(1577-1640)
There are some books of which every reader knows the names, but of whose
contents few know anything, excepting as the same may have come to them
filtered through the work of others. Of these, Burton's 'Anatomy of
Melancholy' is one of the most marked instances. It is a vast storehouse
from which subsequent authors have always drawn and continue to draw,
even as Burton himself drew from others,--though without always giving
the credit which with him was customary. Few would now have the courage
to read it through, and probably fewer still could say with Dr. Johnson
that it "was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours
sooner than he wished to rise."
[Illustration: ROBERT BURTON]
Of Robert Burton himself very little is known. He was born in 1577,
a few years later than Shakespeare,--probably at Lindley, in
Leicestershire; and died at Oxford in 1640. He had some schooling at
Sutton Coldfield in Warwickshire, and was sent to Brasenose College at
Oxford in 1593; was elected a student at Christ Church College in 1599,
and took his degree of B.D. in 1614. He was then thirty-seven years of
age. Why he should have been so long in reaching his degree, does not
appear. Two years later he was presented by the Dean and Chapter of
Christ Church to the vicarage of St. Thomas in the suburbs of Oxford. To
this, about 1630, through presentation by George, Lord Berkeley, was
added the rectory of Segrave in Leicestershire, and he retained both
livings until his death. This is about the sum and substance of his
known history. Various legends remain regarding him; as, that he was
very good and jolly company, a most learned scholar, very ready in
quotations from the poets and classical authors,--and indeed no reader
of the 'Anatomy' could imagine otherwise. Yet was he of a melancholy
disposition, and it is said that "he composed this book with a view of
relieving his own melancholy, but increased it to such a degree that
nothing could make him laugh but going to the foot-bridge and hearing
the ribaldry of the bargemen, which rarely failed to throw him into a
violent fit of laughter." He says himself, "I write of melancholy, by
being busie, to avoid melancholy." He was expert in the calculation of
nativities, and cast his own horoscope; having determined in which, the
time at which his death should occur, it was afterward shrewdly believed
that he took measures to insure the fulfillment of the prophecy.
His life was almost wholly spent in his study at Oxford. He was a wide
and curious reader, and the book to the composition of which he devoted
himself quotes authorities without end. All was fish which came to his
net: divines, poets, astrologists, doctors, philosophers, men of
science, travelers, romancers--he draws from the whole range of
literature; and often page after page--scores and hundreds of pages,--is
filled with quotations, sometimes of two or three words only, sometimes
translated and sometimes not, an almost inextricable network of facts,
of fancies, and of phrases. He says: "As those old Romans rob'd all the
cities of the world, to set out their bad-sited Rome, we skim off the
cream of other men's wits, pick the choice flowers of their till'd
gardens to set out our own steril plots."
Yet when he sets about it, his handling is steady and assured, and he
has distinctly the literary touch, as well as the marks of genius;
having a very great quaintness withal. The title of his famous book is
'The Anatomy of Melancholy. What It Is, with All the Kinds, Causes,
Symptoms, Prognostics, and several Cures of it. In three Partitions.
With their several Sections, Members, and Sub-sections, Philosophically,
Medically, Historically Opened and Cut Up. By Democritus Junior.' The
first edition appears to have been issued in 1621. He continued to
modify and enlarge it from time to time throughout his life; and for the
sixth edition, which appeared some years after his death, he prepared a
long address to the reader, describing his student life, accounting for
his choice of subject, and full of quaint fancies and scathing
criticisms of the ill habits and weaknesses of mankind.
"Melancholy" means with Burton _Melancholia_, but it means also all
sorts of insanity, and apparently all affections of the mind or spirit,
sane or insane. On the one hand he heaps up, in page after page and
chapter after chapter, all the horrid ills to which flesh is heir, or
which it cultivates for itself, and paints the world as a very
pandemonium of evil and outrage. And anon the air blows soft and sweet,
the birds sing, both brotherly love and domestic happiness are possible,
and
"God's in his heaven, all's right with the world."
To the first volume is prefixed 'The Author's Abstract of Melancholy,'
beginning:--
"When I go musing all alone,
Thinking of divers things foreknown,
When I build castles in the ayr,
Void of sorrow and void of feare
Pleasing myself with phantasms sweet,
Methinks the time runs very fleet.
All my joys to this are folly,
Naught so sweet as melancholy."
It does not need an expert to tell, after reading this, whence Milton
drew the suggestion of 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso.'