The Anatomy of Melancholy

I was a king, as this crest shows; but a filthy life Cast me down from that height and made me an unclean bird.

I was a king—my crown bears witness— But my filthiness has brought me to this.

Their blindness is every bit as great and apparent as their weakness and infatuation—or rather, it is an inseparable companion and a usual sign of it. Love is blind, as the saying goes. Cupid is blind, and so are all his followers.

Whoever loves a frog thinks that frog is Diana.

Every lover admires his mistress, though in herself she may be utterly misshapen, ugly, wrinkled, pimply, pale, red, yellow, tanned or tallow-faced; have a swollen face like a juggler’s platter, or a thin, lean, pinched face; have blemishes on her face; be crooked, dried up, bald, goggle-eyed, bleary-eyed or staring like a squeezed cat; always hold her head crookedly; look heavy, dull and hollow-eyed, with black or yellow around her eyes; or be cross-eyed, sparrow-mouthed, Persian hook-nosed, with a sharp fox’s nose, a red nose, a great flat Chinese nose, “a snub and spreading nose,” a nose like a promontory; have jutting teeth, rotten teeth, black, uneven or brown teeth; beetling brows, a witch’s beard, breath that stinks throughout the room and a nose that drips winter and summer;

with a Bavarian goitre beneath her chin, a sharp chin, hanging ears and a long crane’s neck that also stands crookedly; “with hanging breasts,” her teats like two double-sized jugs—or, at the opposite extreme, no breasts at all; have fingers swollen with blood, filthy long untrimmed nails, scabby hands or wrists, tanned skin, a rotten body and a crooked back; stoop, limp, turn her feet out; be as slim in the middle as a cow at the waist; have gouty legs, ankles bulging over her shoes, stinking feet and lice; be an outright changeling, a monster, a malformed changeling, her whole body reeking;

have a harsh voice, uncouth gestures and an ugly walk; be a huge virago or an ugly little creature, a sluggish lump, a fat lumbering woman, a squat bundle, a long lean bag of bones, a skeleton or a sneaking thing (“if anything is hidden, imagine it better”); and in your judgement look like a turd in a lantern, someone you could not fancy for the world, but hate and loathe, in whose face you would spit or whose bosom you would blow your nose in—“a cure for love” to another man—a dowdy, a slattern, a scold, a nasty, rank hussy, stinking like a ram, filthy and beastly, perhaps unchaste, obscene, low, beggarly, rude, foolish, ignorant, perverse, a daughter of Irus, sister of Thersites, pupil of Grobian: once he loves her, he admires her despite all this, noticing none of these faults or imperfections of body or mind.

These very things delight him, as Agna’s nasal polyp delighted Balbinus.