The Anatomy of Melancholy

Paolo Giovio tells an astonishing story about our northern countries: the immense amount of food consumed at our tables. I can truly say that, as it is so often abused, this is neither generosity nor hospitality, but excessive luxury, gluttony, and waste: sheer vice. It brings debt, want, beggary, and hereditary diseases, consumes people’s fortunes, and destroys the healthy balance of their bodies.

To this I might add their excessive spending on buildings—those fanciful houses, turrets, walks, and parks—on gambling, extravagant pleasures, and that prodigious luxury in clothing. In the end they are forced to dissolve their households and creep into holes.

Seyssel, in his account of the commonwealth of France, gives three reasons why the French nobility so often went bankrupt. First, they pursued so many lawsuits and disputes, one after another, that the length and expense commonly enabled lawyers to buy them out of their estates.

The second cause was extravagance: they lived beyond their means and were therefore swallowed up by merchants. La Noue, a French writer, gives five reasons for his countrymen’s poverty, much to the same effect. He believes that if the French gentry were divided into ten parts, eight would be found to have seriously diminished their estates through sales, mortgages, and debts, or to have lost them entirely.

The last was excessive spending on clothes, which consumed their revenues. You may judge how this bears on our own present condition. But more of that elsewhere. In a person’s body, if the head, heart, stomach, liver, spleen, or any other part is diseased, all the rest suffer with it. So it is with this household body.

If its head is worthless—a spendthrift, drunkard, womaniser, or gambler—how can the household live at ease? Even Safety herself, if she wished to save this household, could not possibly do so, as Demea says in the comedy: Safety herself cannot save it.

A good, honest, hardworking man often has a shrew for his wife: a sickly, unchaste, lazy, foolish, careless partner, a proud, ill-tempered hussy, a lustful, extravagant woman; and through her everything goes to ruin;

or if their natures differ—he is thrifty, she spends everything; he is wise, she is stupid and weak-minded—what harmony can there be, what friendship? Like the thrush and swallow in Aesop, instead of mutual love and affectionate names, there are cries of “whore” and “thief”; they throw stools at each other’s heads. What madness torments this household?

Forced marriages commonly produce such results. Or, if all is well between the couple and they live together in loving harmony, they may have disobedient and unruly children whose bad behaviour torments them: their son is a thief or spendthrift, their daughter a whore; a stepmother or daughter-in-law throws everything into disorder;