It is characteristic of all melancholic people, says Mercurialis, consultation 11, to be deeply, violently and continually occupied with whatever idea they have once entertained. “It presents itself against their will”: do what they may, they cannot get rid of it; against their will they must think of it a thousand times over. “They are perpetually troubled and cannot forget.” It troubles them continually, in company or alone, at meals, at exercise, at all times and in all places.

“They never stop thinking about the things they least wish to.” Especially if it is distressing, they cannot forget it; they cannot rest or sleep because of it, but keep tormenting themselves. “They roll Sisyphus’s stone for themselves,” as Brunner observes: “a perpetual calamity and a miserable scourge.”

Crato, Laurentius and Fernel list bashfulness as a common symptom. “Somewhat rustic shyness,” or “faulty shyness,” is something that greatly haunts and torments them. If they have been ill-treated, mocked, disgraced, scolded or the like, or upset by any disturbance of mind, it troubles them so deeply that they often become quite stupefied, so disheartened and dejected that they dare not go out, especially among unfamiliar people, or manage their ordinary affairs. So childish, fearful and bashful are they that they cannot look anyone in the face. Some are more disturbed in this way, some less; some for longer, others for shorter spells, and so on; though others, on the contrary, according to Fracastorius, are “shameless and obstinate”—impudent and ill-tempered.

But for the most part they are very shy, and that makes them, like Peter of Blois, Christopher Urswick and many others, refuse honours, offices and promotions that sometimes fall into their laps. They cannot speak or put themselves forward as others can: “fear holds these back, shyness those.” Fearfulness and bashfulness hinder their progress; they are content with their present condition, unwilling to undertake any office, and therefore unlikely ever to rise.

For that reason they seldom visit their friends, except a few intimates: “speaking little,” of few words, and often wholly silent. Frambesarius, a Frenchman, had two such patients, “altogether silent,” whom their friends could not get to speak. Rodrigo da Fonseca, Consultations, volume 2, consultation 85, gives the example of a young man aged twenty-seven who was frequently silent, bashful, stupefied and solitary, would neither eat his food nor sleep, and yet at other times was prone to anger, and so on.

For the most part they are, as Plater notes, “inactive, silent, hard to stir, and will not go forward unless compelled,” and so on. They can scarcely be forced to do what concerns them, even for their own good: so distrustful, so sluggish, showing little or no courtesy, unsociable, hard to get to know, especially for strangers. They would rather write their thoughts than speak, and above all things love solitude. “Are they alone for pleasure or from fear?” Are they so solitary for pleasure, someone asks, or pain? For both; yet I think it is rather from fear and sorrow, and so on.

“Hence they fear, desire, grieve and flee; they do not Look towards the daylight, shut in darkness and a blind prison.”

Hence they grieve and fear, avoiding light, And shut themselves in a dark prison, out of sight.

Like Bellerophon in Homer,

“Who wandered wretched and grieving in shadowy woods, Devouring his own heart, shunning the paths of men.”

Who wandered sadly in the woods alone, Forsaking human company, lamenting greatly.

They delight in rivers and waters, deserted places, walking alone in orchards, gardens, secluded walks and back lanes, averse to company like Diogenes in his tub or Timon the Misanthrope. At last they abhor all companions, even their closest acquaintances and most intimate friends, for they imagine, I say, that everyone watches them and will mock, scorn or ill-treat them. They therefore confine themselves entirely to their own houses or rooms. “They flee people without a cause,” says Rhazes, “and hate them,” Continens, book 1, chapter 9: they will die by themselves, eat and live alone.

It was one of the chief reasons why the citizens of Abdera suspected Democritus of melancholy and madness: because, as Hippocrates related in his letter to Philopoemen, he left the city and lived in groves and hollow trees, on a green bank beside a brook or meeting of waters, all day and all night. “These things,” he says, “happen especially to those afflicted with black bile and melancholy: they frequent deserted places and shun human company.”

This is common among melancholic people. The Egyptians therefore, in their hieroglyphics, represented a melancholic person by a hare sitting in its form, as an exceedingly fearful and solitary creature: Pierius, Hieroglyphics, book 12. But this and all the preceding symptoms are more or less apparent as the humour is intensified or lessened: scarcely perceptible in some, or not at all, and most evident in others.

Childish in some, terrible in others; to be laughed at in one, pitied or wondered at in another; occurring in spells in one, continually in a second. And although these symptoms are common and may affect everyone, they are more conspicuous, frequent, furious and violent in melancholic people.

To put it in a word, there is nothing so vain, absurd, ridiculous, extravagant, impossible or incredible, no chimera so monstrous, so prodigious and strange that painters and poets would not dare attempt it, which they will not truly fear, invent, suspect and imagine for themselves. And what Ludovicus Vives said in jest of a foolish countryman who killed his donkey for drinking up the moon, “so that he might restore the moon to the world,” you may truly say of them in earnest.

They will act out and conceive every extreme, opposition and contradiction, in endless varieties. “Melancholic people persuade themselves of utterly incredible things, so that in all the ages scarcely two have been found who imagined the same thing” (Erastus, On Witches): scarcely two in two thousand agree in the same symptoms.

The Tower of Babel never produced such confusion of tongues as this chaos of melancholy produces variety of symptoms. In all melancholy there is “a dissimilar likeness,” as in people’s faces: always a likeness with differences. And as we swim in the same place in a river, though not in the very same water, and as the same instrument provides different tunes, so the same disease yields different symptoms. However various, intricate and hard to contain they may be, I will still venture, amid such vast confusion and breadth, to bring them into some order, and so descend to particulars.