I propose, then, in this chapter, to take, as separately as is compatible with such a method, the temperamental, psycho-physical side of Catherine’s life. I shall first take those last thirteen years of admitted illness, as those which are alone at all fully known to us by contemporary evidence.--I shall then make a jump back to her first period,--to the first sixteen years up to her marriage, with the next ten years of relaxation, and the following four years of her conversion and active penitence. I take these next, because, of these thirty years, we have her own late memories, as registered for us by her disciples, at the time of her narration of the facts concerned.--And only then, with these materials and instruments thus gathered from after and before, shall I try to master the (for us very obscure) middle period, and to arrive at some estimate of her temperamental peripheral condition during these twenty years of her fullest expansion.--I shall conclude the chapter by taking Catherine in her general, lifelong temperament, and by comparing and contrasting this type and modality of spiritual character and apprehension with the other rival forms of, and approaches to, religious truth and goodness as these are furnished for us by history. The ultimate metaphysical questions and valuation are reserved for the penultimate chapter of my book. I. CATHERINE’S THIRD PERIOD, 1497 TO 1510. 1. _Increasing illness of Catherine’s last years._ Beginning with her third and last period (1497-1510), there can be no doubt that throughout it she was ill and increasingly so. Her closest friends and observers attest it. It is presumably Ettore Vernazza who tells us, for 1497, “when she was about fifty years of age, she ceased to be able to attend either to the Hospital or to her own house, owing to her great bodily weakness. Even on Fast-days she was obliged, after Holy Communion, to take some food to sustain her strength.” Probably Marabotto it is who tells us that, in 1499, “after twenty-five years she could no further bear her spiritual loneliness, either because of old age or because of her great bodily weakness.” We hear from a later Redactor that, “about nine years before her death (_i.e._ about 1501), there came to her an infirmity.” And then, especially from November 1509, May 1510, and August 1510 onwards, she is declared and described as more and more ill.[12] Indeed she herself, both by her acts and by her words, emphatically admits her incapacitation. For it is clearly ill-health which drives her to abandon the Matronship and even all minor continuous work for the Hospital. In her Wills we find indeed that, as late as May 21, 1506, she was able to get to the neighbouring Hospital for Incurables; and that even on November 27, 1508 she was “healthy in mind and body.” But her Codicil of January 5, 1503, was drawn up in the presence of nine witnesses at midnight,--a sure sign of some acute ill-health.