The Anatomy of Melancholy

A sick man, he says, sits on a grassy bank; and when the Dog Star scorches the plains and dries up rivers, he lies in a shady bower: “beneath a tree’s foliage he tempers the burning stars.” He feeds his eyes on varied sights, herbs and trees, to console him in his misery; he receives many delightful scents, and fills his ears with the sweet and varied harmony of birds. “Good God,” he says, “what a multitude of pleasures you have made for mankind!”

Anyone suddenly admitted to see such a palace as the Escorial in Spain, or the one the Moors built at Granada, Fontainebleau in France, or the Turkish sultan’s gardens in his seraglio, where all kinds of birds and beasts are kept for pleasure—wolves, bears, lynxes, tigers, lions, elephants, and so on—or the gardens on the banks of the Thracian Bosporus; the pope’s Belvedere in Rome, as delightful as the hanging gardens of Babylon; the Indian king’s delightful garden in Aelian; those famous gardens of Lord Cantelow in France; or many of our noblemen’s gardens at home: however unhappy he might be, he could not help being greatly refreshed for a time.

To take a boat on a pleasant evening and row upon the water with music, as Plutarch so warmly praises and Aelian admires on the river Peneus, among those Thessalian fields bordered with green laurels, where birds sing so sweetly that travellers, as though enchanted by their heavenly music, “forget all labours and cares”—at once forgetting every labour, care, and grief—or to travel by gondola along the Grand Canal in Venice to see those splendid palaces, must surely refresh and bring contentment to a dull, melancholy spirit.

Or to see the inner rooms of a finely built, sumptuous building, such as the Persian kings’ palace so celebrated by Diodorus and Curtius, where almost everything was beaten gold: chairs, stools, thrones, canopies, and pillars of gold; plane trees and vines of gold; grapes made of precious stones; all the other ornaments of pure gold—

Jewels glitter on the couches, and furnishings glow with jasper; Coverings gleam with Tyrian purple …

With sweet scents and perfumes, fine wines, sumptuous food, and so forth; besides the handsomest young men and most beautiful maidens, “pretty girls serving,” the rarest beauties the world could supply, dressed in costly and elaborate clothes “to the astonishment of the spectators”; with exquisite music, as in Trimalchio’s house, sweet voices sounding in every room throughout the day and night: “incomparable luxury,” every delight and pleasure of every kind that could possibly be devised or obtained to please the senses, “guests crowned with garlands, drunk with delights,” and so forth.

In Homer, Telemachus is presented as almost enraptured by the sight of Menelaus’s magnificent palace and rich furnishings, when he beheld