The Anatomy of Melancholy

Among all these, the avaricious are the maddest. They have all the symptoms of melancholy—fear, sadness, suspicion, and so on—as will be demonstrated in its proper place. By far the largest dose of hellebore must go to the greedy.

And yet I think spendthrifts are much madder, whatever their station, whether they manage public money or their own. A German writer censured Richard, the rich Duke of Cornwall, when he sought to become emperor, for his lavish spending: he poured money like water at the feet of the prince-electors; he scattered money like water;

I condemn them. “Foolish England,” he says, “which willingly deprived herself of so much money; foolish princes of Germany, who sold their noble right for money.” Spendthrifts, those who offer bribes, and those who take them are fools; so are all who cannot save, disburse, or spend their money properly.

I might say the same of the angry, ill-tempered, envious, and ambitious: better for them to swallow undiluted Anticyra; of sensualists, atheists, schismatics, and heretics. All have disordered imaginations, says Nymannus, and their madness shall be evident, 2 Timothy 3:9.

Sabatus, an Italian, considers all seafarers mad. The ship is mad because it never stands still; the sailors are mad to expose themselves to such immediate dangers; the waters are raging mad, perpetually moving; the winds are as mad as the rest, knowing neither where they come from nor where they want to go; and maddest of all are those who go to sea, for they find forty fools abroad for every one at home. The man who said it was mad, and perhaps you are just as mad to read it.

Felix Platter thinks all alchemists mad, out of their wits. Athenaeus says as much of fiddlers and the Muses’ nightingales, musicians: all pipers go mad; the moment they blow, their minds fly away. Music comes in at one ear and wit goes out at the other.

The proud and vain are certainly mad, and so are the lustful. I can feel their pulses beating from here. Some are mad enough to wear cuckolds’ horns: they let others sleep with their wives and turn a blind eye.

To dwell on every particular would be a Herculean task: to enumerate mad building works, mad exertions, mad luxury; mad labours, mad books, undertakings and conduct, gross ignorance, ridiculous actions, absurd gestures; mad gluttony, the madness of country houses, mad quarrels, as Cicero calls them: the madness of villages;