The Anatomy of Melancholy

“Him in colours, him in wax, him in bronze,” and so on. “He portrayed his friends in colours, wax, bronze, ivory, marble, gold and silver,” as Pliny reports of a citizen of Rome, “and not long ago, before a large audience, recited a full volume about his life.”

Elsewhere, speaking of an epigram Martial had written in his praise, he says: “He gave me as much as he could, and would have done more if he had been able. Yet what more can anyone give than honour, glory and eternity? Perhaps what he wrote will not endure; still, he wrote it to endure.”

This is all the recompense a poor scholar can make to his deserving patron, his Maecenas, his friend: to mention him in his works, dedicate a book to him, write his life and so on, as our poets, orators and historians have always done. And the greatest revenge such men take on their enemies is to attack them with satires, invectives and the like. In both ways their writing has great power, as Plato gives us to understand.

Paolo Giovio, in the fourth book of the life and deeds of Pope Leo X, his noble patron, concludes in these words: “Because I cannot honour him as other wealthy men do, I have undertaken to write his life with equal effort, affection and devotion. Since my means do not allow me to erect a more splendid monument, I will pay his sacred ashes the honours that an intellect, small perhaps but generous, can afford.” But I digress.

Where this true love is lacking, there can be no lasting peace: friendship is mere lip service, a pretence serving some ulterior motive, kept up only until people have satisfied their own ends. At the slightest provocation it breaks out into hostility, open war, defiance, resentment, malicious whispers, slander, disputes and every kind of bitter, melancholy discontent.

Those who love nothing but greatness, wealth, authority and so on are feared rather than loved: “they love no one and are loved by none.” However much they may be tolerated for a time, their tyranny and oppression, extortion, greed, brutish hardness, folly, lack of restraint, recklessness and similar vices make them universally hateful, abhorred by all, both God and humankind.

Neither wife nor son wishes you well; all Your neighbours hate you—

Wife and children, friends, neighbours, the whole world abandons them and gladly would be rid of them, often being driven to attack them violently; or God’s judgements overtake them: the Furies come in place of the Graces.

Thus beautiful Abigail, a woman of exceptional wisdom, pleased David, while Nabal was surly and ill-natured; and Mordecai was welcomed when Haman was executed—Haman the favourite, “whose seat was above the other princes and to whom all the king’s servants standing at the gates bowed their knees in reverence.”