The Anatomy of Melancholy

Now, because they are commonly subject to such dangers and disadvantages as loss of judgement, madness, simplicity, and so on, Johannes Vossius would have good scholars richly rewarded and held in exceptional esteem above other men. Those who risk themselves and shorten their lives for the public good should enjoy greater privileges than the rest.

But nowadays our patrons of learning are so far from respecting the Muses and giving scholars the honour or reward they deserve—and which the generous privileges granted by many noble princes entitle them to—that, after all their labour at the universities, cost and expense, tedious hours, demanding tasks, weary days, dangers and risks, they end by being rejected and despised. Meanwhile they are denied all the pleasures other men enjoy, shut up like hawks all their lives. If they manage to struggle through these hardships, their greatest misery still awaits them: they are left to fend for themselves, exposed to want, poverty and beggary. Their constant companions are:

Pale diseases, grief, cares and toil, And fear, hunger that counsels evil, and squalid poverty: Shapes terrible to see.

Grief, toil, care, pale sickness, miseries, Fear, filthy poverty, hunger that cries, Terrible monsters for the eyes to see.

If nothing else troubled them, the thought of this alone would be enough to make them all melancholic. In most other trades and professions, some seven years of apprenticeship give people the skill to support themselves. A merchant risks his goods at sea, and though the risk is great, if one ship out of four returns he will probably recover his costs.

A farmer’s profits are almost certain: “Jupiter himself cannot harm them”—Cato’s exaggeration, and he was a great husbandman himself. Only scholars, it seems to me, face the greatest uncertainty, receive no respect, and are exposed to every accident and risk. First, not one in many becomes a scholar; not everyone has the ability or is teachable: “Not every piece of wood can be made into a Mercury.”

We can appoint mayors and officials every year, but cannot make scholars. Kings can invest knights and barons, as the Emperor Sigismund admitted; universities can confer degrees; and “anyone from the crowd can become what you are.” But neither he nor they, nor all the world together, can bestow learning or create philosophers, masters of the arts, orators and poets.

We can readily say, as Seneca well observes, “What a good man! What a rich man!” We can point to a rich man, a good man, a fortunate man, a handsome man, “expensively dressed, with curled hair, sweetly scented.” But “this praise costs a great expenditure of time: ‘What a man of learning!’” Finding a learned man is not so easy. Learning is not quickly acquired. People may be willing to work, adequately instructed for the purpose, and generously supported by their patrons and parents, yet few can attain it.