The Anatomy of Melancholy

Who, though wholly overcome by idleness or entangled in a labyrinth of worldly cares, troubles, and discontents, would not find the mind greatly lightened by reading some enticing story, true or invented? There, as in a mirror, one sees what our ancestors did: the beginnings, ruins, falls, and endings of commonwealths, and private people’s actions vividly displayed. Plutarch therefore calls such stories “second courses and sweetmeats”—the second course and delicacies—because they were usually read at noblemen’s feasts.

Who is not deeply moved by a passionate, well-written speech, an elegant poem, or some delightful, enchanting narrative like that of Heliodorus, “where a certain pleasure flows gently, joined with cheerfulness”? Julian the Apostate was so captivated by a speech of Libanius the sophist that, as he admits, he could not rest until he had read it all. “I read the greater part of your speech yesterday before my meal; after eating, I finished the whole without any interruption. What arguments! What composition!”

I may say the same of one delightful treatise or another, which carries the reader’s attention along with it. For most kinds of people, study is an extraordinary pleasure. What a world of books presents itself, on every subject, art, and science, to suit the reader’s capacity and give sweet contentment!

There are arithmetic, geometry, perspective, optics, astronomy, architecture, sculpture, and painting, on which so many elaborate treatises have lately appeared; mechanics and its secrets; military affairs, navigation, horsemanship, fencing, swimming, gardening, and planting; great volumes on agriculture, cookery, falconry, hunting, fishing, catching birds, and so forth, with exquisite pictures of every sport and game—what is there not?

Music, metaphysics, natural and moral philosophy, philology, politics, heraldry, genealogy, chronology, and the like supply great volumes; so do studies of antiquity. And “what is more subtle than arithmetical discoveries, more delightful than musical principles, more divine than astronomical ones, more exact than geometrical demonstrations?” What is so certain, what so pleasant?

Anyone who merely sees the geometrical tower of Garisenda at Bologna in Italy, or the spire and clock at Strasbourg, will admire what art can accomplish; or Archimedes’s device for moving the earth itself, if only he had somewhere to fix his instrument; Archimedes’s screw, ingenious devices for bringing streams together, musical instruments, and three-syllable echoes repeated again, again, and again, with countless other examples.

What immense volumes exist in law, medicine, and theology, for profit, pleasure, practice, and contemplation, in verse or prose! Their titles alone fill whole volumes. We have thousands of authors of every kind and many great, well-stocked libraries, like so many dishes of food served for different tastes; anyone moved by none of them is a complete blockhead.

Some take immense delight in studying the very languages in which these books are written: Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, Chaldean, Arabic, and so forth.