The Anatomy of Melancholy

“Here in France,” Scaliger says, “everyone has permission to write, but few have the ability.” Learning was once honoured by discerning scholars; now noble fields of knowledge are debased by low, unlearned scribblers. They write out of vanity or need, to make money, or as parasites to flatter and ingratiate themselves with some powerful man, publishing “trifles, rubbish, and nonsense.”

Among so many thousands of authors, you will scarcely find one whose works make you any better by reading them; instead, they make you much worse: “by which one is infected rather than perfected,” corrupted rather than improved. Someone who reads such things— what has he learned, after all? What does he know but dreams and nonsense? So it often turns out, as Callimachus complained long ago, that a big book is a great evil.

Cardano criticizes the French and the Germans for their pointless scribbling: “I do not,” he says, “discourage them from publishing, provided that they discover something new.” He does not forbid them to write, so long as they produce a new invention of their own. But we keep weaving the same cloth, twisting the same rope again and again. Or, if the invention is new, it is merely some trinket or trifle, written by idle fellows for equally idle fellows to read. Who cannot invent something like that?

A man must have a barren imagination if he can produce nothing in this scribbling age. Princes display their armies, rich men boast of their buildings, soldiers of their courage, and scholars put their trifles on show: people must read them and listen to them, whether they want to or not.

Whatever he has once smeared on paper, he will long for everyone returning from the bakehouse and the fountain to know it, both boys and old women. Everyone must know what has been said and written, old women and children, coming and going.

What a crowd of poets this year has produced, as Pliny complains to Sosius Senecio: “This April someone or other has given a reading every day.” What a catalogue of new books our Frankfurt fairs and our fairs at home have produced this whole year—this whole age, I should say!

Twice a year, “new talents come forward and put themselves on display.” We stretch our minds and put them up for sale: “with great effort we accomplish nothing.” Unless there is a prompt reform of the kind Gesner so much desires, with princely decrees and responsible overseers to curb this freedom, it will go on “without end.”