Luzzatto appears to have been sobered by these events. He occupied himself with his business, wrote more poetry, and resolved to marry. He was a happy father, lived in concord with his parents and brothers and sisters, and was highly respected. The evil spirit, however, to whom he had sold himself would not release him, and led him back to his youthful follies. A quarrel in the family and business misfortunes in connection with his father's house, in which he was a partner, appear to have been the cause of this renewal of his former studies. Disquieted and troubled in the present he sought to learn the future by means of Kabbalistic arts. He began once more to write down his mystical fancies, and ventured to show them to Bassan, from whom he obtained permission to publish them. It was whispered that Luzzatto performed incantations by means of magic, and that his teacher had handed him for publication some of the sealed writings in his custody. The Venetian council of rabbis, owing to certain reports, was especially excited and prejudiced against him. Luzzatto had written a sharp reply to Leon Modena's forcible work against the Kabbala; and as the latter was a Venetian rabbi, though of doubtful sincerity, the members of the Venetian council, Samuel Aboab and his five colleagues, considered any attack upon him an insult to their own honor. Their _esprit de corps_ roused them to greater activity than had zeal for their faith, when seemingly in peril. True Venetians, they had in their service a spy, Salman of Lemberg, who watched and reported Luzzatto's movements to them. As long as he was prosperous and surrounded by friends the Venetian rabbis had treated him with remarkable indulgence, and bestowed on him a title of honor; but after his family fell into misfortune, when he was on the verge of ruin, and deserted by his friends and flatterers, their regard for him ceased, and they could not find enough stones to throw at him. They believed one of their number who asserted that he had found implements of magic in Luzzatto's house. Absurdly enough, too, they reproached Luzzatto with having learnt Latin; to a man who had studied this language of Satan no angel, they said, could appear! The members of the Venetian council of rabbis believed, or pretended to believe that Luzzatto had boasted that in the Messianic age his psalms would take the place of David's psalter. They now showed themselves as active as they had previously been negligent in the persecution of the unfortunate author. They sent three inquisitors to Padua to examine him, search his house for writings, and make him declare on oath that he would publish nothing without first submitting it to the censorship of the Venetian council of rabbis. The poet, deeply mortified, haughtily answered that this council had no authority whatever over him, a member of the community of Padua. The Venetian rabbis then excommunicated him, and condemned his writings