The Anatomy of Melancholy

Their whole religion is sacrifice to Volupia, Rumina, Edulica, Potina, and Mellona. They wish for Philoxenus’s neck, Jupiter’s threefold night, and for the sun to stand still as it did in Joshua’s time, to satisfy their appetites, so that they might “revel like Greeks and drink day and night.” Men of brilliant wit, talent, standing, and worth debase themselves in any scoundrel’s company, smoking tobacco and drinking, roaring and singing filthy songs in sordid places.

You will find someone reclining beside a cut-throat, Mixed in with sailors, thieves, or runaways.

Thomas Erastus’s charge against Paracelsus—that he would lie drinking all day in a brothel with carters and tapsters—is all too common among us, even among men of higher standing: like Timocreon of Rhodes, “drinking much and devouring much,” and so on.

They drown their wits, boil their brains in ale, consume their fortunes, waste their time, weaken their constitutions, contract filthy diseases, catarrhs, dropsies, fevers, and tremors; they develop swollen jugular veins, red pimply faces, sore eyes, and the like; they overheat their livers, upset their bodily balance, spoil their stomachs, and ruin their bodies. For drink drowns more people than the sea and all the rivers flowing into it. Mere blockheads and barrels, they confound their souls, suppress reason, pass from Scylla to Charybdis, and turn a remedy into their ruin.

What does it matter whether I perish by disease, the sword, or a falling ruin?

When the Black Prince went to restore the exiled king of Castile to his kingdom, a terrible battle was fought between the English and the Spanish. At last the Spanish fled, and the English pursued them to the river, where some drowned themselves to escape their enemies and the rest were killed. Now tell me the difference between drowning and being killed. One might as well remain melancholy as become a drunken beast and a beggar.

Company, the one comfort and remedy for every kind of discontent, becomes their very misery and the cause of their destruction. As Hermione lamented in Euripides, “Bad women made me bad”—evil company ruined her—so they may rightly complain that bad companions have been their undoing. For “a bad man wants another to be bad, so that he may be like himself.” One drunkard in a company, one thief, one whoremonger, would gladly make all the others as bad as himself.

Even if You swear you dread the night-time fumes of wine,