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Rh fever brought him near to death's door. He suffered in his eyes, teeth, head, and heart. He was racked with neuralgia, especially when he had retired to rest, and thus sleep had become a torture to him. He became prematurely old. At forty-two years of age he had a sense of his decrepitude. At forty-eight he wrote that for every day he worked he had to rest four. He obstinately refused to accept the advice of a doctor.

His mind, even more than his body, suffered the consequences of this terrible life of work. Pessimism—a hereditary evil with him—consumed him. When in his youth he wore himself out in reassuring his father, who seems, at times, to have suffered from attacks of the mania of persecution. But Michael Angelo himself