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← ExitThe Anatomy of Melancholy

Reading language

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

Pausanias, in his account of Elis, says that this is why one Cupid was depicted contending with another and taking the garland from him: because one love drives out another.

One love takes away another’s strength.

And Cicero, in book 3 of On the Nature of the Gods, debating with Gaius Cotta, mentions three separate Cupids, each with a different function.

Felix Plater, in the first book of his Observations, boasts that by this stratagem alone he cured a patient, a widower in Basel, who was infatuated with a poor woman employed as his maid. Friends, children and all persuasion had failed to turn his mind away. They proposed to him the daughter of another respectable man in the town; he loved her and lived with her long afterwards, detesting the very name and sight of the first woman.

After Lucretia’s death, Euryalus would accept no comfort until the Emperor Sigismund married him to a noble lady of his court; then, in a short time, he was freed from his sorrow.

10683.Pausanias, Description of Greece 6.23.5, describes a relief of Love and Love Returned, with the latter trying to take a palm-branch from the former. Burton says “painted” and “Garland” and gives his own explanation in terms of one love displacing another. Eliacis means the account of Elis.

10685.Ovid, Remedies for Love 444. This line belongs to the same passage as the advice to keep two mistresses and the image of a river divided into channels.

10686.Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods 3.60, lists three Cupids with different parentages, the third identified as Anteros. The list occurs in Cotta’s speech. Burton’s description “disputing with C. Cotta” and his emphasis on different functions are retained as his framing.

10687.Basil is Basel. “Motioned him to” means proposed or directed his attention to a match; “honest” here means respectable. Plater’s report of the widower’s cure is preserved as a historical claim; the case itself remains uncollated.

10689.The ending of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini’s History of Two Lovers confirms Euryalus mourning Lucretia until the emperor marries him to a beautiful, chaste and prudent virgin of ducal descent. Burton’s margin condenses this sentence; his “of his Court” and “in short space” are not specified there. The narrative then warns against love’s bitter outcome. Burton uses the marriage as an example of recovery.