The Anatomy of Melancholy

“Now for the first time I, her long-standing lover, despised Doris,” as he said: Doris is only a dowdy beside this woman. Just as someone who looks at himself in a mirror immediately forgets his features, so the power of this flattering mirror of love will diminish with a change of place. After a short absence it will weaken; the next beautiful person will probably change it.

A young man in Lucian was pitifully in love. He happened to come to the theatre and, on seeing other beautiful people there, “recovered his sanity”: he was fully cured and went home cheerfully, as though he had taken a dose of forgetfulness.

A mouse, says a writer of fables, was brought up in a chest and fed there on scraps of bread and cheese. It thought no better food could exist, until it finally came out and fed freely on a variety of other foods; then it loathed its former life. Apply the moral of this fable to yourself.

Plato, in the seventh book of his Laws, has an ingenious fiction about an underground city into which a little light entered through small holes. The inhabitants thought there could be no better place, and when they first came outside they could not bear the light: “they could scarcely look at the sun.” But after growing a little accustomed to it, they pitied the misery of their companions who lived underground.

A foolish lover is in the same condition. At first no one is as beautiful as his mistress; he cares for no one else. Yet after a while, once he has compared her with others, he detests her name, her sight and her memory. It is generally true, for, as the writer observes, “a new fire drives out the former flame; and many people have it in their nature to love those present most.” One fire drives out another, and such is women’s weakness that they commonly love the man who is present.

And so do many men. As one confessed, he loved Amye until he saw Floriat; and when he saw Cynthia, he forgot them both. But beautiful Phillis was incomparably beyond them all; Cloris surpassed her; yet when he caught sight of Amaryllis, she became his only mistress. O divine Amaryllis! “How tall, like a cypress; how elegant, how graceful!” How lovely, how tall, how comely she was, says Polemius—until he saw another, who then became the sole subject of his thoughts. In the end, he loves best the woman he saw last.

Triton the sea god first loved Leucothoe, until he came into Milaene’s presence. She ruled his heart until he saw Galatea; but, as Galatea complains, before long he loved another, and another, and another.

According to Jerome, this has commonly been practised. “Pagan philosophers drive out one love with another, as one peg or pin drives out another.” The seven Persian princes did this for Ahasuerus, replacing his longing for Queen Vashti with love for other women.