The Anatomy of Melancholy

For anyone who believes that they rose through learning is a fool; anyone who thinks their advancement the reward of ability, scholarship, experience, honesty, piety and the Muses—as it really was once, and is still promised to be—is plainly mad. However or wherever this evil began, I shall enquire no further. From these beginnings arose the flood of vices; every calamity, the whole army of miseries, is brought into the Church.

Hence the frequency of simony; hence complaints, frauds and impostures; from this spring flow all the wicked practices. I say nothing in passing of ambition, of flattery beyond even a courtier’s—so that they need not endure the dreariness of dining at home—of luxury, of the sometimes foul example of their lives that causes others to stumble, or of their Sybaritic drinking parties, and so on.

Hence the university’s squalor, hence the sorrow of the Muses in our age: any petty fellow ignorant of the arts may rise by these arts, gain promotion and wealth in this way, dazzle the crowd with high-sounding titles and a multitude of imposing dignities, and live comfortably. He strides along, displaying a certain majesty and grandeur, and a wonderful air of care: venerable in his beard, splendid in his gown, glittering in purple, conspicuous above all for his magnificent furnishings and numerous servants.

They resemble those statues, as that author says, set upon columns in sacred buildings: they appear to bend beneath a load, as though sweating, when in fact they have no feeling and add nothing to the strength of the stone. They want to look like Atlases, though they are stone statues, mere shadows of men in reality, perhaps blockheads and dullards, no different from a rock.

Meanwhile learned men, endowed with the graces of a holier life, who bear the heat of the day, are unfairly condemned to serve them, perhaps content with the smallest salary, known by their plain names, humble and obscure. Though far more deserving, they live privately in poverty and without honour, buried in a meagre church living, or imprisoned for ever in their colleges, hidden away without renown.

But I will stir this cesspool no longer. Hence those tears, the Muses’ mourning dress; hence religion itself—to speak with Seyssel—is brought into ridicule and contempt, and the priesthood debased. Where these things happen, I would venture to apply that foul man’s foul taunt to the clergy: “A foul rabble, penniless, uncultivated, filthy, melancholy, miserable, despicable, contemptible.”