In his fifteenth consultation, he tells of a man aged fifty who fell into despair on his mother’s death. Cured by Falloppio, he relapsed many years later after the sudden death of a daughter and could never afterwards be restored to health.

The force of this passion is sometimes so violent that it overwhelms whole kingdoms and cities. Vespasian’s death was piteously lamented throughout the Roman Empire: “the whole world mourned,” says Aurelius Victor. Alexander ordered the battlements of houses pulled down, mules’ and horses’ manes cut off, and many common soldiers killed to accompany his dear Hephaestion in death.

This is now practised among the Tartars: when a great khan dies, ten or twelve thousand must be killed—men and horses, everyone they encounter. Among those pagan Indians, their wives and servants voluntarily die with them.

Leo X was so deeply mourned in Rome after his death that, as Giovio reports, “the common welfare and public happiness”—the common safety, all good fellowship, peace, mirth and plenty—died with him: “they were mourned as though buried in the same grave with Leo.” For his lifetime was a golden age, but after his death an iron age followed: “barbarous violence, foul devastation and the dreadful sufferings of every kind of evil”—wars, plagues, devastation and discontent.

When Augustus Caesar died, says Paterculus, “we had feared the ruin of the world”: we were all afraid, as though heaven had fallen upon our heads. Budé records that at Louis XII’s death there was “so sudden a change that those who previously seemed to touch heaven with a finger were now suddenly crawling on the ground; you would have said they had been struck by the stars.” Those who were formerly in heaven suddenly lay grovelling on the ground, as if struck down by a planet.

Their spirits shaken, they sank down, as a vast Wood grieves when its leaves have fallen— They looked like lopped trees.

At Nancy in Lorraine, when Claude of Valois, sister of Henry II, king of France, and wife of the duke, died, all the churches were closed for forty days: no prayers or masses except in the room where she lay. All the civic councillors appeared in black, and for twelve months singing and dancing were forbidden throughout the city.

In those days, Daphnis, no one drove the grazing cattle To the cool streams; no four-footed creature tasted The river’s water or touched a blade of grass.

How deeply were we affected here in England by the untimely death of Prince Henry, our Titus, “the delight of humankind,” as though the lives of all our dearest friends had breathed their last with his! Scanderbeg’s death was not mourned so deeply in Epirus.

In a word, as the historian says of Edward I at the news of his son Edward of Caernarfon’s birth, “he rejoiced beyond measure”—he was eternally glad—so we may say the reverse of friends’ deaths: “mourning for ever.” Many of us, like so many turtledoves, are for ever cast down by it.

There is another sorrow, arising from the loss of worldly goods and wealth, which afflicts us equally and may go hand in hand with the preceding one. Loss of time, honour, office, reputation or labour, and disappointed hopes, will torment us greatly; but in my judgement no torture equals this loss, or more quickly brings about this illness and calamity.

Lost money is mourned with genuine tears.

It wrings real tears from our eyes, many sighs and much sorrow from our hearts, and often causes settled melancholy itself. Guaineri, treatise 15, chapter 5, repeats this as a particular cause: “Loss of friends and loss of goods make many people melancholy, as I have often seen, through continually dwelling on such things.”

Arnald of Villanova stresses the same causes, Breviary, book 1, chapter 18: “from loss of possessions, damage, the death of friends,” and so on. Want alone will drive a man mad: being “without money” will cause deep and grievous melancholy.

Many people feel about this as Irishmen do, who, if they have a good scimitar, would rather take a blow on the arm than have their weapon damaged. They would sooner lose their lives than their possessions. The grief that follows lasts a long time, says Platter, and repeated dispositions produce an established condition.

Montanus and Frigimelica cured a young man of twenty-two who became melancholy in this way, “because of lost money”: a sum he had unfortunately lost. Schenck has another such story of a man made melancholy because he had overreached himself and spent his capital on unnecessary building.

Roger, that rich bishop of Salisbury, “stripped of wealth and castles by King Stephen”—deprived of his goods by King Stephen—“overwhelmed by the force of grief and driven mad, behaved disgracefully.” He went mad with grief, speaking and acting without knowing what he did.

Nothing is more common than for people in such circumstances to kill themselves through anguish of mind. A poor fellow went to hang himself, as Ausonius elegantly tells in a neat epigram; but happening to find a pot of money, he threw away the rope and went home cheerfully. The man who had hidden the gold, however, on finding it missing, hanged himself in despair with the rope the other man had left.

But the man who had hidden it, when he failed to find his gold, Fitted to his neck the noose that he did find.

Such deadly events can want and poverty produce. Whether through standing surety, shipwreck, fire, soldiers’ plunder and pillage, or any other loss, it makes no difference: it will produce the same effect, the same desolation in provinces and cities as in private individuals. The Romans were miserably cast down after the battle of Cannae, the men stunned with fear, the stupefied women tearing their hair and crying. So were the Hungarians when their King Ladislaus and their bravest soldiers were killed by the Turks: “public mourning,” and so on.