The Anatomy of Melancholy

In his fifteenth consultation, he tells of a man aged fifty who fell into despair on his mother’s death. Cured by Falloppio, he relapsed many years later after the sudden death of a daughter and could never afterwards be restored to health.

The force of this passion is sometimes so violent that it overwhelms whole kingdoms and cities. Vespasian’s death was piteously lamented throughout the Roman Empire: “the whole world mourned,” says Aurelius Victor. Alexander ordered the battlements of houses pulled down, mules’ and horses’ manes cut off, and many common soldiers killed to accompany his dear Hephaestion in death.

This is now practised among the Tartars: when a great khan dies, ten or twelve thousand must be killed—men and horses, everyone they encounter. Among those pagan Indians, their wives and servants voluntarily die with them.

Leo X was so deeply mourned in Rome after his death that, as Giovio reports, “the common welfare and public happiness”—the common safety, all good fellowship, peace, mirth and plenty—died with him: “they were mourned as though buried in the same grave with Leo.” For his lifetime was a golden age, but after his death an iron age followed: “barbarous violence, foul devastation and the dreadful sufferings of every kind of evil”—wars, plagues, devastation and discontent.

When Augustus Caesar died, says Paterculus, “we had feared the ruin of the world”: we were all afraid, as though heaven had fallen upon our heads. Budé records that at Louis XII’s death there was “so sudden a change that those who previously seemed to touch heaven with a finger were now suddenly crawling on the ground; you would have said they had been struck by the stars.” Those who were formerly in heaven suddenly lay grovelling on the ground, as if struck down by a planet.

Their spirits shaken, they sank down, as a vast Wood grieves when its leaves have fallen— They looked like lopped trees.

At Nancy in Lorraine, when Claude of Valois, sister of Henry II, king of France, and wife of the duke, died, all the churches were closed for forty days: no prayers or masses except in the room where she lay. All the civic councillors appeared in black, and for twelve months singing and dancing were forbidden throughout the city.

In those days, Daphnis, no one drove the grazing cattle To the cool streams; no four-footed creature tasted The river’s water or touched a blade of grass.

How deeply were we affected here in England by the untimely death of Prince Henry, our Titus, “the delight of humankind,” as though the lives of all our dearest friends had breathed their last with his! Scanderbeg’s death was not mourned so deeply in Epirus.

In a word, as the historian says of Edward I at the news of his son Edward of Caernarfon’s birth, “he rejoiced beyond measure”—he was eternally glad—so we may say the reverse of friends’ deaths: “mourning for ever.” Many of us, like so many turtledoves, are for ever cast down by it.