The Anatomy of Melancholy

“In places he has thorns and tedious passages,” says Lipsius; and, as in all his other works, especially in his letters, “some are occupied with subtleties and foolishness”; “in places he is tangled and poorly arranged”; “he did this without an abundance of material.” He jumbles many things together without method, in the Stoic fashion: “he arranged little and piled up much,” and so on. If Seneca is whipped like this, and many famous men I could name, what should I expect? How can I, “scarcely the shadow of so great a philosopher,” hope to please? No one is so perfect, Erasmus holds, as to satisfy everyone, unless antiquity, established authority, and so on bar criticism. But, as I have shown with Seneca, even this does not always work. How shall I escape?

It is every writer’s common sentence; I must, I say, endure it. I do not seek applause: “I do not hunt the votes of the fickle crowd.” Yet again, “I am not so ugly”: I would not be disparaged. I shall be praised enough if you, reader, do not scorn me. I fear the judgement of good people and submit my labours to their favourable reception; “and I despise the tongues of slaves.” Like a dog’s barking, I calmly despise the malicious, scurrilous abuse, sneers, and slanders of those who rail and detract; I scorn the rest. What I have said, therefore, I have said “according to my limited ability.”

There are still one or two things about my treatment of this subject that I wished to amend if I could. For these I must apologize, “beg indulgence,” and, on further consideration, give the friendly reader notice. I did not intend to prostitute my muse in English or disclose “Minerva’s secrets,” but to publish this in a shorter Latin form, if I could have had it printed. Any scurrilous pamphlet in English is welcome to our money-minded booksellers; they print everything— and hammer out little books on whose pages scarcely a naked ape would shit.

But they will not deal in Latin. Nicholas Carr, in his oration on the scarcity of English writers, gives this as one reason why so many flourishing minds in our country are smothered in oblivion, lying dead and buried. Another major fault is that I have not revised the manuscript and improved its style, which now flows carelessly, just as it first came to me; my available time did not allow it. “I did neither what I could nor what I wished.” I admit it is neither as I would like it nor as it should be. When I reread it, I am ashamed to have written it, for I see much that even in my own judgement deserved erasure. When I read through this treatise I have written, I am ashamed, and find much in it unfit.

“And, most seriously,” there are many things in the substance itself that I now disapprove of, though I did not when I wrote them: “my age is not the same, nor my mind.” I would willingly retract much, and so on, but it is too late. I can only ask pardon now for what is wrong. Had I acted wisely, I might indeed have followed the poet’s rule— and let it be kept back until the ninth year— and taken greater care. Or, as the physician Alexander required lapis lazuli to be washed fifty times before use, I should have revised, corrected, and improved this treatise. But, as I said, I lacked that fortunate leisure: I had no copyists or assistants.