The Anatomy of Melancholy

The first is their neglect. Other men care for their tools: a painter washes his brushes; a smith looks after his hammer, anvil and forge; a farmer repairs his plough-irons and sharpens his hatchet when it is blunt. A falconer or huntsman takes particular care of his hawks, hounds, horses, dogs, and so on. A musician strings and unstrings his lute. Only scholars neglect the instrument they use every day—I mean their brain and spirits—with which they range across the whole world, and which much study wears away.

“Take care,” says Lucian, “that by stretching the cord too tightly you do not eventually snap it”: see that you do not twist the rope so hard that it finally breaks. Ficino, in his fourth chapter, gives other reasons. Saturn and Mercury, the patrons of learning, are both dry planets. Origanus gives the same reason why Mercury’s followers are so poor and mostly beggars: their patron Mercury had no better fortune himself. Long ago the Fates imposed poverty on him as a punishment. Since then, poetry and beggary have been “twins,” children born together, inseparable companions.

And to this day every scholar is poor; Gross gold runs headlong from them to the boor.

Mercury can help them to knowledge, but not to money. The second reason is contemplation, which dries the brain and extinguishes natural heat. While the spirits are occupied with meditation above in the head, the stomach and liver are left without their support. Black blood and undigested matter then arise from defective digestion, and lack of exercise prevents the surplus vapours from escaping, and so on.

The same reasons are repeated by Gomesius, On Salt, book 4, chapter 1; Nymannus, Oration on the Imagination; and Johannes Vossius, On Plague, book 2, chapter 5. They add more: diligent students are commonly afflicted with gout, catarrhs, rheums, wasting ill health, sluggish digestion, bad eyes, stones and colic, undigested matter, obstructions, dizziness, wind, wasting diseases and all the illnesses that arise from too much sitting. They are mostly lean, dry and pallid; they spend their fortunes and lose their senses, and often their lives—all through excessive labour and extraordinary study.

If you will not believe this, look at the works of the great Tostatus and Thomas Aquinas and tell me whether those men worked hard. Read Augustine, Jerome and many thousands more.

He who longs to reach the hoped-for finish in the race Has endured and done much as a boy, has sweated and shivered.

He who desires to reach this wished-for goal Must sweat and freeze before he can attain it,