The Anatomy of Melancholy

We might wish for such an inspector; or, if wishing could do it, that someone had a ring or rings like those Timolaus desired in Lucian. They would make him as strong as 10,000 men or an army of giants, enable him to go unseen, open gates and castle doors, possess whatever treasure he wanted, travel instantly wherever he wished, change people’s feelings, and cure every kind of disease. Then he could roam the world, reforming every troubled state and person as he pleased.

He could bring to order those wandering Tartars who plague China on one side and Muscovy and Poland on the other; and tame the wandering Arabs who rob and plunder those eastern countries, so that travellers would no longer need caravans or Janissaries to escort them.

He could root barbarism out of America, fully explore the Unknown Southern Land, discover the Northeast and Northwest Passages, drain the vast Maeotian marshes, cut down the immense Hercynian forests, irrigate the barren Arabian deserts, and so on; cure us of our epidemic diseases—scurvy, plica, the Neapolitan disease, and the rest; end our pointless disputes, cut off our unruly desires and excessive lusts, and root out atheism, impiety, heresy, schism, and superstition, which now so torment the world;

instruct the grossly ignorant in religion; purge Italy of lust and dissipation, Spain of superstition and jealousy, Germany of drunkenness, and all our northern country of gluttony and excess; chastise our hard-hearted parents, masters, and tutors; whip disobedient children and negligent servants, correct these spendthrifts and prodigal sons, force idle people to work, drive drunkards from the alehouse, suppress thieves, and call corrupt and tyrannical magistrates to account.

But you may rebuke us as L. Licinius rebuked Timolaus: these are vain, absurd, ridiculous wishes, with no hope of fulfilment. Everything must remain as it is. Boccalini may summon commonwealths before Apollo and seek to reform the world itself through commissioners, but there is no remedy; it cannot be put right. “People will cease to act foolishly only when they cease to exist”: as long as they can wag their beards, they will play the knaves and fools.

Since, then, this is so difficult, impossible to accomplish, and far beyond the labours of Hercules, let them remain rude, stupid, ignorant, uncultivated: “let one stone sit upon another.” And, as the writer of fables would have it, “let the commonwealth suffer from a cough and a foul smell, and the world from vice.” Let them remain as barbarous as they are.

Let them tyrannise, pursue pleasure, oppress, indulge themselves, consume themselves in factions, superstitions, lawsuits, wars, and disputes; live in dissipation, poverty, want, and misery; rebel; and, like Ulysses’ companions, wallow like so many pigs in their own dung. “I gladly bid them be fools.”

Yet, to satisfy and please myself, I will make a Utopia of my own, a new Atlantis, an imagined commonwealth of my own, in which I will rule freely, build cities, and make laws and statutes just as I please. And why should I not?

“Painters and poets,” and so forth. You know the freedom poets have always enjoyed. Besides, my predecessor Democritus was a political thinker, a recorder of Abdera, a lawgiver, some say. Why should I not presume as much as he did? At any rate, I will venture it.