The Anatomy of Melancholy

Though medicine and philosophy had many giants in ancient times, I say with Diego de Estella: “A dwarf standing on a giant’s shoulders may see farther than the giant himself.” I too may add something, alter something, and see farther than my predecessors. It is no more objectionable for me to write after others than for that famous physician Eliano Montalto to write On Diseases of the Head after Jason Pratensis, Heurnius, Hildesheim, and others. Many horses run in a race; one logician or rhetorician follows another. So make whatever objections you please: You may bark at me again and again and assail me with your vicious yelping.

That is my answer. As for those other faults—barbarous language, a rustic dialect, an improvised style, repetitions, monkey-like imitation, a patchwork of rags gathered from several dung heaps, authors’ excrement, trifles and fooleries tumbled out in confusion, without art, invention, judgement, intelligence, or learning; harsh, raw, rough, fanciful, absurd, insolent, indiscreet, badly composed, undigested, vain, scurrilous, idle, dull, and dry—I confess them all. Some are deliberate. You cannot think worse of me than I think of myself. It is not worth reading: I concede it. I ask you not to waste time reading so worthless a subject; perhaps I myself would be reluctant to read him or you writing in this way. It is “not worth the trouble.”

All I say is that I have precedents—what Isocrates calls “a refuge for those who do wrong”: others just as absurd, vain, idle, unlearned, and so on. “Some others have done the same.” Others have done as much, perhaps more, and perhaps you yourself: “We know, too, who did it to you,” and so on. We all have our faults; “we know, and this indulgence,” and so on. You judge me; I have judged others, and may judge you. “We yield in turn,” and so on. It is “the law of retaliation,” “something for something.” Go on, then: judge, criticize, mock, and rail.

Be as sharp-nosed a critic as you please—be all nose: you cannot say more against my trifles than I myself have said, and so on. Even if you were all scoffs and sneers, a very Momus, you could say nothing worse of us than we say ourselves. So, like women quarrelling, I have been first to cry “whore”; and I fear some will judge that I have gone too far. “Praising oneself is vain; blaming oneself is foolish.” Just as I will not overrate myself, I will not underrate myself. “I am not the first among you, nor the lowest.” I am neither one of the best nor one of the worst of you.

Though I may be an inch, so many feet, or so many parasangs behind this man or that, perhaps I am a little ahead of you. Let it be as it is, good or bad: I have made the attempt and put myself on stage. I must submit to judgement; I cannot escape it. It is quite true that “style reveals the man”: our style gives us away. As hunters find their quarry by its tracks, so a man’s character can be discerned in his works. “We judge people’s character much better from their speech than from their features”: that was old Cato’s rule. I have exposed myself in this treatise—I know it—turned myself inside out. I shall be criticized, no doubt, for, to tell the truth with Erasmus, “nothing is more captious than people’s judgements.” Nothing is so hard to please. Yet there is some comfort: “as tastes, so judgements.” Our judgements vary as much as our palates.