The Anatomy of Melancholy

There is no servile task these wretches will not undertake. “Among them many empty privies; others work in kitchens, tend stables, work as divers and pursue similar occupations,” and so on. Like those people who live in the Alps—chimney sweeps, privy cleaners, plasterers, wandering rogues—some labour hard and still cannot obtain clothes to wear or bread to eat.

For what else can filthy poverty offer but beggary, disgusting filth, squalor, contempt, drudgery, toil, ugliness, hunger and thirst, “a multitude of lice and fleas”? As the speaker in Aristophanes aptly continues: fleas and lice; “a torn garment instead of a cloak, and a good-sized stone under the head instead of a pillow”—rags for clothing and a stone for a pillow; “the broken top of a pot instead of a chair”—he sits in a broken pitcher or on a block for a chair; “and eats mallow stalks instead of bread”—he drinks water and lives on cabbage leaves and pulses like a pig, or scraps like a dog.

“As our life now stands, who would not consider it madness and unhappiness?” As Chremylus concludes his speech: given the way we poor people live nowadays, who would not regard our life as unhappiness, misery and madness?

Even if their circumstances are a little better than those of these base wretches, starving beggars, wandering rogues, ordinary slaves and day labourers, they are commonly so preyed upon by extortionate officers for breaking laws, and by tyrannical landlords, so flayed and fleeced by constant demands, that in some countries they cannot make a living, however hard they toil, however poorly they eat and however much they deny themselves. Whatever they have is instantly taken away. Their very struggle to live, to drudge and support their poor families—their trouble and anxiety—“takes away their sleep,” Sirach 31:1, and makes them weary of life.

When they have taken every trouble and done their honest best, if sickness sets them back or age overtakes them, no one pities them. Hardhearted, merciless and uncharitable, people leave them in such distress to beg, steal, complain and rebel, or else starve.

The experience and fear of this misery drove the ancient Romans whom Menenius Agrippa pacified to resist their rulers, and drives outlaws and rebels in most places to take up arms in revolt. In every age it has caused disturbances, complaints, seditions, rebellions, thefts, murders, mutinies, quarrels and conflicts in every commonwealth, and resentment, repining, complaints and discontent in every household. They lack the means to live according to their station and bring up their children; it breaks their hearts that they cannot do as they wish.

There is no greater misery than for a lord to have a knight’s income, a gentleman a yeoman’s, and be unable to live as his birth and rank require. Poverty and want generally eat away at people of every kind, especially those who once prospered and are suddenly in distress: people nobly born and generously brought up, brought miserably low by some disaster or mischance.