The Anatomy of Melancholy

If you arrive at an inn in Germany and dislike the food, meals, lodging, and so on, a German innkeeper replies gruffly, “Find yourself another inn.” If you do not like this one, go elsewhere. That is my decision: if you do not like my writing, read something else. I do not greatly value your judgement; do as you please. The outcome depends on neither your wishes nor mine. When we have both had our say, what Pliny the Younger says to Trajan will prove true: not everyone’s intellectual work succeeds; it needs suitable material, a subject, an occasion, and some influential person to recommend it.

If you and others like you criticize and shout me down, perhaps others will approve and praise me; some already have—“I speak from experience.” I may truly say with Giovio in a similar case—“let there be no boasting in the words”—“through it I have earned the intimacy and friendship of certain great men, pontiffs, and noblemen, their welcome thanks, and the praises of many who are themselves well praised.” Just as some worthy men have honoured me, others have disparaged me and will do so again.

Of this book’s first publication I may apply, in some measure, what Probus says of Persius’s satires: “As soon as the book was published, people began to admire it and snatch it up eagerly.” The first, second, and third editions quickly sold out and were eagerly read; yet, as I have said, some praised them less warmly than others scornfully rejected them. That was Democritus’s fortune too: “the same man was an object of admiration and ridicule.” It was also the fate of Seneca, that overseer of intelligence, learning, and judgement, “learned to an astonishing degree,” the best of Greek and Latin writers in Plutarch’s opinion;

that “renowned corrector of vice,” as Quintilian calls him, and painstaking philosopher of universal learning, who wrote so excellently and admirably, could not please everyone or escape criticism. How he is disparaged by Caligula, Aulus Gellius, Quintilian, and even Lipsius, his chief defender! “Much in him is harmful,” says that same Quintilian. He has many childish passages and sayings, “unpolished language,” often too careless and slack, as Gellius observes: “commonplace, worn-out expression; smart but foolish sayings; ordinary learning”—a plain, shallow writer, such as he is.