himself, to a great degree, a disappointed man in his literary career, and was ignorant of the universal applause bestowed upon his tragedies. He divided his time with the most scrupulous exactitude, and his horses were still dear to him. Many hours were spent in the aisles of Santa Croce, or other churches of Florence, listening to the music, and absorbed in reverie. During the last years of his life, he was visited each spring by a fit of the gout, and each summer by a desire to employ himself upon original composition, to which he devoted himself with an ardour which brought on, each autumn, a dangerous illness. His six unlucky comedies were the principal objects of these ill-fated labours; and his life was at last their sacrifice. A theorist in all things, he imagined that, as the gout proceeded from inflammation, it could be starved out of his frame; and he commenced a system of abstinence that deprived him of the nutriment necessary to support life. The countess in vain implored him not to adhere to so senseless a plan: it has often happened that, by resisting the prescriptions of physicians, and the aid of medicine, a man has conquered inherent disease, and lived to an old age; but as soon as he begins to administer remedies to himself, and to act from theories, instead of from that long and arduous practice necessary to give the smallest insight into the delicate structure of our physical nature, he must become the victim: thus it was with Alfieri; hard study and abstinence reduced his life to a mere flickering spark; he became a skeleton in appearance; each day he took less nourishment, and the weaker he grew, the more resolutely did he apply himself to study, as the sole solace of his worn-out and burthensome existence. In the month of October, 1803, he was attacked by gout in the stomach. The physicians wished, by means of blisters and sinapisms, to draw it to the extremities; but a childish dislike to the inconvenience which would ensue, and the impossibility of taking his daily walk, if these remedies were applied to his legs, caused him to refuse them. Opium was given instead, and his pain was moderated; but still he sat up; and his mind was rather excited than calmed by the narcotics administered: he remembered as in dreams, but with the utmost vividness, various incidents of his past life, or passages from his own writings and those of others; and these he repeated to the countess, who sat by him watching.