In general we may conclude this much about melancholy: that it is most pleasant at first, I say, “the mind’s most welcome delusion,” a most delightful disposition—to be alone, live alone, walk alone, meditate, lie in bed for whole days, dreaming awake, as it were, and fashion a thousand fantastic imaginings for themselves. They are never happier than when doing this; for the time they are in paradise and can scarcely bear to be interrupted, like the man in the poet,

“By heaven, my friends, you have killed me, not saved me,” he says.

You have undone him, he complains, if you disturb him. Tell him what harm will follow, what the outcome will be: it makes no difference. “The dog returns to its vomit”; it is so pleasant that he cannot refrain. He may perhaps continue like this for many years because he has a strong constitution, or because some business intervenes to divert his thoughts. But at last, “the imagination is injured”: his fancy is impaired and, now accustomed to such trifles, cannot stop working on, like fate. The scene changes suddenly: Fear and Sorrow displace those pleasing thoughts, and suspicion, discontent and perpetual anxiety take their places.

Thus, little by little, with idleness and voluntary solitude as the shoehorn, Melancholy, that deadly fiend, is drawn on: “As far as its crown reaches into the heavenly air, so far its root stretches into Tartarus.” It was not so delicious at first as it is bitter and harsh now. A cankered soul wasted by cares and discontents, weariness of life, impatience, agony, inconstancy and indecision plunge them into unspeakable miseries.

Some of them cannot endure company, light or life itself; they are unfit for action, and so on. Their bodies are lean and dried up, withered and ugly, their looks harsh and very dull, and their souls tormented, according to how deeply they are entangled, how much the humour has intensified, or how long they have been troubled.

To distinguish all these symptoms more clearly, Rhasis the Arabian divides them into three degrees. The first is “false thinking”: false notions and idle thoughts, misconstruing and magnifying, making everything they imagine or fear worse. The second is “speaking what has been falsely conceived”: talking to themselves, making inarticulate, disordered sounds and speeches and strange gestures, and openly expressing their minds and inward notions through words and actions—laughing, weeping, being silent, not sleeping or eating their food, and so on. The third is putting into practice what they think or say.

Savonarola, rubric 11, treatise 8, chapter 1, on illness, confirms as much: when he begins to express in words what he conceives in his heart, talks idly, or jumps from one thing to another—what Gordonius calls things “having neither head nor tail”—he is at the middle stage. But when he also begins to act upon it and put his follies into effect, he has reached the furthest extent of melancholy, or madness itself.

You will easily observe this progression of melancholy in those who have been affected by it. At first they go about smiling to themselves; eventually they laugh aloud. At first solitary, in the end they can endure no company; or, if they do, they have now become fools, beyond sense and shame, utterly stupefied, caring nothing for what they say or do: all their actions, words and gestures are frenzied or ridiculous. At first his mind is troubled and he does not attend to what is said. If you tell him a story, he finally cries, “What did you say?” But in the end he mutters to himself, as old women often do, or old men when they sit alone. Suddenly they laugh, whoop, shout or run away, and swear that they see or hear actors, devils, hobgoblins and ghosts; they strike out or strut about, and so on, becoming capricious in the end.

Like the man in the poet, with “often two hundred slaves, often ten,” he will dress and undress himself, grow careless at last, become insensible, stupefied or mad. He howls like a wolf, barks like a dog, and raves like Ajax and Orestes, hearing music and cries that no one else hears.

So did the man whom Amatus Lusitanus mentions in century 3, case 55; or the woman in Springer who spoke many languages and said she was possessed; or the farmer in Prosper Calenius who disputed and discoursed learnedly on philosophy and astronomy with his master Alexander Achilles at Bologna in Italy. But I have already spoken of these.

Who can adequately describe these symptoms, or lay down rules that encompass them? As Echo says to the painter in Ausonius, “Fool, what are you attempting?” and so on. Foolish fellow, what do you want? If you must paint me, paint a voice: “And if you wish to paint a likeness, paint sound.” If you wish to describe melancholy, describe a fantastic notion, a disordered imagination, vain and differing thoughts—and who can do that?

The twenty-four letters make no greater variety of words in different languages than melancholic notions produce diversity of symptoms in different people. They are irregular, obscure, varied and so innumerable that Proteus himself is not so changeable. You might as well make the Moon a new coat as produce a true portrait of a melancholic person; you could as easily trace a bird’s movement through the air as discover a person’s heart—a melancholic person’s heart. They are so confused, I say, so varied and intermingled with other diseases.

As the types are mingled, as I have shown, so are the symptoms: sometimes with headache, a wasted bodily condition, dropsy or stones, as you can see from the various examples and illustrations collected by Hildesheim, Spicilegium 2. Mercurialis, consultation 118, chapters 6 and 11: with headache, epilepsy and priapism. Trincavelius, consultation 12, book 1, consultation 49: with gout; ravenous appetite. Montanus, consultation 26, etc., 23, 234, 249: with epilepsy, headache, vertigo, lycanthropy, and so on. 1. Caesar Claudinus, consultation 4, consultations 89 and 116: with gout, fevers, haemorrhoids, stones, and so on. Who can distinguish these melancholic symptoms, so intermingled with others, assign them to their various kinds, or contain them within a system?