The Anatomy of Melancholy

On this point, therefore, I declare myself a disciple of Apollonius, a follower of Socrates: I disregard fine phrasing and devote my effort to informing my reader’s understanding, not pleasing his ear. My purpose is not the polished composition an orator requires, but to express myself readily and plainly as things come to me. So my style flows like a river: sometimes rushing and swift, then sluggish and slow; now straight, then “through winding ways”; now deep, then shallow; now muddy, then clear; now broad, then narrow. It is serious, then light; comic, then satirical; more elaborate, then more relaxed, as the subject required or as I felt at the time.

And if you are willing to read this treatise, it will seem to you like a road to an ordinary traveller: sometimes fair, sometimes foul; open country here, enclosed land there; barren in one place, better soil in another. By woods, groves, hills, valleys, plains, and so on, I shall lead you “over steep mountains, slippery valleys, dew-covered turf, and clod-filled fields,” through a variety of sights—things you will like and things you will certainly dislike.

As for the material itself or my method, if it is faulty, please consider Columella’s saying: “Nothing is perfect or brought to completion by one person’s efforts.” No one can observe everything. Even in those great masters Galen and Aristotle, much is undoubtedly defective and may justly be criticized, corrected, and avoided. “A good hunter,” someone maintains, “catches many beasts, not all.” A good huntsman can catch some, not all: I have done my best.

Besides, I do not make my home in this field of study: “These are not the furrows I plough; this is not the dust in which I sweat.” I admit that I am only a dabbler, a visitor, picking a flower here and there. I readily concede that a severe critic examining what I have written would find not just three faults, as Scaliger did in Terence, but three hundred—as many as he found in Cardan’s Subtleties; as many conspicuous errors as Wilhelm Lauremberg, lately a professor at Rostock, finds in Laurentius’s anatomy, or the Venetian Barozzi in Sacrobosco.

And although this is a sixth edition, in which I ought to have been more accurate and corrected all the earlier oversights, it was nevertheless “a work of great labour”—so difficult and tedious that, as carpenters discover from experience, it is sometimes much better to build a new house than to repair an old one. I could write as much again as readily as revise what is already written. So if anything is wrong—and I admit that something is—I ask for a friendly correction, not bitter abuse: Let the Graces accompany the Muses; let every Fury keep away.

Otherwise, as in ordinary disputes, “let us knot the rope of contention—but who benefits?” We may quarrel, and probably abuse one another, but to what purpose? Let us say we are both scholars: Both Arcadians, equal at singing, and ready to answer. What shall we gain by wrangling? We shall trouble and injure ourselves and amuse other people. If I am proved wrong, I will give way; I will correct myself. “If I have said anything contrary to good morals or to truth, in sacred or secular learning, let it be as though I had never said it.”