The Anatomy of Melancholy

A grave and learned minister, a regular preacher at Alkmaar in Holland, was one day walking in the fields for recreation when he was suddenly seized with diarrhoea and forced to withdraw to the nearest ditch. Caught unawares by some gentlewomen of his parish who were walking that way, he was so ashamed that he never again appeared in public or entered the pulpit, but wasted away with melancholy: Pieter van Foreest, Medical Observations, book 10, observation 12. Thus shame, too, can show its strength among the passions.

I know there are many base, shameless, brazen-faced rogues who will “turn pale at no wrongdoing,” who are moved by nothing, take no infamy or disgrace to heart and laugh at everything. Let them be proved perjurers, marked and convicted as rogues, thieves and traitors; let their ears be cut off, let them be whipped, branded, paraded in a cart, pointed at, hissed at, abused and mocked like Ballio the pimp in Plautus: they enjoy it. “Fine singers!” “Ha!” and “Bravo!”—what do they care? We have too many such people in our own times.

Melicertes cries out that all sense of shame Has vanished from the world.

Yet a modest man, one with a sense of decency, a noble spirit sensitive about his reputation, will be deeply wounded and so grievously affected that he would rather give away tens of thousands of crowns, or lose his life, than suffer the slightest stain on his honour or blemish on his good name. If he cannot avoid it, then, like a nightingale “that dies when defeated in song,” as Mizaldus says—dies of shame if another bird sings better—he languishes and wastes away in anguish of spirit.