The Anatomy of Melancholy

Let Melita’s eyes be Juno’s, her right hand Minerva’s, Her breasts Venus’s, her calf the sea goddess’s, and so on.

Let her head come from Prague, her breasts from Austria, her belly from France, her back from Brabant, her hands from England, her feet from the Rhineland and her buttocks from Switzerland. Let her have the Spanish walk, Venetian dress, Italian courtesy and accomplishments:

Let bright eyes blaze with starry fires, Let her neck breathe roses, and gold yield to her hair; Let honeyed lips reveal a crimson blush; Let her shine and surpass Venus with her heavenly body, The beauty of all the goddesses, and so forth.

Let her be altogether such a woman as Lucian portrays in his Portraits, as Euphanor painted Venus long ago, or as Aristaenetus describes Lais: another Helen, Chariclea, Leucippe, Lucretia or Pandora. Let her have a box of beauty with which to renew herself continually, like the one Venus gave Phaon when he ferried her across the water. Let her use every aid that art and nature can supply; let her be like this woman, and that woman, and whomever you please, or all of them in one.

A little illness, a fever, smallpox, a wound, a scar, the loss of an eye or a limb, a violent passion, an imbalance of heat or cold, spoils and disfigures everything in an instant. Childbearing, old age and that tyrant time will turn Venus into a Fury. Ravaging time and care wrinkle her suddenly. After she has been married a little while and the black ox has trodden on her toe, she will be so changed and lose so much of her beauty that you will not know her.

One grows too fat, another too thin, and so on. Modest Matilda, pretty pleasing Peg, sweet-singing Susan, mincing merry Moll, dainty dancing Doll, neat Nancy, jolly Joan, nimble Nell, kissing Kate, buxom Bess with her black eyes, fair Phillis with her fine white hands, fiddling Frank, tall Tib, slender Sib, and the rest will soon lose their grace, become repellent, stale, gloomy, heavy, dull and sour, and at last all go out of fashion. “Where now are the lively expression, the sweet kisses, the winning smile?” and so on.

Those beautiful sparkling eyes will look dull; her soft coral lips will become pale, dry, cold, rough and blue; her skin will grow coarse, that soft and tender surface hard and harsh. Her entire complexion will change in a moment, as Matilda wrote to King John:

I am not now as when you saw me last; That beauty soon has vanished and is past. That rosy blush enfolded in a lily vale Is now blotched over, discoloured and pale.

So it is with the rest: their beauty fades like a tree in winter, as Deianira elegantly expresses it in the poet: