on circumstances which existed from the twelfth to the end of the fourteenth century; for the origin of Tarantism itself is referrible, with the utmost probability, to a period between the middle and the end of this century, and is consequently contemporaneous with that of the St. Vitus’s dance (1374). The influence of the Roman Catholic religion, connected as this was, in the middle ages, with the pomp of processions, with public exercises of penance, and with innumerable practices which strongly excited the imaginations of its votaries, certainly brought the mind to a very favourable state for the reception of a nervous disorder. Accordingly, so long as the doctrines of Christianity were blended with so much mysticism, these unhallowed disorders prevailed to an important extent, and even in our own days we find them propagated with the greatest facility where the existence of superstition produces the same effect in more limited districts, as it once did among whole nations. But this is not all. Every country in Europe, and Italy perhaps more than any other, was visited during the middle ages by frightful plagues, which followed each other in such quick succession, that they gave the exhausted people scarcely any time for recovery. The oriental bubo-plague ravaged Italy[261] sixteen times between the years 1119 and 1340. Small-pox and measles were still more destructive than in modern times, and recurred as frequently. St. Anthony’s fire was the dread of town and country; and that disgusting disease, the leprosy, which, in consequence of the crusades, spread its insinuating poison in all directions, snatched from the paternal hearth innumerable victims who, banished from human society, pined away in lonely huts, whither they were accompanied only by the pity of the benevolent and their own despair. All these calamities, of which the moderns have scarcely retained any recollection, were heightened to an incredible degree by the Black Death[262], which spread boundless devastation and misery over Italy. Men’s minds were everywhere morbidly sensitive; and as it happens with individuals whose senses, when they are suffering under anxiety, become more irritable, so that trifles are magnified into objects of great alarm, and slight shocks, which would scarcely affect the spirits when in health, give rise in them to severe diseases, so was it with this whole nation, at all times so alive to emotions, and at that period so sorely pressed with the horrors of death.