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← ExitThe Anatomy of Melancholy

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Subsection 4 Cheerfulness, Merry Company, and Pleasing Sights as Remedies

As Marsilio Ficino concludes a letter to Bernard Canisianus and some other friends, so I shall conclude this discussion for all good students: “Live cheerfully, my friends, free from care, perplexity, anguish, and distress; live cheerfully. Heaven made you for joy.” Again and again I ask you to be cheerful. If anything troubles your hearts or torments your souls, disregard and despise it; let it pass.

I urge this on you not only as a theologian but as a physician: without this cheerfulness, which is the life and very essence of medicine, drugs and everything used to prolong human life are dull, dead, and powerless. “While the Fates allow, live happily”—Seneca. Be cheerful, I say.

Let us not deprive this flourishing youth Of its amusements.

This was the prophet Tiresias’s advice to Menippus, who travelled throughout the world, even down to hell itself, seeking contentment; and his final farewell to Menippus was to be cheerful. “Despise the world,” he says, “and count what is in it as vanity and trifles. Seek only this throughout your life: do not pry too closely or worry too much about anything, but enjoy yourself in a composed, contented state, and above all be cheerful.”

If, as Numerus thinks, nothing is pleasant without love and laughter, Live amid love and laughter.

To conclude with Solomon, Ecclesiastes 3:22, nothing is better than that a person should take pleasure in his own affairs. Every physician repeats the same advice to his patient in this case. Capivaccius tells his to avoid excessive study and disturbances of mind, and, as far as he can, to live with an easy heart. Prospero Calano tells the melancholy Cardinal Cesi: amid your serious studies and business, enjoy jokes and witty fancies, games and diversions, and whatever else may refresh your mind. Nothing is better for this illness than cheerfulness and cheerful company. “It begins with sorrow,” says Montanus; “it must be driven out by joy.”

But look at the harm that follows. Many men, knowing that cheerful company is the only medicine against melancholy, therefore neglect their business and fall into the opposite extreme: they spend all their days among drinking companions in a tavern or alehouse, and know no other use for their time than drinking. Ale-soakers, human fish, or water-snakes, “who only drink, like frogs, and eat nothing”—like so many frogs in a puddle! Their sole occupation is eating and drinking.

Their whole religion is sacrifice to Volupia, Rumina, Edulica, Potina, and Mellona. They wish for Philoxenus’s neck, Jupiter’s threefold night, and for the sun to stand still as it did in Joshua’s time, to satisfy their appetites, so that they might “revel like Greeks and drink day and night.” Men of brilliant wit, talent, standing, and worth debase themselves in any scoundrel’s company, smoking tobacco and drinking, roaring and singing filthy songs in sordid places.

You will find someone reclining beside a cut-throat, Mixed in with sailors, thieves, or runaways.

Thomas Erastus’s charge against Paracelsus—that he would lie drinking all day in a brothel with carters and tapsters—is all too common among us, even among men of higher standing: like Timocreon of Rhodes, “drinking much and devouring much,” and so on.

They drown their wits, boil their brains in ale, consume their fortunes, waste their time, weaken their constitutions, contract filthy diseases, catarrhs, dropsies, fevers, and tremors; they develop swollen jugular veins, red pimply faces, sore eyes, and the like; they overheat their livers, upset their bodily balance, spoil their stomachs, and ruin their bodies. For drink drowns more people than the sea and all the rivers flowing into it. Mere blockheads and barrels, they confound their souls, suppress reason, pass from Scylla to Charybdis, and turn a remedy into their ruin.

What does it matter whether I perish by disease, the sword, or a falling ruin?

When the Black Prince went to restore the exiled king of Castile to his kingdom, a terrible battle was fought between the English and the Spanish. At last the Spanish fled, and the English pursued them to the river, where some drowned themselves to escape their enemies and the rest were killed. Now tell me the difference between drowning and being killed. One might as well remain melancholy as become a drunken beast and a beggar.

Company, the one comfort and remedy for every kind of discontent, becomes their very misery and the cause of their destruction. As Hermione lamented in Euripides, “Bad women made me bad”—evil company ruined her—so they may rightly complain that bad companions have been their undoing. For “a bad man wants another to be bad, so that he may be like himself.” One drunkard in a company, one thief, one whoremonger, would gladly make all the others as bad as himself.

Even if You swear you dread the night-time fumes of wine,

whatever your constitution, inclination, loves or hates, whether good or bad, if you join them you must do as they do. Even at the cost of your health, you must drink “poison in place of wine.” And so, like grasshoppers singing over their cups all summer, they starve in winter; for a little empty merriment they will face a sorrowful reckoning in the end.

