The Anatomy of Melancholy

The eagle in Aesop, seeing a piece of meat ready for sacrifice, snatched it up in her claws and carried it to her nest. But a burning coal happened to be stuck to it, and before she knew it, it consumed her, her young, her nest and everything together. Let our simoniacal patrons who trade in church livings, those sacrilegious Harpies, expect no better outcome.

A second cause is ignorance, and from it contempt: “Hatred of letters has arisen from the ignorance of the multitude,” as Junius clearly perceived. This hatred and contempt of learning proceeds from ignorance. Since they themselves are uncultivated, unlearned, dull, illiterate and proud, they judge others accordingly.

Let there be patrons like Maecenas, Flaccus, and Virgils will not be lacking.

Let there be generous patrons, and there will be hardworking scholars in every branch of knowledge. But when they despise learning and think themselves sufficiently qualified if they can read and write, stumble through a legal document, or know as much Latin as that emperor—“He who does not know how to dissemble does not know how to live”—they are unfit to serve their country or undertake any activity or employment that might benefit the commonwealth, except to fight or administer local justice with common sense, which any yeoman can equally do.

And so they bring up their children as uncultivated as themselves: unqualified, untaught and, for the most part, ill-mannered. “Who among our young people is properly educated in letters? Who touches the orators or philosophers? Who reads history, which is, as it were, the soul of practical affairs? Parents rush to fulfil their wishes, and so on.” This was Lipsius’s complaint to his illiterate countrymen; it may also be ours.

Are these men to judge a scholar’s worth, when they have no worth themselves, know nothing of a student’s labour, and cannot distinguish a true scholar from a drone? Or from someone who, with a fluent tongue, a strong voice, a pleasing tone and a few truant’s aids from a Polyanthea, steals and gleans a few notes from other people’s harvests, and so makes a finer show than someone genuinely learned? They think preaching is no more than talking, or running off with an empty cart, as a respected man said. And so they disparage us and our labour, and scorn us and all learning.

Because they are rich and have other means of support, they think learning is no concern of theirs and not worth their trouble. They think being a pen-and-ink man, a slave to book learning, is a fitter occupation for younger brothers or poor men’s sons, entirely unbecoming to a gentleman’s station. As Frenchmen and Germans commonly do, they therefore neglect all human learning. What have they to do with it?