The Anatomy of Melancholy

Swear, protest, call God and all his angels to witness: “find someone who does not know you”; you are a feigned invalid, a cheat. He is unmoved. “The poor man lies downtrodden everywhere.” Ride on; he takes no notice.

Present a petition as he passes in the name of a thousand orphans, a hospital, a shelter for the sick, a prison; they cry to him for help. Ride on: “you are speaking to a deaf man.” He does not care. Let them eat stones, be eaten up by vermin, rot in their own filth: he does not care.

Show him a harbour, a bridge, a school, a fortification or some other public work in disrepair: ride on. “Please, your worship, your honour, for God’s sake, for your country’s sake”—ride on.

But show him a roll on which his name will be recorded in golden letters and praised to all posterity, with his coat of arms displayed and his emblems visible, and perhaps he will stop and contribute. Or, if you can thunder at him, as Papists do, about works of satisfaction and merit, or persuade him that by these means he will save his soul from hell and free it from purgatory—if he has any religion—then in all likelihood he will listen and stop.

Or if he has no children, no close relation or heir whom he cares for at least, or cannot otherwise decide how or where to dispose of his possessions—for he cannot take them with him—perhaps then he will build a school or hospital during his lifetime, or be persuaded to make a generous bequest for religious and charitable purposes.

For I dare say boldly that vainglory, this belief in merit, and the necessity forced on people when they do not know how else to leave their possessions or what better to do with them, are the chief causes of most of our good works.

I do not press this argument to detract from anyone’s charitable devotion or generosity, or to condemn any good work. There are undoubtedly many sanctified, noble and worthy-minded people—divine spirits—who, out of true zeal and for virtue’s sake, generously give from compassion and pity. As far as they can, they do good to everyone, clothe the naked, feed the hungry, comfort the sick and needy, relieve everyone, forget and forgive injuries, as true charity requires. Yet for the most part there is “something feigned,” a great deal of hypocrisy, much fault and failing.

Cosimo de’ Medici, that wealthy citizen of Florence, frankly confessed to a close friend who asked why he built so many splendid public palaces and gave so generously to scholars: it was not because he loved learning more than other people, “but to make his own name everlasting, to gain immortality through scholars; for when his friends were dead, walls decayed and all inscriptions gone, books would remain until the world’s end.”

The lantern in Athens was built by Xenocles, the theatre by Pericles, the famous port of Piraeus by Musicles, the statue of Pallas by Phidias, the Pantheon by Callicratidas. Yet all these splendid monuments have decayed and long since fallen into ruin; only their builders’ names flourish, preserved through writers.