Richard Burton

The Anatomy of Melancholy and (full title: The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up and ) is a book by Robert Burton, first published in 1621, but republished five more times over the next seventeen years with massive alterations and expansions.

The Anatomy of Melancholy

里森

no man in his time did surpass him for his ready and dexterous interlarding his common discourses among them with verses from the poets, or sentences from classic authors;

‘“Tis a book so full of variety of reading, that gentlemen who have lost their time, and are put to a push for invention, may furnish themselves with matter for common or scholastical discourse and writing.”—Wood's Athenae Oxoniensis, vol. i. p. 628. 2d edit.

the writer's variety of learning, his quotations from scarce and curious books, his pedantry sparkling with rude wit and shapeless elegance, miscellaneous matter, intermixture of agreeable tales and illustrations, and, perhaps, above all, the singularities of his feelings, clothed in an uncommon quaintness of style, have contributed to render it, even to modern readers, a valuable repository of amusement and information.”—Warton's Milton, 2d edit. p. 94.

828“Man in honour that understandeth not, is like unto beasts that perish,”

831“Great travail is created for all men, and an heavy yoke on the sons of Adam, from the day that they go out of their mother's womb, unto that day they return to the mother of all things. Namely, their thoughts, and fear of their hearts, and their imagination of things they wait for, and the day of death. From him that sitteth in the glorious throne, to him that sitteth beneath in the earth and ashes; from him that is clothed in blue silk and weareth a crown, to him that is clothed in simple linen. Wrath, envy, trouble, and unquietness, and fear of death, and rigour, and strife, and such things come to both man and beast, but sevenfold to the ungodly.”

[855] “Beware that he do not forget the Lord his God;” that he be not puffed up, but acknowledge them to be his good gifts and benefits, and 856“the more he hath, to be more thankful,” (as Agapetianus adviseth) and use them aright.

“The principal things for the use of man, are water, fire, iron, salt, meal, wheat, honey, milk, oil, wine, clothing, good to the godly, to the sinners turned to evil,” Ecclus. xxxix. 26.

Whom fire spares, sea doth drown; whom sea, Pestilent air doth send to clay; Whom war 'scapes, sickness takes away.

[863] Ignis pepercit, unda mergit, aeris Vis pestilentis aequori ereptum necat, Bello superstes, tabidus morbo perit. 

Dearths, tempests, plagues, our astrologers foretell us; Earthquakes, inundations, ruins of houses, consuming fires, come by little and little, or make some noise beforehand; but the knaveries, impostures, injuries and villainies of men no art can avoid.

[867] Ad unum corpus humanum supplicia plura, quam membra: We have invented more torturing instruments, than there be several members in a man's body, as Cyprian well observes.

The Anatomy of Melancholy quotes

Join the club