The Anatomy of Melancholy

Fabius thinks most of them no better, in speech, performance, or gesture, than men out of their minds: mad declaimers. Gregory agrees: I call wise the person whose wisdom lies in deeds, not words. Make the best of him: a good orator is a turncoat, a bad man; an excellent speaker, a thoroughly wicked man. His tongue is for sale. He is nothing but a voice, as someone said of a nightingale: he makes sounds without thought; an extravagant liar, a flatterer, a parasite;

and, as Ammianus Marcellinus has it, a corrupting cheat, who does more harm through fine speeches than another does through bribes. It is easier to avoid someone who traps you with money than someone who deceives you with flattering words. This made Socrates detest and denounce them so strongly.

Fracastoro, a famous poet, freely admits that all poets are mad; so does Scaliger, and who does not? “The fellow is either mad or writing verses,” says Horace, Satires, book 2, satire 7. “I feel like going mad”—that is, composing verses—says Virgil, Eclogue 3, as Servius interprets it. All poets are mad: a company of bitter satirists and slanderers, or else fawning applauders;

and what is poetry itself but, as Augustine says, the wine of error poured out by drunken teachers? You may pass on them all the judgement that Sir Thomas More once passed on the poems of Germanus Brixius: Follies sail aboard the ship; The Furies inhabit the wood.

Budé, in a letter to Lupset, makes civil law the tower of wisdom. Another honours medicine as the quintessence of nature. A third pulls both down and raises the flag of his own particular discipline.

Your haughty critics, grammatical triflers, annotators, and meticulous antiquaries discover every ruined fragment of learning, their cherished absurdities, among the rubbish of old writers. They reckon people fools unless they can find something to blame in another’s writing: anyone who cannot find fault is a fool to them. They correct others and grow heated over a cold cause;

they torment themselves finding out how many streets, houses, gates, and towers Rome had; where Homer came from; who Aeneas’s mother was; about Niobe’s daughters; whether Sappho was a prostitute; whether the egg or the hen came first; and other things which, as Seneca says, you ought to unlearn if you knew them.

What clothes the Roman senators wore, what shoes, how they sat, where they relieved themselves, how many dishes were served at a meal, and with what sauce: details which, according to Luis Vives, it is thoroughly ridiculous for a historian to recount on such an occasion are to these men precious material for painstaking study. They are admired for it, and feel as proud and triumphant over their discovery as if they had captured a city or conquered a province, as rich as if they had found a gold mine.

They shit on and befoul every author with their absurd commentaries, as someone says; they soil and smear a whole company of books and good authors with their ridiculous comments. Scaliger calls these the dungheaps of textual correctors. They show their wit by censuring others, a company of foolish annotators, bumblebees, dor-beetles, or other beetles, spending most of their time among dung;