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← ExitThe Anatomy of Melancholy

Reading language

Resist the Beginnings, Avoid Occasions, Change One’s Location; Fair and Foul…

Felix Plater, Observations, book 1, had a baker as his patient, nearly mad with love for his maid and desperate. By having her removed from him, he was cured in a short time.

Isaeus, a philosopher of Assyria, lived most dissolutely in his youth, “openly indulging in lust,” falling in love with everyone he met. But after taking his friends’ advice, turning to study and leaving women’s company, he changed so completely that he no longer cared for plays, feasts, masques, songs, verses, fine clothes or any such amorous trifles. He suddenly became a new man, “as if he had lost his former eyes,” as my author says.

In the last chapter of his third book, Peter Godefridus tells a story from Saint Ambrose of a young man who met his former love after a long absence. Though once deeply infatuated with her, he scarcely acknowledged her. Astonished that he valued her so lightly, she called to him again, “soothing his heart with words,” and told him who she was. “It is I,” she said. “But I am no longer I,” he answered: he was not the same man. “At last he rushed away,” as Dido fled from Aeneas, refusing her any further conversation, disgusted by his folly and ashamed of what he had formerly done.

I am no longer a fool as before, Neaera.

O Neaera, from now on try your tricks and schemes on somebody else; you shall fool me no longer.

Petrarch has another such tale of a young gallant who loved a girl with one eye, and for that reason was sent by his parents to travel in distant countries. After some years he returned. Meeting the girl for whose sake he had been sent abroad, he asked how she had come to lose her eye. “No,” she said, “I have lost none; you have found yours.”

She meant that all lovers were blind, as Fabius says: “lovers cannot judge beauty,” nor scarcely anything else. They will readily confess this once some interruption or better advice has brought them back to themselves. They wonder at their own folly, madness, stupidity and blindness, feel deeply ashamed, “and laugh at love, and call it an idle thing,” condemn themselves for ever having been so infatuated or misled, and rejoice heartily that they have escaped so happily.

If a change of place fails to bring about this alteration, which seldom happens, other remedies must be added, fair means and foul: persuasion, promises, threats, fright, or diversion through some contrary passion, rumour, story, news or clever invention, to alter his affection. “Drive out the smaller sorrow by a greater,” says Gordonius: tell him his house is on fire, his best friend dead or his money stolen; or that he has been made a great governor, received an honour or office, or come into an inheritance, and will be a knight or baron. Or use some false accusation, as people do to those with hiccups, to make them forget them.

Saint Jerome, book 2, letter 16, to the monk Rusticus, gives the example of a young Greek living in a monastery in Egypt, whom no labour, abstinence or persuasion could divert, but who was finally delivered by this trick. The abbot set one of his community to quarrel with him, defame him before others with some scandalous accusation, and then be the first to lodge a complaint. Witnesses were also bribed or induced to give false evidence for the complainant. The young man wept; when everyone was against him, the abbot cunningly took his side, lest he be overwhelmed by excessive grief. But why prolong the story? By this device he was cured and drawn away from his former thoughts of love.

Injuries, slanders, contempt, disgrace,

and the insult of beauty scorned,

are very powerful ways to turn people’s affections aside. As Lucian says, “lovers subjected to insult cease to love.” Lovers abused or neglected, despised or mistreated, turn love to hatred. “Shall I return? Not if she begs me!” “I’ll never love you more.” “What, I love her—who loves him, who treats me—who does not—?”

So Zephyrus hated Hyacinthus because he scorned him and preferred his rival Apollo: Palaephatus, Fabulous Narratives. Such a lover will not come again even when invited.

Just tell him how he was mocked behind his back—this is Avicenna’s advice—that his love is unfaithful, entertains another, rejects him or cares nothing for him; or that she is a fool, a filthy whore, a sloven, a vixen, a scold or a devil. Or, as Italians commonly do, say that he or she has some disgusting, filthy disease: gout, stone, painful dribbling urination or epilepsy, and that these are hereditary and unavoidable; that he is prone to wasting disease, has the pox or three or four incurable skin eruptions or draining sores; that she is bald, her breath stinks, she is mad by inheritance, as are all her relatives, and is scatterbrained, with many other hidden ailments belonging to women which I will not even name.

