[In the following essay, Holmes discusses the influence of The Anatomy of Melancholy on English literature and comments on the massive breadth of the treatise.]

Cotton Mather says of our famous and excellent John Cotton, “the Father and Glory of Boston,” as he calls him, that, “being asked why in his Latter Days he indulged Nocturnal Studies more than formerly, he pleasantly replied, Because I love to sweeten my mouth with a piece of Calvin before I go to sleep.” Hot in the mouth, rather than sweet, we of to-day might think his piece of Calvin; but as a good many “night-caps” are both hot and sweet as well as strong, we need not quarrel with the worthy minister who has been with the angels for more than two hundred years.

It is a matter of no little importance that the mind should be in a fitting condition for sleep when we take to our pillows. The material “thought-stopper,” as Willis called it, in the shape of alcoholic drinks of every grade, from beer to brandy, has penalties and dangers I need not refer to. Still greater is the risk of having recourse to opium and similar drugs. I remember the case of one who, being fond of coffee, and in the habit of taking it at night, made very strong, found himself so wakeful after it that he was tempted to counteract its effects with an opiate. It led to the formation of a habit which he never got rid of. We must not poison ourselves into somnolence.

Still, we must sleep, or die, or go mad. We must get a fair amount of sleep, or suffer much for the want of it. Among the means for insuring peaceful slumber at the right time, and enough of it, the frame of mind we take to bed with us is of the highest importance. Just as the body must have its ligatures all loosened, its close-fitting garments removed, and bathe itself, as it were, in flowing folds of linen, the mind should undress itself of its daily cares and thoughts as nearly as its natural obstinacy will permit it to do, and wrap itself in the lightest mental night-robes.

Now there are books that make one feel as if he were in his dressing-gown and slippers, if not as if in his night-gown. I have found a few such, and I have often finished my day with one of them, as John Cotton wound up his with Calvin. From a quarter to half an hour's reading in a book of this kind just before leaving my library for the bed-room has quieted my mind, brought in easy-going, placid trains of thought, which were all ready to pass into the state of dreamy forgetfulness, and taken the place which might have been held by the dangerous stimulant or the deadly narcotic. One of these books is that of which I shall say something in the following pages.

In passing a shop where books of every grade of cheapness are exposed I came upon an old edition of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. I always pity a fine old volume which has fallen into poor company, and sometimes buy it, even if I do not want it, that it may find itself once more among its peers. But in this case I was very glad to obtain a good copy of a good edition of a famous book at a reasonable and not an insulting price; for I remember being ashamed, once, when I picked up some Alduses at the cost of so many obsolete spelling-books. The prize which I carried home with me was a folio in the original binding, with the engraved title and in perfect preservation, the eighth edition, “corrected and augmented by the author,” the date 1676. I had never thoroughly read Burton, and I knew enough of the book to think it was worth reading as well as dipping into, as most readers have done. So I took it for my mental night-cap, and read in it for the last quarter or half hour before going to bed, until I had finished it, which slow process took up a year or more, allowing for all interruptions. I made notes of such things as particularly struck me,—brief references, rather, to them,—in pencil, at the end of the volume. It is with these I propose to entertain the reader, using them somewhat as a clergyman uses his text, which furnishes him a pretext that will stretch like an india-rubber band to hold whatever he chooses to have it.

The first edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy was published in 1624, the year after the first folio edition of the Plays of Shakespeare, the Poems having been long before the public. Burton quotes a passage from Venus and Adonis, referring to its author “Shakespeare” in the margin, and calling him in the text “an elegant poet of our time.” I note a certain number of coincidences, which look as if Burton was familiarly acquainted with the Plays. Falstaff “lards the lean earth as he walks along.” The scribblers, whom Burton found so numerous even in his day, “lard their lean books with the fat of others' works.” John of Gaunt says of himself,—

My oil-dried lamp and time-bewasted light
Shall be extinct with age and endless night;

and Burton says of life that it “is in the end dryed up by old age, and extinguished by death for want of matter, as a Lamp for defect of oyl to maintain it.” Burton tells the Christopher Sly story from two old authors, but makes no allusion to Shakespeare's use of it.

Non omnem molitor quœ fluit unda videt.

“The miller sees not all the water that goes by his mill,” says Burton.

What, man! more water glideth by the mill
Than wots the miller of,

says Demetrius, in Titus Andronicus. Burton speaks of “Benedict and Betteris in the Comedy,” with the marginal reference “Shakespeare.” The name “Betteris” can hardly be a misspelling, but is probably a popular form of the Italian appellative.

