The Anatomy of Melancholy

Do not misunderstand me, I say again: “You of patrician blood”, you worthy senators and gentlemen, I honour your names and persons, and submit myself most humbly to your judgement and service. Among you, I frankly acknowledge, are many deserving patrons and true patriots whom I know, besides, no doubt, many hundreds I have never seen or heard of: pillars of our commonwealth whose merit, generosity, learning, readiness to help, true religious zeal and esteem for all scholars ought to be honoured by every generation to come.

But within your ranks there is also a debauched, corrupt, greedy, unlearned crew, no better than blocks of wood, “mere cattle—I call God to witness that I do not consider them worthy of the name of freeborn men”—barbarous Thracians, “and what Thracian would deny this?” A sordid, profane, pernicious company, irreligious, shameless and stupid: I do not know what names to give them. They are enemies of learning, destroyers of the Church and the ruin of a commonwealth.

They are patrons by hereditary right, entrusted to grant such church livings freely for the Church’s good. But they prove harsh taskmasters: they take away the straw and compel the men to make their full tally of bricks. They commonly pursue their own ends; profit steers everything they do, and the man they finally nominate as having the greatest gifts is the one who will give most. “No penny, no Our Father,” as the saying goes.

“Unless you back your prayers with gold, you only provoke them further.” “As Cerberus with a morsel”: their attendants and officers must be bribed, paid and won over, as Cerberus is with a mouthful of food by the traveller going down to hell. The old saying was, “Everything at Rome is for sale.” It is a remnant of popery that will never be rooted out: there is no hope, no good to be achieved without money.

A clergyman may offer himself and prove his merit, learning, integrity, religion and zeal: they will commend him for it, but “honesty is praised and left out in the cold.” If he is a man of exceptional abilities, they will flock from afar to hear him, as people did in Apuleius to see Psyche:

“Many mortals flocked together to see the glory of the age, a glorious mirror. She is praised by everyone, gazed at by everyone; yet no one—not a king, not a prince—comes as a suitor eager to marry her. All indeed admire her divine beauty, but they admire it as they would a skilfully fashioned statue.”

Many mortal men came to see beautiful Psyche, the glory of her age. They admired her, praised her, desired her for her divine beauty and gazed at her—but as at a picture. None would marry her, “because she had no dowry”: beautiful Psyche had no money. So they treat learning.

The rich miser has now learned Only to admire, only to praise the eloquent, As boys admire Juno’s bird.

Your rich men have now lately learned To admire, commend and come together To hear and see a worthy scholar speak, As children admire a peacock’s feather.