"This event," says Alfieri, "upset my brains for nearly two years; and upset and retarded also my work in every way." In speaking of Alfieri's youth I have already had occasion to remark that there was in this man's character something abnormal; he was, as I have said, a moral invalid from birth; his very energy and resolution had somewhat of the frenzy and rigidity of a nervous disease, and though he would seem morally stronger than other men when strictly following his self-prescribed rule of excessive intellectual exercise, and when surrounded by a soothing atmosphere of affection and encouragement, his old malady of melancholy and rage (melancholy and rage whom he represents in one of his sonnets as two horrible-faced women seated on either side of him), his old incapacity for work, for interest in anything, his old feverish restlessness of place, returned, as a fever returns with its heat and cold and impotence and delirium, whenever he was shut out of this atmosphere of happiness, whenever he was exposed to any sort of moral hardship. On leaving Rome Alfieri went to Siena, where, years before, when he had come light-hearted and bent only upon literary fame, to learn Tuscan, he had been introduced into a little circle of men and women whom he faithfully loved, and to that Francesco Gori who shared with Tommaso di Caluso the rather trying honour of being his bosom friend. This Gori, "an incomparable man," writes Alfieri, "good, compassionate, and with all his austerity and ruggedness of virtue (_con tanta altezza e ferocia di sensi_) most gentle," appears literally to have nursed Alfieri in this period of moral sickness as one might nurse a sick or badly-bruised child. "Without him," writes Alfieri, "I think I should most likely have gone mad. But he, although he saw in me a would-be hero so disgracefully broken in spirit and inferior to himself" (this passage is characteristic, as showing that Alfieri considered himself, when in a normal condition, far superior to his much-praised Gori), "although he knew better than any the meaning of courage and endurance, did not, therefore, cruelly and inopportunely, oppose his severe and frozen reason to my frenzies, but, on the contrary, diminished my pain by dividing it with me. O rare, O truly heavenly gift, this of being able both to reason and to feel."