The Anatomy of Melancholy

With no skill but prating arrogance, No learning—a purse-milking nation: Gowned vultures, thieves, a quarrelsome gang Of cheats who haunt this occupation.

There are so many that they scarcely know how to make a living alongside one another. As the comic poet joked about clocks, “the greater part of the people crawl about in parching hunger.” A great many are almost starving, ready to devour their fellows “and attack one another with malicious cunning.” Such a multitude of pettifoggers and empirics, such impostors, that an honest man does not know how to conduct himself in their company or maintain his good name in so vile a crowd: “he would be ashamed to profess the title of learning, acquired at such expense and through so many sleepless nights, since”—and so on.

Last of all, to come to our clergy: theirs is the noblest profession, worthy of double honour, yet of all people they are the most distressed and miserable. If you will not believe me, hear a brief account publicly preached not many years ago at Paul’s Cross by a minister who was then a respected preacher and is now a reverend bishop of this country:

“We who are brought up in learning, and destined for this by our parents, endure our childhood in the grammar school, which Augustine calls ‘a great tyranny and a grievous evil’, comparing it to the torments of martyrdom. When we come to the university, if we live on the college allowance, we are, as Phalaris reproached the Leontines, ‘lacking everything except hunger and fear’—needy of all things but hunger and fear. Or, if our parents bear even part of our costs, we spend five hundred pounds or a thousand marks on unnecessary upkeep, books and degrees before we reach any accomplishment.

If, at this cost in time, in our bodies and spirits, our property and inheritances, we cannot obtain those small rewards that belong to us by law and hereditary right—a poor parsonage, or a vicarage worth fifty pounds a year—but must pay the patron for a lease lasting our lifetime, a spent and worn-out lifetime, either by an annual payment or at more than the rate for a copyhold, and must do so at the risk and loss of our souls through simony and perjury, forfeiting all our church appointments, ‘actual and possible’, both present and future—

What father, before long, will be so improvident as to educate his son at great expense for this inevitable beggary? What Christian will be so irreligious as to bring up his son for a life that, in all probability and indeed inevitably, ‘compels him to shameful acts’—forces him into sin—and will entangle him in simony and perjury? As the poet says, ‘Even someone invited from a bridge would refuse such fare’: a beggar’s brat taken from the bridge where he sits begging would have reason to refuse it if he knew the hardship involved.”