ment freed
from the imagined causes of their sufferings, are but for a short time
released from their false notions, was attended with the most injurious
effects: for in consequence of it those affected necessarily became by
degrees convinced of the incurable nature of their disorder. They
expected relief, indeed, but not a cure, from music; and when the heat of
summer awakened a recollection of the dances of the preceding year, they,
like the St. Vitus's dancers of the same period before St. Vitus's day,
again grew dejected and misanthropic, until, by music and dancing, they
dispelled the melancholy which had become with them a kind of sensual
enjoyment.

Under such favourable circumstances, it is clear that tarantism must
every year have made further progress. The number of those affected by
it increased beyond all belief, for whoever had either actually been, or
even fancied that he had been, once bitten by a poisonous spider or
scorpion, made his appearance annually wherever the merry notes of the
tarantella resounded. Inquisitive females joined the throng and caught
the disease, not indeed from the poison of the spider, but from the
mental poison which they eagerly received through the eye; and thus the
cure of the tarantati gradually became established as a regular festival
of the populace, which was anticipated with impatient delight.

Without attributing more to deception and fraud than to the peculiar
nature of a progressive mental malady, it may readily be conceived that
the cases of this strange disorder now grew more frequent. The
celebrated Matthioli, who is worthy of entire confidence, gives his
account as an eye-witness. He saw the same extraordinary effects
produced by music as Alexandro, for, however tortured with pain, however
hopeless of relief the patients appeared, as they lay stretched on the
couch of sickness, at the very first sounds of those melodies which made
an impression on them--but this was the case only with the tarantellas
composed expressly for the purpose--they sprang up as if inspired with
new life and spirit, and, unmindful of their disorder, began to move in
measured gestures, dancing for hour together without fatigue, until,
covered with a kindly perspiration, they felt a salutary degree of
lassitude, which relieved them for a time at least, perhaps even for a
whole year, from their defection and oppressive feeling of general
indisposition. Alexandro's experience of the inju