Of the more or less curious words used by Burton, the following particularly attracted my attention. I will give them, or some of them, in their connection:—

Of 15,000 proletaries slain in a battel, scarce fifteen are recorded in history, or one alone, the General perhaps.

A good, honest, painful man many times hath a shrew to his wife, a sickly, dishonest, slothful, foolish, careless woman to his mate, a proud peevish flurt,

and worse, if possible. The word which a generation or two ago meant a kind of half courtship between young people, is now applied to the more or less questionable relations of married persons tired of their own firesides.

He speaks of some demons, devils, or genii who as far excel men in worth as a man excels the meanest worm, “though some of them are inferior to those of their own rank in worth as the black guard in a Prince's Court.”

Speaking of the excesses into which one who is fond of praise is liable to be led by his vanity, he says, after telling how one compares himself to Hercules or Samson, another to Tully or Demosthenes, another to Homer or Virgil,—

He is mad, mad, mad, no whoe with him.

Certain “epicureal tenents” are “most accurately ventilated by Jo. Sylvaticus, a late Writer and Physitian of Millan.”

On the same page is the well-known passage, “The Turks have a drink called Coffa (for they use no wine), so named of a berry as black as soot, and as bitter (like that black drink which was in use among the Lacedæmonians, and perhaps the same), which they still sip of, and sup as warm as they can suffer.”

Burton must have been a bachelor, for if he had been a married man he would never have dared talk of women as he did.

Take heed of your wives' flattering speeches over night, and curtain sermons in the morning.

His vocabulary of satire abounds with happy expressions. “Theologasters” is credited to him, and what can be more descriptive than his expression “collapsed ladies”?

“Bayards,” gapers, “stupid, ignorant, blind” creatures, “dummerers,” impostors feigning dumbness, “Abraham men” pretending blindness, are no longer heard of; but when we hear that Jodocus Damhoderius “hath some notable examples of such counterfeit Cranks,” we find that a word only recently come into common use is an old one recalled from the rich phraseology of the Elizabethan period. Burton recommends “cowcumbers” to such as are of too ardent a temperament. Tobacco he spells as we do, but speaks of it in a way that reminds us at once of Charles Lamb's often-quoted Farewell to the great vegetable, which it probably suggested:—

Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent Tobacco, which goes far beyond all their Panaceas, potable gold and Philosophers stones, a soveraign remedy to all diseases. A vertuous herb, if it be well qualified, opportunely taken, and medicinally used, but as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as Tinkers do Ale, 't is a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, land, health, hellish, devilish and damned Tobacco, the ruine and overthrow of body and soul.

Burton makes great fun of the foolish old questions of the schoolmen and pedants, such as “ovum prius extiterit an gallina,”—whether the egg or the hen came first into being. He is a good Protestant, and very bitter at times against the “Papists,” but I cannot help suspecting his own orthodoxy. One is reminded of the more recent “Genesis and Geology” battles in reading such sentences as this: “But to avoid these Paradoxes of the earth's motion (which the Church of Rome hath lately condemned as heretical) our latter mathematicians have rolled all the stones that may be stirred: and to solve all appearances and objections, have invented new hypotheses and fabricated new systems of the World, out of their own Dedalean heads;” or, as we should say, projected them out of their own inner consciousness. You may find here the mill of conscience that grinds the souls of sinners, as expressed by “those ægyptians in their Hieroglyphics,” and the saying “quod ideo credendum quod incredibile,”—it is to be believed because it is incredible,—from Tertullian. One is surprised in reading this book, more than any other that I am acquainted with, to find how much of the new corn comes out of the old fields. The quarrel between science and that which calls itself religion was the same, essentially, in the days of Burton and those older authors whom he quotes that it is now.