Say that he is a hermaphrodite, a eunuch, physically defective or impotent; a spendthrift, gambler, fool, dupe, beggar or whoremonger, deeply in debt and unable to support her; a habitual drunkard whose mother was a witch and whose father was hanged; that he has an ulcer in his breast, a sore leg, leprosy or some incurable disease; that he will certainly beat her, cannot hold his urine, cries out or walks at night, will stab his bedfellow or reveal all his secrets in his sleep, so that nobody dares sleep beside him; that his house is haunted by spirits. Use such frightening and tragic things as could repel and terrify any man or woman alive.

Gordonius, part 2, chapter 20, advises in this manner:

10628.Plater’s Observations supplies Burton’s claimed cure. “Maid” means a female domestic servant in this context. The specific case and outcome remain uncollated; the translation preserves the historical claim without adding clinical confirmation.

10630.“Masks” means masques, staged entertainments, and “love toys” amorous trifles. Burton identifies his source as Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists. The precise Isaeus passage, his designation as a philosopher and Burton’s geographical description remain for collation.

10632.Burton threads Virgil’s language into an anecdote attributed through Peter Godefridus to Ambrose. Aeneid 6.468 supplies lenibat dictis animum, and 6.472 has tandem corripuit sese, where Burton prints proripuit sese tandem. The change from Dido to the young man reverses the gender of the person who departs. The Ambrose/Godefridus chain remains uncollated.

10634.Buchanan’s Ad eandem, beginning Risus, blanditiae, procacitates, is confirmed in scanned printed pages 112–114. Page 113 reads Non sum stultus ut ante. Iam Neæra / Vale: “farewell” continues in the next line. Burton stops before Vale and supplies his own dismissal in prose. Buchanan’s speaker later relents at Neaera’s tears. Burton’s immediate edition remains unidentified.

10635.“Wench” here means a young woman. The reply turns blindness into a figure for the lover’s loss of judgment: her eye has not changed, his perception has. Burton supplies no precise Petrarch reference at this point.

10636.“Discontinuance” is an interruption or separation; “return unto themselves” means recover their judgment. Fabius is the name Burton gives the authority for the maxim; the precise work and the italicized English phrase remain to be located.

10639.“Hickhop” means hiccups. A seneschal is a high household or administrative officer. Burton describes fabricating distressing or gratifying news, and false accusations, to displace the passion; those deceptive practices belong to the historical argument.

10641.Jerome, Letter 125.13 to Rusticus in the consulted numbering, rather than Burton’s book 2, letter 16. Jerome makes the process last a year; Burton compresses that interval away. “Covent” means the monastic community, “suborned” induced to give false evidence, and “pristine” former. The narrative explicitly depends on deliberate mistreatment and false accusation.

10642.Virgil, Aeneid 1.27, on Juno’s resentment at the judgment of Paris. Burton reuses the insult to rejected beauty as an example of what can turn affection into hatred.

10645.Terence, Eunuchus 49 and 65. The first line voices Phaedria’s defiance; the second reproduces his broken, angry syntax. The supplied verbs in the modern rendering make that elliptical sense readable while retaining its interruptions. Lucian’s volume reference is too broad to identify the exact passage without further collation.

10646.“Corrival” means rival. Burton cites Palaephatus for the myth of Zephyrus’s jealousy of Apollo over Hyacinthus; the abbreviated title and the specific version remain uncollated. The closing refusal resumes the general description of the rejected lover.

10647.This catalogue consists of allegations to be made about the beloved. “Quean” is a sexual insult; “slut” can mean a slovenly woman; “fixen” is vixen. Stone denotes urinary calculi, strangury painful or difficult urination, falling-sickness epilepsy, and consumption a wasting disease. Pox here has a venereal implication. “Tetters” are skin eruptions and “issues” draining sores or openings. These historical terms do not establish diagnoses or inheritance patterns.

10648.The historical label “hermaphrodite” is retained because it functions here as a stigmatizing allegation; it does not map neatly onto modern descriptions of sex characteristics. A “gull” is a dupe, and “maintain” means support financially. A “wolf” can mean an eating ulcer or similar destructive sore; that sense is used here. The whole list, including disability, disease and family disgrace, belongs to Burton’s proposed campaign of disparagement.