The Anatomy of Melancholy

Subsection 4 Symptoms arising from education, custom, duration, our circumstances, mingled with other diseases, occurring in fits, from inclination, and so on

Another major cause of the variety of these symptoms lies in custom, training, education and differing inclinations. This humour will impress upon melancholic people the objects most closely corresponding to their condition in life and ordinary activities, and shape their dispositions according to their various studies and occupations.

If an ambitious man becomes melancholic, he immediately thinks he is a king, an emperor, a monarch, and walks alone, pleasing himself with an empty hope of future advancement—or advancement already achieved, as he supposes. At the same time he plays the lord, assumes the role of some statesman or grandee, makes bows, receives visitors and looks important. Francisco Sansovino records a melancholic man in Cremona who could not be persuaded that he was anything but the pope: he granted pardons, made cardinals, and so on. Christophorus à Vega mentions another man he knew who thought he was a king driven from his kingdom and was very anxious to recover his position.

A covetous person is always occupied with buying lands and properties, scheming in his mind how to acquire this or that manor, as if he were already its lord and able to carry the purchase through. Everything he sees is his, “in reality or in hope”: he has swallowed it up in anticipation, or in imagination counts it his own, like the man in Athenaeus who thought all the ships in the harbour belonged to him.

A lustful lover spends the whole day planning how to please his mistress, posing and strutting and conducting himself as though she were present, continually dreaming of her, as Pamphilus dreams of his Glycerium, or as some people do in their morning sleep. Marcellus Donatus knew such a gentlewoman in Mantua, called Elionora Meliorina, who firmly believed that she was married to a king. She would kneel and talk with him as though he were there with his companions; and if she happened to find a piece of glass on a dung heap or in the street, she would say that it was a jewel sent by her lord and husband.

If devout and religious, he is wholly taken up with fasting, prayer, ceremonies, alms, interpretations, visions, prophecies and revelations. He is inspired by the Holy Ghost, full of the spirit: at one moment he is saved, at another damned, or continually troubled in mind over his sins—the devil will certainly have him, and so on. More about these matters in the Third Partition, on love melancholy.

A scholar’s mind is occupied with his studies. He applauds himself for what he has done or hopes to do, at one moment fearing that he will fail in his next academic exercise, at another scorning all criticism; he envies one person and rivals another, or else wears himself out with unremitting labour and study. So it is with the rest: all vary according to the weaker or stronger impression made by the object of thought, or as the humour itself is intensified or diminished.