The great, though whimsical author of the 'Anatomy of Melancholy' was
born at Lindley, in Leicestershire, 1576, and educated at Christ Church,
Oxford. He became Rector of Seagrave, in his native shire. He was a man
of vast erudition, of integrity and benevolence, but his happiness,
like that of Burns, although in a less measure, 'was blasted _ab
origine_ by an incurable taint of hypochondria;' and although at times a
most delightful companion, at other times he was so miserable, even when
a young student at Oxford, that he had no resource but to go down to the
river-side, where the coarse jests of the bargemen threw him into fits
of laughter. This surely was a violent remedy, and one that must have
reacted into deeper depression. In 1621, he wrote and published, as a
safety-valve to his morbid feelings, his famous 'Anatomie of Melancholy,
by Democritus Junior.' It became instantly popular, and sold so well,
that the publisher is said to have made a fortune by it. Nothing more of
consequence is recorded of the author, who died in 1640. Although
'Melancholy mark'd him for her own,'
she failed to kill him till he had passed his grand climacteric. He was
buried in Christ Church, with the following epitaph, said to have been
composed by himself:--
'Paucis notus, paucioribus ignotus.
Hic jacet Democritus Junior,
Cui vitam pariter et mortem
Dedit _Melancholia_!
'Known [by name] to few, unknown [as the author of the "Anatomy"]
to fewer, here lies D. J., who owes his death [as a man] and his
life [as an author] to Melancholy.'
His work is certainly a most curious and bewitching medley of thought,
information, wit, learning, personal interest, and poetic fancy. We all
know it was the only book which ever drew the lazy Johnson from his bed
an hour sooner than he wished to rise. The subject, like the flesh of
that 'melancholy' creature the hare, may be dry, but, as with that, an
astute cookery prevails to make it exceedingly piquant; the sauce is
better than the substance. Burton's melancholy is not, like Johnson's,
a deep, hopeless, 'inspissated gloom,' thickened by memories of remorse,
and lighted up by the lurid fires of feared perdition; it is not, like
Byron's, dashed with the demoniac element, and fretted into universal
misanthropy; it is not, like Foster's, the sad, fixed fascination of
a pure intelligence contemplating the darker side of things, as by a
necessity of nature, and ignoring, without denying, the existence of the
bright; nor is it, like that of the 'melancholy Jacques,' in 'As you
Like it,' a wild, woodland, fantastical habit of thought, as of one
living collaterally and aside to the world, and which often explodes
into laughter at itself and at all things else;--Burton's is a wide-
spread but tender shade, like twilight, diffused over the whole horizon
of his thought, and is nourished at times into a luxury, and at times
paraded as a peculiar possession. In his form of melancholy there are
pleasures as well as pains. 'Most pleasant it is,' he says, 'to such
as are to melancholy given, to lie in bed whole days and keep their
chambers; to walk alone in some solitary grove, betwixt wood and water,
by a brook-side, to meditate upon some delightsome and pleasant subject;
and a most incomparable delight it is so to melancholise and build
castles in the air.' Religious considerations have little to do with
Burton's melancholy, and remorse or fear apparently nothing. Hence his
book, although its theme be sadness, never shadows the spirit, but, on
the contrary, from his dark, Lethean poppies, his readers are made to
extract an element of joyful excitement, and the anatomy, and the cure,
of the evil, are one and the same.
As a writer, Burton ranks, in some points, with Montaigne, and in others
with Sir Thomas Browne. He resembles the first in simplicity, _bonhommie_,
and miscellaneous learning, and the other in rambling manner, quaint
phraseology, and fantastic imagination. Neither of the three could be said
to write books, but they accumulated vast storehouses, whence thousands of
volumes might be, and have been compiled. There is nothing in Burton so
low as in many of the 'Essays' of Montaigne, but there is nothing so lofty
as in passages of Browne's 'Religio Medici' and 'Urn-Burial.' Burton has
been a favourite quarry to literary thieves, among whom Sterne, in his
'Tristram Shandy,' stands pre-eminent. To his 'Anatomy' he prefixes a poem,
a few stanzas of which we extract.