Diotimos Reading Desk

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← ExitThe Anatomy of Melancholy

Reading language

To the Reader Who Misuses His Leisure.

To the reader who misuses his leisure.

But you, whoever you are, take care, I warn you, not to attack the author of this work rashly or mock him like a fault-finder. Indeed, do not even join silently in other people’s condemnation; to put it plainly, do not turn up your nose and foolishly find fault, or invent false charges.

For if Democritus Junior really is what he claims to be—at least a kinsman of the elder Democritus, or possessed of even a little of his spirit—you are done for. He will turn critic and accuser against you in return. With his mischievous spleen, he will blow you into a jest, grind you into grains of wit, and, I may add, sacrifice you to the god of laughter.

Again I warn you: do not carp. If you abuse and disgrace Democritus Junior, who thinks no ill of you, a sensible friend may say to you what Hippocrates once said to the people of Abdera when they took their worthy fellow citizen Democritus for a madman: “You, Democritus, are indeed wise; the Abderites are the fools and madmen.”

“You have the wits of the Abderite mob.” I wanted to give you this brief warning, reader who misuses his leisure. Be off.

Weep, Heraclitus: it befits this wretched age; You see nothing but shame, nothing but sorrow. Laugh too, Democritus, laugh as much as you please: You see nothing but vanity, nothing but folly.

Let one find pleasure in tears, the other in laughter, Though both share the same endless labour and pain.

Now we need—for, alas, the whole world has gone mad— A thousand Heraclituses, a thousand Democrituses. Now, so great is the madness, we need the whole World turned into Anticyras, and all grass into hellebore.

1315.Male feriatus suggests leisure spent badly or mischievously. The Latin postscript abruptly renews the confrontation with the reader after the conciliatory ending of the English address.

1317.Spleen carries the associations of laughter and ill temper. Sales literally means “salts” and figuratively “witticisms”; the rendering retains the image of grinding the victim down. The sacrifice to laughter continues the mock threat.

1319.This returns to the pseudonymous Hippocratic correspondence discussed in Blocks 001–002. The supposedly mad philosopher proves wiser than the citizens who summoned the doctor. Burton’s retelling is preserved; this is not authenticated correspondence between the historical men.

1321.Heraclitus weeps and Democritus laughs at human conduct, the contrasting responses repeatedly invoked in the address. The ten Latin lines are rendered as ten lines of unrhymed English, divided here only for alignment. No author is identified on this page.

1322.Anticyra and hellebore recur in Block 019: the place and its purgative are conventional images of a cure for madness. The plural Anticyras imagines the whole earth transformed into places supplying the remedy. The poem’s independent source has not been established.