“Others freely speak, mutter and would persuade the world (as Marinus Marcenus complains) that our modern Divines are too severe and rigid against Mathematicians; ignorant and peevish in not admitting their true demonstrations and certain observations, that they tyrannize over art, science, and all philosophy in suppressing their labors (saith Pomponatius), forbidding them to write, to speak a truth, all to maintain their superstition, and for their profits sake. As for those places of Scripture which oppugn it, they will have spoken ad captum vulgi, and if rightly understood, and favorably interpreted, not at all against it.” We find the same old difficulties, and the same subterfuges to escape from them that we have seen and still see in our own day. Doctrines which we have always thought of as belonging to our own theology are traced to other and remote sources. Plato learned in Egypt that the devils quarrelled with Jupiter, and were driven by him down to hell. Others of our generally accepted beliefs he claims as of heathen parentage. “Twas for a politique end, and to this purpose the old Poets feigned those Elysian fields, their æacus, Minos, and Rhadamantus, their infernal judges, and those Stygian lakes, fiery Phlegeton's, Pluto's Kingdom, and variety of torments after death. Those that had done well went to the Elysian fields, but evil doers to Cocytus and to that burning lake of Hell with fire and brimstone forever to be tormented.”

“Old Probabilities” was anticipated by Lucian's Jupiter, who, as Burton says, spent much of the year, among other occupations, in “telling the hours when it should rain, how much snow should fall in such a place, which way the wind should stand in Greece, which way in Africk.”

Never was there such a pawn-shop for poets to borrow from as The Anatomy of Melancholy. Byron knew this well, and tells the world as much. His own

                              Mountains interposed
Make enemies of nations who had else,
Like kindred drops, been mingled into one,

may have been suggested by the fluvio vel monte distincti sunt dissimiles, which Burton gives without assigning its authorship. Herrick's beautiful

Gather ye rose buds while ye may,
          Old Time is still a-flying,

finds its original more nearly in the lines Burton quotes from Ausonius than in the verse from the Wisdom of Solomon, from which it has been thought to have been borrowed:—

Collige virgo rosas dum flos novus et nova pubes
          Et memor esto œvum sic properare tuum.

“Where God hath a Temple the Devil will have a Chappel,” familiarly known in the couplet of Defoe, and referred by Mr. Bartlett to the “Jacula Prudentum,” is found here also.

Qui jacet in terra non habet unde cadat,

says Burton.

He that is down needs fear no fall,

says Bunyan.

He that is down can fall no lower,

says Butler, in Hudibras.

“To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.” So spoke George Washington.

“The Commonwealth of Venice in their Armory have this inscription, Happy is that City which in time of peace thinks of war. Felix civitas quæ tempore pacis de bello cogitat.” So says Burton.

Qui desiderat pacem præparet bellum

is referred, in Familiar Quotations, to Vegetius, a Roman writer on military affairs, of the fourth century.

I read Mr. Emerson's complaint, in his first Phi Beta Kappa oration, that “the state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.” Compare this with Burton's passage from Scaliger: “Nequaquam nos homines sumus, sed partes hominis, ex omnibus aliquid fieri potest, idque non magnum; ex singulis fere nihil.”

We have been in the habit of thinking that “liquor or fight” was a form of courtesy peculiar to our Western civilization. But we may learn from Burton that our German ancestors were before us in this social custom: “How they love a man that will be drunk, crown him and honour him for it, hate him that will not pledge him, stab him, kill him: A most intolerable offence, and not to be forgiven. He is a mortal enemy that will not drink with him, as Munster relates of the Saxons.” We all remember Byron's writing under the inspiration of gin. His familiarity with Burton may have supplied him with the suggestion, for Burton tells us that “our Poets drink sack to improve their inventions.” We are surprised, in reading the old author, to come upon ideas and practices which we thought belonged especially to our own time:—

Such occult notes, Stenography, Polygraphy, Nuncius animatus, or magnetical telling of their minds, which Cabeus the Jesuit, by the way, counts fabulous and false.

If Burton had not been an irreclaimable bachelor, he would never have dared to make an onslaught like the following upon the female sex:—

To this intent they crush in their feet and bodies, hurt and crucifie themselves, sometimes in lax clothes, one hundred yards I think in a gown, a sleeve, and sometimes again so close, ut nudos exprimant artus. Now long tails and trains, and then short, up, down, high, low, thick, thin, etc. Now little or no bands, then as big as cart-wheels; now loose bodies, then great fardingals and close girt, etc.

The trailing dresses which delicate ladies wore but a very few years ago, through our slovenly streets, were always an object of aversion to men, and seriously lowered the sex in their eyes. Nobody, however, seems to have taken the offense so much to heart as Sir David Lyndsay,—the old Scotch minstrel whom Sir Walter Scott speaks of as

Sir David Lyndsay of the mount,
          Lord Lyon king at arms.

