[In the following excerpt, Thrale acknowledges the widespread influence of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy on English literature.]

What a strange Book is Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy! & how it has been plunder'd! Milton took his Allegro and Penseroso from the Verses at the beginning,¹ Savage his Speech of Suicide in the Wanderer² from Page 216. Swift his Tale of the Woman that held water in her Mouth to regain her Husband's Love by Silence—'tis printed in the Tatler;³ Johnson got his Story of the Magnet that detects unchaste Wives⁴ from the same Farrago, & even Shakespear I believe the Trick put on the Tinker Christopher Sly in the taming of the Shrew.⁵ See page 277. of Burton.⁶

Notes

1. ‘The Author's Abstract of Melancholy’, at the beginning of the Anatomy, has the alternating refrain, ‘All my joys to this are folly / Naught so sweet as Melancholy’; and ‘All my griefs to this are jolly / Naught so sad as Melancholy’.

2. Canto 2, ll. 193 ff. The corresponding section in Burton is Pt. I, Sec. 4, Memb. 1. Savage owes more, however, to Spenser's Despair (Faerie Queene, i. 9).

3. See Burton, Pt. 3, Sec. 3, Memb. 4, subsec. 2. The story is versified by William Harrison, not Swift, in ‘The Medicine, A Tale—for the Ladies’, Tatler, No. 2.

4. Rambler, No. 199.

5. The source was, of course, the old play, The Taming of a Shrew. The passage in Burton which she finds similar is probably the story of a physician who cured a melancholy patient by putting him to bed in splendor (Pt. 2, Sec. 2, Memb. 6, subsec. 4).

6. These observations, omitting Johnson's debt, appear in her letter to him, dated June 14 [1782], which she published in Letters to and from … Johnson (ii. 247): ‘You bid me study that book [Burton] in your absence, and now, what have I found? Why, I have found, or fancied, that he has been very cruelly plundered. …’ Since the date of this entry is May 19, and Johnson did not leave for Oxford until June 9, it is difficult to believe that this letter, too, was not made to order for publication.