This much I dare say boldly: whoever is idle, whatever their station, however rich, well connected, fortunate or happy, though they possess everything in abundance, every happiness the heart could wish and every satisfaction, as long as they remain idle they will never be content, never sound in body and mind. They will always be weary, always sickly, always troubled, always disgusted—weeping, sighing, grieving, suspecting, offended by the world and everything in it, wishing themselves gone or dead, or carried away by some foolish fancy or other.

And this is the true reason why so many great men, ladies and gentlewomen suffer from this disease in town and country. Idleness attends nobility: they think work a disgrace, spend their days in sports, recreations and pastimes, and therefore undertake no labour and follow no vocation. They eat plentifully and well, but lack exercise, activity, employment—for, as I say, they cannot bear to work—and company to their taste. Hence their bodies fill with thick humours, wind and undigested matter, and their minds become troubled, dull and heavy. Care, jealousy, fear of illnesses, sulking fits and weeping fits take hold of them all too readily.

For what will fear and imagination not do to an idle body? What disorders will they not cause? When the children of Israel murmured against Pharaoh in Egypt, he ordered his officers to double their task: they were to gather their own straw and still make their full quota of bricks. For the sole reason for their mutiny and discontent was, “They are idle.”

When everywhere you go you hear and see so many discontented people, so many grievances, needless complaints, fears and suspicions, the best remedy is to set them to work and occupy their minds; for the truth is, they are idle. They may build castles in the air for a while and soothe themselves with fanciful and pleasant imaginings, but these will prove as bitter as gall in the end. They will remain, I say, discontented, suspicious, fearful, jealous and sad, fretting and tormenting themselves.

As long as they are idle, it is impossible to please them. “He who does not know how to use leisure has more trouble than someone occupied with business”—as Aulus Gellius observed. Someone who does not know how to spend his time has more business, care, grief and anguish of mind than the busiest person in the thick of his affairs. “The idle mind does not know what it wants”: an idle person, as he goes on, does not know when he is well off, what he wants or where he would go. “Once there, he wants to leave”: he is tired of everything, pleased with nothing, weary of life. “At ease neither at home nor on campaign”—neither at home nor abroad—“he wanders, and life is lived beside itself”: he wanders and lives beside himself.

In a word, nowhere do I find the harmful effects of laziness and idleness more exactly expressed than in these verses spoken by Philolaches in the comic poet. For their elegance, I shall quote part of them.

I think a human being, when first born, Is like a newly built house. I shall explain why. When a house is finished to exact measure, Everyone praises the builder and wants to copy it, and so on. But when a worthless, careless man moves in, and so on, A storm comes and breaks the roof tiles and gutters; The weather rots the builder’s work, and so on.

I shall show you why people resemble houses. Parents are the builders who lay their children’s foundations, Polish them, teach them letters, and spare no expense. While I was under my builders’ authority, I was upright; But once I moved into a mind of my own, I ruined their work at once, utterly. Idleness came: that was my storm, And with it came hail and rain. It swept my virtue away, and so on.

A young man is like a fine new house: the carpenter leaves it well built, sound and made of solid materials; but a bad tenant lets the rain in and, through lack of repair, lets it fall into decay, and so forth. Our parents, tutors and friends spare no expense in bringing us up with every kind of virtuous education. But when we are left to ourselves, idleness, like a storm, drives every virtuous impulse from our minds, “and we become worthless”: suddenly, through sloth and such bad ways, we come to nothing.

First cousin to idleness, and an accompanying cause that goes hand in hand with it, is “excessive solitude”—too much being alone—which all physicians testify is both cause and symptom. Considered here as a cause, it is either compelled, imposed on us, or voluntary.

Enforced solitude is commonly found among students, monks, friars and anchorites, whose rules and way of life require them to abandon all company and human society and withdraw to a private cell: “secluded in superstitious idleness,” as Bale and Hospinian aptly call it. Such are the Carthusians of our time, who eat no meat, as their rule requires, keep perpetual silence and never go out.

Those who live in prison or some deserted place and cannot get company—as many of our country gentlemen do in isolated houses—must either remain alone without companions, or live beyond their means and entertain everyone who comes as though they were innkeepers, or associate with their servants and farm labourers, people unequal and inferior to them in rank and of a different disposition. Or, as some do to avoid solitude, they spend their time with disreputable fellows in taverns and alehouses and so give themselves over to unlawful amusements or dissolute ways.

Others are driven onto this rock of solitude by poverty or a strong fear of some infirmity or disgrace; or through shyness, uncouthness or lack of worldly experience they cannot adapt themselves to other people’s company. “No place is more welcome to the unhappy than solitude, where there is no one to reproach them with their misery.”

This enforced solitude takes hold and produces its effects soonest in those who have spent their time merrily, perhaps in entirely innocent recreation, in good company, in some large household or populous city, and are suddenly confined to a deserted country cottage far away, deprived of their freedom and cut off from their usual companions. Solitude is deeply irksome to such people, unbearably tedious, and a sudden cause of great harm.

Voluntary solitude is melancholy’s familiar companion. Like a Siren, a lure or some Sphinx, it gently draws us into this gulf from which there is no return; Piso calls it a primary cause. At first it is most pleasant for those inclined to melancholy to lie in bed all day and remain in their rooms; to walk alone in a secluded grove, between wood and water, beside a brook; to meditate on some delightful, pleasant subject that most engages them: “a lovely madness,” and “the mind’s most welcome delusion.”

It is an incomparable delight to indulge in melancholy like this, building castles in the air, smiling to oneself, acting an endless variety of parts which one supposes and vividly imagines oneself to be playing, or sees performed in the mind. “Enticing indeed at first,” says Lemnius: to picture and contemplate such pleasant things, sometimes “present, past or yet to come,” as Rhazes says.