Before the disagreeable fashion threatens us again, let us hope that our ladies will read the old poet's “Supplication in Contemption of Side Tails;” for this is the name he gave to the bedraggled finery with which showy women swept the sidewalks in his day, as they have done in ours,—side tails meaning only long dresses,

Whilk through the dust and dubs trails
Three quarters lang behind their heels—
Wherever they go it may be seen
How kirk and causay they soop clean—
In summer when the streets dries
They raise the dust aboon the skies;
Nane may gae near them at their ease
Without they cover mouth and neese.

Sir David uses some harder words than these about the garments

Whilk over the mires and middings trails,

and ends with a couplet doubtless very severe, but which fortunately few of us can interpret:—

Quoth Lindsay in contempt of the side tails
That duddrons and duntibours through the dubs trails.

One can never be sure, in reading Burton, that he will not find his own thoughts, his own sayings in prose or verse, anticipated.

So that affliction is a School or Academy, wherein the best Scholars are prepared to the commencements of the deity.

Till dawns the great commencement day on every land and sea
And expectantur all mankind to take their last degree.

It was a coincidence, and not a borrowing, for I had never read Burton when I wrote those lines. I do not believe there is any living author who will not find that he is represented in his predecessors, if he will hunt for himself in Burton. Even the external conditions of the residence of myself and my immediate neighbors are described as if he had just left us; for the dwellers in this range of houses on one side “see the ships, boats and passengers go by, out of their windows,” and on the other look out into a “thoroughfare street to behold a continual concourse, a promiscuous rout, coming and going,”—which conditions he considered as “excellent good” for the infirmity of which he was treating, or professing to treat, while he discoursed about everything.

What a passion many now famous in other pursuits have had for poetry, and what longings for the power to express themselves in harmonious numbers! Blackstone and Murray, John Quincy Adams and Joseph Story, at once occur to our memory. It was said that at one time every member of the existing British cabinet had published his volume of verse. Every one remembers the story of Wolfe and Gray's Elegy. But I confess I was a little surprised to find a famous old scholar bewitched to such an extent as Burton represents him: “Julius Scaliger was so much affected with Poetry that he brake out into a pathetical protestation, he had rather be the author of twelve Verses in Lucan or such an Ode in Horace (Lib. 3, Ode 9) than Emperour of Germany.” A charming little quarrel it is between Horace and Lydia, but one would hardly have expected such a juvenile outburst from a gray-beard old scholiast like Julius Cæsar Scaliger.

From page to page we get striking and life-like portraits of notable men of olden time. Here is a charming one of a great Dutch scholar and critic:—

Heinsius, the keeper of the Library at Leiden in Holland, was mewed up in it all the year long; and that which to thy thinking should have bred a loathing, caused in him a greater liking.

“I no sooner (saith he) come into the Library, but I bolt the door to me, excluding lust, ambition, avarice, and all such vices, whose nurse is idleness, their mother Ignorance, and Melancholy herself, and in the very lap of eternity, amongst so many divine souls, I take my seat, with so lofty a spirit and sweet content, that I pity all our great ones, and rich men that know not this happiness.”

And take as a background to this delightful picture the dreadful glimpse which this brief passage gives us: “Servetus the heretick that suffered in Geneva, when he was brought to the stake, and saw the executioner come with fire in his hand, homo viso igne tam horrendum exclamavit, ut universum populum perterre facerit, roared so loud that he terrified the people.”

We are often surprised at finding there are good reasons for practices which seem to us quite singular, and even absurd. I remember the first time I wandered in the streets of an old European city,—Rouen,—I felt as if I was at the bottom of a deep crevice, looking up at a narrow ribbon of blue sky. I read in Burton, “In hot Countreys they make the streets of their Cities very narrow. Monpelier, the habitation and University of Physitians, is so built, with high houses, narrow streets to divert the suns scalding rayes, which Tacitus commends,” etc.

There is but one street at the West End of our city, Boston,—the new part of it,—which one can walk through in the middle of a hot summer day without danger of a sun-stroke: that is Boylston Street. The front yards of all the others are so wide that the sidewalks are in full sunshine, while this is a shady refuge for the unfortunate prisoner intra muros.

I once amused myself with calculating how many grains of sand there would be in our earth if it was made of them. It was only necessary to see how many grains it took to make a line of an inch in length, and this number, if I recollect, was about a hundred, which gives a million to the cubic inch, and so on; and although one might miss a few grains in calculating the number of cubic feet in the oblate spheroid upon which we dwell, it was easy to come near enough for all practical purposes. But Burton reminds me that I was only doing what Archimedes had done before me.

