The Anatomy of Melancholy

“Who is such a ravenous devourer of books?” Who can read them all? We shall have—as we already do—a vast chaos and confusion of books. They overwhelm us; our eyes ache from reading and our fingers from turning the pages. For my part, I am one of the number, “we are just so many more”; I do not deny it. I have only this saying of Macrobius to offer in my defence: “All mine, nothing mine.” It is all mine, and none mine.

As a good housewife weaves one piece of cloth from several fleeces, and a bee gathers wax and honey from many flowers and makes a new bundle of it all: As bees sip from everything in flower-filled pastures— so I have laboriously collected this patchwork from various writers, and done so “without injury”: I have wronged no authors, but given everyone his due.

Jerome so highly praises this practice in Nepotian. He did not steal whole verses, pages, or treatises, as some do nowadays, concealing their authors’ names; he always said, this was Cyprian’s, that Lactantius’s, that Hilary’s; so said Minucius Felix, so Victorinus; thus far Arnobius. I name and quote my authors—a practice I must and will follow, however much some unlearned scribblers call it pedantic, to cloak their ignorance and because it clashes with their affected elegance. “I have borrowed, not stolen.”

And what Varro says of bees in On Agriculture, book 6—“entirely harmless, they damage no one’s work by taking from it”—I can say of myself: whom have I injured? The material is mostly theirs, and yet mine: “it is clear where it was taken from” (as Seneca approves), “yet it appears different from what it was taken from.” What nature does with our bodily food—incorporating, digesting, assimilating—I do too: “digest what I have swallowed,” arrange what I take.

I make them pay tribute to furnish this medley of mine; only the method is my own. I must appropriate Wecker’s saying, taken from Terence: “Nothing has been said that has not been said before; method alone reveals the craftsman.” We can say nothing that has not been said; only the arrangement and method are ours, and these reveal the scholar. Oribasius, Aesius, and Avicenna take everything from Galen, but arrange it in their own way: “with a different style, not a different fidelity.” Our poets steal from Homer: he vomits, Aelian says, and they lick it up. Theologians keep using Augustine’s words verbatim, and our reworkers of history do the same. Whoever comes last is usually best— until a later age and better fortune bring something greater.