6360.The letters are attributed to Marsilio Ficino. “Heaven made you for joy” renders the Latin inserted into Burton’s English paraphrase. The margin also inserts Horace, Odes 2.16.25–26, on a mind content with the present. The precise Ficino letter and form of its addressee’s name remain to be collated.

6363.“Quintessence” means the concentrated essence or animating principle. Ficino’s description makes cheerfulness the life of medicine. The Senecan line is from Hercules Furens 177 in the Dickinson text; it is numbered 178 in some editions. Burton’s conclusion follows his translated quotation and is not a modern medical recommendation.

6365.The two Latin lines urge that youth should not be deprived of play. The 1651 margin reads Loebeus Anacreon; its precise bibliographical identification remains open.

6368.Burton refers to Lucian’s Menippus, also called Necyomancy: a satirical descent to the underworld in search of guidance about life. The advice is spoken by the dead seer Tiresias. The quoted Latin and Burton’s English rendering await comparison with the particular edition he used.

6369.The couplet comes from Horace, Epistles 1.6.64–65, where the name is Mimnermus, the Greek elegiac poet. The 1651 page clearly prints Numerus. That reading remains in both columns, with the identification supplied here.

6373.The biblical reference is Ecclesiastes, not Ecclesiasticus. The physicians named are Girolamo Capivacci, Prospero Calano, and Giovanni Battista da Monte, Latinized as Capivaccius, Prosper Calenus, and Montanus. The medical passages and the precise Cardinal Cesi intended remain for bibliographical collation.

6375.“Malt-worms” is a derisive term for heavy drinkers. Burton first likens them to frogs that drink without eating, then says their sole occupation is eating and drinking; the rhetorical inconsistency is retained. The Athenaeus book number is 1 in the full footer reference.

6376.The named deities associate religion with pleasure, nursing, eating, drinking, and honey. Philoxenus was said to wish for a crane’s long neck to prolong the pleasure of swallowing; Athenaeus, Deipnosophists book 1, reports the story. Jupiter’s trinoctium is the mythic night prolonged to three nights for his union with Alcmena. Joshua 10:12–14 supplies the arrested sun. Pergræcari, literally to live like a Greek, means to revel or carouse.

6378.Juvenal, Satire 8.173–174, satirizes a high-born man in low company. The comparison text has aliquo (“some cut-throat”) rather than Burton’s aliquem (“someone”), and uses “and” where Burton prints “or.” The translation follows Burton’s form. “Runaways” here evokes fugitive slaves.

6379.Erastus’s accusation against Paracelsus is reported polemically; Burton does not establish it as fact. Car-men are cart-drivers, and tapsters serve drink. The Latin fragment characterizes Timocreon as a glutton; its precise source and wording are not fully collated here.

6380.Temperatures and complexions refer to bodily constitutions or humoral balance. Rheums are watery discharges or catarrhs; dropsy is swelling attributed to retained fluid; calentures are fevers; juglars means jugular veins. Funges means soft-headed fools, from a word for mushrooms; Murray’s dictionary specifically cites this passage. Burton couples the insult with drink-filled barrels. Scylla and Charybdis are the opposed sea dangers of classical myth: escaping one danger only to enter another.

6382.Compare Horace, Satires 2.3.157: the standard text asks whether one perishes by disease or by theft and robbery. Burton substitutes sword and ruin. His wording is retained and translated, without reconstructing Horace’s line in the original column.

6384.The Black Prince is Edward of Woodstock; the king is Pedro of Castile. Burton evokes the rout at Nájera in 1367, using the river deaths as an analogy for replacing melancholy with ruinous drinking. His exact Froissart text and Latin intermediary remain to be collated.

6386.Burton cites Hermione’s lament in Euripides and paraphrases it in Latin, then English. His next maxim is labelled Terence in the margin, but compare Plautus, Trinummus 285: a bad man wants a good man to become bad like himself. Burton abbreviates that wording, leaving the object implicit; the modern rendering supplies “another” to make the intended sense readable.

6388.Horace, Epistles 1.18.92–93, describes drinkers’ dislike of someone who refuses a cup. The comparison text reads tepores, “heats,” where Burton prints vapores, “fumes”; his introductory Et si also alters the connection. The fumes are the feared effects of drinking during the night, not simply outdoor night air.

6390.The Greek margin gives the drinking-party ultimatum “Drink or leave.” The grasshopper image recalls the fable in which a creature that sings through summer has nothing to eat in winter. The warning closes Subsection 4 and Section 2 of the Second Partition.