He is severely satirical in speaking of the corrupt practices and the quarrels of doctors. He accuses them of taking all manner of advantage of their privileged intimacy. “Paracelsus did that in Physick which Luther did in Divinity.” “A drunken rogue he was, a base fellow, a Magician, he had the Devil for his master, Devils his familiar companions, and what he did, was done by the help of the Devil.” “Thus they contend and rail, and every Mart [sic] write Books pro and con and adhuc sub judice lis est; let them agree as they will, I proceed.”

Not less sharp is he in commenting upon the practices of another profession: “Now as for Monks, Confessors and Friers—under colour of visitation, auricular confession, comfort and penance, they have free egress and regress, and corrupt God knows how many.”

“Mutual admiration” alliances are not the invention of this century, for Burton speaks of “mutual offices,” “praise and dispraise of each other,” “mulus mulum scabit,” one mule scratches another. In that very amusing book, which has much in it that sounds like Dickens, with a great deal that is its own, the Reverend Jonathan Jubb is busy writing the Life and Times of Rummins, while Rummins is equally busy writing the Life and Times of the Reverend Jonathan Jubb.

I have said that Burton must have been a bachelor, and so he must have been; and the gentle sex will exclaim that he was a hard-hearted old wretch, too, for he says, “As much pity is to be taken of a woman weeping as of a Goose going barefoot.”

Perhaps some wives with irritable husbands may like to hear the advice contained in his story of the honest woman “who, hearing one of her gossips by chance complain of her husband's impatience, told her an excellent remedy for it, and gave her withal a glass of water, which when he brauled she should hold still in her mouth, and that toties quoties, as often as he chid.” This had such a good effect that the woman wished to know what she had mingled in her prescription, when her adviser “told her in brief what it was, Fair Water and no more: for it was not the water but her silence which performed the cure. Let every froward woman imitate this example, and be quiet within doors,” and so on, giving his advice to the poor scolded woman as if she was to blame, and not the brauling husband! I am afraid the Cochituate will not be largely drawn upon by our matrons whose lords take their constitutional exercise in finding fault with their ladies.

I cannot be answerable for Burton's advice to women, but he gives some most sensible and kindly counsel to those who are abused by others, the substance of which is, Keep your temper and hold your tongue, but illustrated, amplified, made palpable and interesting by the large drapery of quotations in which it is robed, according to his habitual way of expanding and glorifying a maxim. “Deesse robur arguit dicacitas,” or, as Dr. Johnson might have translated it, Verbosity indicates imbecility. Burton quotes the Latin phrase, and then pours out a flood of words to illustrate it.

That great modern naturalist, so well remembered, and so dear to many of us, used to remind me of the ancient observer and philosopher whom he admired, and in many points resembled.

“How much did Aristotle and Ptolomy spend? Unius regni precium, they say, more than a king's ransom; how many crowns per annum, to perfect arts, the one about his History of Creatures, the other on his Almagest.” These are the words of Burton.

“How much,” I once said to Agassiz, “would you really want for your Museum, if you could get it?”

“Ten millions!” was his immediate, robust, magnificent answer. “Ah!” I thought to myself, “what a pity there is not an Alexander for this Aristotle!” My wish came nearer fulfilment in after years than I could have dreamed at that time of its ever coming.

Even the puns and quibbles we have thought our own we are startled to find in these pages of Burton, which take, not the bread out of our mouths, perhaps, but at least the Attic salt which was the seasoning of our discourse. When we find him asking “What's matrimony but a matter of money?” we cannot help feeling that more jesting glideth through the lips than wots Joe Miller of, or even my good friend Mr. Punch, whom I have never thanked as I ought to have done for the pretty compliment he paid me some time ago.

And now let any somnolent reader who has tried on my night-cap wake himself up, and take down excellent Mr. Allibone's great Dictionary of Authors and turn to Burton. He will find what a high estimate was placed upon the work I have been getting my scant spicilegium out of for his entertainment. It was greatly esteemed by Johnson, by Sterne, who showed his regard by helping himself to his pleasantry and pathos, and by various other less generally known writers. Byron says that if the reader has patience to go through The Anatomy of Melancholy “he will be more improved for literary conversation than by the perusal of any twenty other works with which I am acquainted.”

I did not read it to equip myself for “literary conversation,” but to predispose myself to somnolence; and if, as I hope, this article shall prove as effective in bringing about that result for the reader as the book was for myself, it will have fully answered my tamest expectations.