t, 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 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, which spread
boundless devastation and misery over Italy. Men's minds were everywhere
morbidly sensitive; and as it happened 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, gave 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 oppressed with the
horrors of death.

The bite of venomous spiders, or rather the unreasonable fear of its
consequences, excited at such a juncture, though it could not have done
so at an earlier period, a violent nervous disorder, which, like St.
Vitus's dance in Germany, spread by sympathy, increasing in severity as
it took a wider range, and still further extending its ravages from its
long continuance. Thus, from the middle of the fourteenth century, the
furies of _the Dance_ brandished their scourge over afflicted mortals;
and music, for which the inhabitants of Italy, now probably for the first
time, manifested susceptibility and talent, became capable of exciting
ecstatic attacks in those affected, and then furnished the magical means
of exorcising their melancholy.

SECT. 3--INCREASE

At the close of the fifteenth century we find that tarantism had spread
beyond the boundaries of Apulia, and that t