The Anatomy of Melancholy

They are not so useful: a man who can count his money knows enough arithmetic. A true geometrician can measure out a good fortune for himself; a perfect astrologer can calculate the rise and fall of others and turn their wandering movements to his own advantage. The best optics reflect the rays of great men’s favour and grace so that they shine on him. A good engineer needs only to devise a means of gaining advancement.

This was the usual opinion and practice in Poland, as Kromer observed not long ago in the first book of his History. Their universities were generally of low standing; no philosopher, mathematician, antiquary or the like of any distinction could be found among them, because no fixed reward or stipend was provided. Instead, everyone took up divinity, “having only this wish: a fat benefice.” A good parsonage was their aim.

Some of our near neighbours followed the same practice, as Lipsius complains: they push their children into the study of law and divinity before they are properly instructed or ready for such studies. “Of course, the hope of profit takes precedence over all the arts, and a heap of gold is more beautiful than anything those raving Greeks and Romans wrote. From this number men then come to steer the state; they sit in and preside over the councils of kings. O father, O fatherland!” So he complained, and others may do the same. For we find just this: serving a great man, obtaining an office in a bishop’s court, practising in a prosperous town or securing a benefice is the target we aim at, because it offers such advantages—the highway to advancement.

Yet, as far as I can see, these men often fail in their plans just as frequently as the rest and are just as often disappointed in their hopes. Suppose a man is a doctor of law, an excellent and accomplished civil lawyer: where can he practise and find room to work? His field is so narrow. Here, prohibitions so restrict the civil law, and so few cases remain because of those all-devouring laws of our own country—“than which nothing is more unlearned,” says Erasmus, an unlearned and barbarous study—that scarcely any courts are left to the profession. However well versed men may be in that national law, I can hardly grant them the name of scholars unless they have other accomplishments. The offices are so poorly paid, and usually cost so much to obtain, that I do not know how a talented man can prosper among them.

As for physicians, every village has so many mountebanks, empirics, quacks and self-styled Paracelsians—“lawsuit-makers and health-killers,” as Clenard calls them—wizards, alchemists, poor vicars, discarded apothecaries, physicians’ servants, barbers and housewives, all claiming great skill, that I seriously doubt how they can earn a living or who their patients will be.

Besides, there are so many of both kinds, and some are such harpies—so grasping, so noisy, so shameless—and, as the poet said, litigious fools:

With plenty of loud-mouthed arrogance, Little skill or none, And not one grain of literary wit: A purse-milking tribe, A chattering crowd, bundles of legal tricks, A malicious band of litigants, vultures in gowns, Laverna’s pupils, charlatans, and so on.