The Anatomy of Melancholy

It is very true: “many are gripped by an incurable itch to write,” and “there is no end to the writing of books,” as the wise man discovered long ago. In this scribbling age, especially, “the number of books is beyond number” (as a worthy man says), and “the presses are oppressed.” Everyone has an itch to display himself and longs for fame and honour—“learned and unlearned alike, we write”—so he will write anything at all and scrape it together from anywhere.

Bewitched by this desire for fame, “even in the midst of illness,” damaging their health and scarcely able to hold a pen, they must say something and make a name for themselves, Scaliger says, even at the cost of bringing many others down to ruin.

To be counted as writers, “to be greeted as authors”; to be regarded as polymaths and scholars of universal learning “among the ignorant crowd, for the empty name of learning”; to acquire a kingdom of paper, “with no hope of profit, but great hope of fame”: such is this rash, ambitious age, “the age as it now is, ambitious and headlong amid immature learning” (that is Scaliger's judgement). People who are scarcely students, “barely listeners,” must become masters and teachers before they are capable, qualified pupils.

They rush into every branch of learning, “of the gown and of arms,” into religious and secular authors, and rake through every index and pamphlet for notes, as our merchants scour foreign ports for trade. They write huge volumes, “though they are not really more learned, only more talkative”: they become greater babblers, not better scholars. They usually claim to serve the public good, but, as Gesner observes, pride and vanity spur them on. They offer nothing new or worth noticing, only the same things in different words. “Perhaps something must be written to keep the printers from idleness, or simply to testify that the writers have lived.”

Like apothecaries, we make new mixtures every day, pouring from one vessel into another. Like those ancient Romans who robbed every city in the world to adorn their badly situated Rome, we skim the cream from other people's minds and pluck the finest flowers from their cultivated gardens to decorate our own barren plots. “They castrate others to stuff their own naturally lean books with someone else's fat,” as Giovio indignantly puts it. They lard their lean books with the fat of other people's works. “Unlearned thieves,” and so on.

Every writer points out this fault, as I am doing now, yet they are guilty of it themselves: “men of three letters,” all thieves. They pilfer from old writers to pad their new commentaries, scrape Ennius's dung heaps, and draw from Democritus's well, as I have done.

And so our stinking papers fill not only libraries and shops but every commode and privy: “They write verses that people read while shitting.” These papers serve to line the bottoms of pies, wrap spices, and keep roasting meat from burning.