The Anatomy of Melancholy

This made Demosthenes declare that “if he were led either to the tribunal or to his destruction”—if given the choice between being a judge and being condemned—he would choose condemnation. Rich men are in the same position. As for their sufferings, “fools do not know them; they themselves feel them”: they feel what fools do not perceive, as I shall show elsewhere. Their wealth is fragile, like children’s rattles. Riches come and go; there is no certainty in them. Those whom they raise up they just as suddenly bring down, leaving them in a valley of misery.

People of the middle rank are so many asses carrying burdens. Or, if they are free and live at ease, they exhaust themselves and consume their bodies and fortunes in indulgence and excess, conflict, rivalry and the like. I reserve the poor and their discontents for another place. As for particular professions, I hold the same opinion as of the rest: none offers contentment or security. What course will you settle on? What will you decide?

To be a clergyman is contemptible in the world’s estimation; to be a lawyer is to be a wrangler. To be a physician—“one is ashamed of the urine”—is loathsome. A philosopher is a madman; an alchemist, a beggar; a poet—“he goes hungry”—a hungry fellow. A musician is a mere performer; a schoolmaster, a drudge; a farmer, an ant. A merchant’s profits are uncertain; a craftsman is lowly; a surgeon, disgusting.

A tradesman is a liar; a tailor, a thief; a serving-man, a slave; a soldier, a butcher. A smith or metalworker never takes the drinking pot from his nose; a courtier is a parasite. As the man could find no tree in the wood to hang himself from, I can point to no condition of life that brings contentment. The same may be said of every age. Children live in perpetual slavery, always under their masters’ tyrannical rule. Young men and those of mature years are subject to labour and a thousand worldly cares, to treachery, falsehood and cheating:

He walks over fires Hidden beneath deceptive ash.

The old are full of aching bones, cramps and convulsions—worn-out old wrecks, hard of hearing, weak-sighted, grey-haired, wrinkled and harsh; so changed that they cannot recognize their own faces in a mirror, burdens to themselves and others. After seventy years, “all is sorrow,” as David has it: they do not live but linger. If healthy, they fear disease; if sick, they are weary of life. “Life is being well, not merely being alive.”

One complains of poverty, another of servitude, another of a hidden or incurable disease; of bodily deformity, loss, danger, the death of friends, shipwreck, persecution, imprisonment, disgrace, rejection, insult, slander, abuse, injury, contempt, ingratitude, unkindness, scoffs and taunts; an unhappy marriage, single life, too many children, no children, dishonest servants, unfortunate children, infertility, banishment, oppression, frustrated hopes and failure, and so on.

Things of this kind are so many That they could exhaust even talkative Fabius.