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From Blackwood's Magazine. question in succession all the Fellows of the BURTON'S ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY. college where he will dine to-day as to their WHEN that well-known British traveller, own personal acquaintance with the Anatomy Leo Rusticus, Esq., pays his visit to Oxford of Melancholy, he would scarcely find more with his interesting daughters about Com-than one among them who had read the memoration time, and makes the tour of the book. He would discover that their knowluniversity under the eyes of criticising un- edge of it, like his own, had been gained dergraduates, he usually finds his way at from passing allusions to it in other writers, last into Christchurch Cathedral. True, or bibliographical notices in booksellers' catthere is very little to be seen there, for it is alogues. They will all have heard, no doubt, about the ugliest possible of collegiate that it was the only book that could get the churches; still, it is a cathedral, and there- great Samuel Johnson out of bed two hours fore, like other cathedrals, to be "done" as before his wont in the morning; but its presa duty. And, feeling this, like the British ent effect upon the early rising of Oxford Lion in general, he does it. There, amongst would be admitted to be quite inappreciable. other objects of interest, the attendant verger The truth is, that Burton's book is what will point out to him (if he does his duty) everybody has heard of, and few people have in the north aisle, high up against a pillar, read. Its popularity was always uncertain, a small bust, with a Latin inscription under- and subject to ebbs and flows. At its first neath, and a queer-looking diagram stuck appearance it seems to have been quite what rather awkwardly on one side of it, which we should now call the book of the season. the young ladies will probably at the first The author himself, in his Address to the glance take for a sundial, but which is, in Reader prefixed to the fourth edition, tells truth, an astrological calculation of a nativ- us that "the first, second, and third editions ity. 'Burton, sir," says the verger, suc- were suddenly gone, eagerly read, and not cinctly pointing up to it-"author of the so much approved by some, as scornfully reAnatomy-formerly student of this house." jected by others." Whether the author profThe young ladies conclude him to have been ited or not, in a pecuniary way, by this rapid some medical celebrity; but papa with the sale, the booksellers, according to Antony-asuperior information for which the gentlemen Wood (not an authority always to be trusted), of the family of Rusticus have always been got an estate by it, having disposed of no distinguished, volunteers a word of explana- less than eight editions-five in Burton's tion-" Anatomy of Melancholy, you know, lifetime. It afterwards fell into comparative my dears." Neither of the dears know much neglect. Mr. Steevens remarks that it "is about it; but the verger strikes in. Yes, not noticed by either Addison, Pope, or sir," says that worthy, "he was a very mel- Swift; nay, it even escaped the notice of ancholy gentleman, and is supposed to have that excursive reader, Arbuthnot, who was destroyed himself; and that's his horror- familiarly acquainted with more books than scope." Miss Leonina, not at all disposed the preceding triumvirate ever heard of." at present to anatomize melancholy, skips on It rose again into temporary demand, owing to the next monument; and papa, after a to the laudatory notices of it by Johnson, nod intended to imply that the whole sub- Warton, and others-the price of a copy ject is familiar to him, thinks it as well to rising in consequence, says Steevens, "from follow. He knows he has the book upon one shilling and sixpence to a guinea and a his library shelves at home, and has an half," but soon relapsed into comparative impression that it is considered a clever neglect; and although it has always had its thing; but he is by no means prepared to enthusiastic readers and admirers, the readundergo an extempore examination as to its ing public in general has been content to contents. He has seen the work so often take its merits upon trust. Such is the fate alluded to, and in such high terms of praise, at present of many an author's works more that he has little doubt but that all the edu-worthy than even old Burton to be ranked cated world are perfectly well acquainted with it, and that his own ignorance on the subject is highly inexcusable. He need not judge himself so hardly. If he were to

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amongst our English classics. There they are, in rows along the walls of our libraries, like ladies of a certain age in a ball-room, well known by name and sight, and highly

respected, but whom no gentleman has the order to enable any ambitious friend to hardihood to take in hand. It would be an shine as a talker at a modern intellectual interesting branch of literary statistics, and dinner-party. We doubt very much whether, might lead to some rather startling results, even in the poet's own day, such an underto ascertain what proportion of professed taking would have repaid an aspirant to conadmirers of Shakspeare have any intimate versational eminence. Such authorities as acquaintance with his plays beyond what Mr. Peter Lombard, and Jerome Cardan, and Kean has given them, or how many who talk Lipsius, and Paracelsus, or even Lucian (and familiarly of the great Lord Bacon ever these are household names compared with read a line of his, except in a quotation. some of Burton's out-of-the-way acquaintSouthey once said that if his library (four-ances), if introduced in conversation either teen thousand volumes) were necessarily cut in this or the last generation, would be down to nineteen, it should consist of Shaks- likely to win for a man little reputation expeare, Spenser, and Milton; Jeremy Taylor, cept for pedantry. But if the volumes seem South, and Thomas Jackson as divines; Lord Clarendon, Isaak Walton, Sir Thos. Brown, Fuller's Church History, and Sidney's Arcadia. There can be very little doubt that a small travelling library so selected-say for a modern English gentleman going out for ten years to China-would at least have one important recommendation-way since his death; and it is a pity that he most of them would be, to all intents and purposes, new books, and would probably last him a long time.

to have been rather overrated as a storehouse for talkers, they were no doubt found exceedingly useful for another class, quite as important, and very nearly as large,-the writers who "wished to acquire the reputation of being well read with the least trouble." Burton's brains have been well picked in this

could not have returned for awhile in his own person to detect and castigate, in his own peculiar style, those who availed themWe will not make any apology, in these selves of his prodigious reading, and excurdays of æsthetic revivalism, when we are all sive forays into all manner of unknown litwearing our grandmothers' hoops, and going erary districts, to gain for themselves the back to worse than our great-grandfathers' credit of original research. Hearne calls superstitions, for a re-introduction of our the book, in his day, "a commonplace for readers to Robert Burton and his Anatomy. filchers." Anthony Wood says the same; A book which fascinated men of such differ-"it is so full," says he, "of variety of readent minds as Samuel Johnson and Charles ing, that gentlemen who have lost their time, Lamb, Lord Byron and Archbishop Herring, and are put to a push for invention, may furdoes not deserve to lie unread. Possibly the nish themselves with matter for scholastical terms in which Byron speaks of it may seem discourse and writing. Several authors have to recommend it especially to the taste of stolen matter from the said book without any the present day. "The book," says he, " in acknowledgment." It may seem almost my opinion, most useful to a man who wishes treason to place Milton in the foreground of to acquire the reputation of being well read these; but there can be no doubt but that at with the least trouble, is Burton's Anatomy least the idea, if not some of the imagery, of Melancholy; the most amusing and in- of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso are taken from structive medley of quotations and classical the" Dialogue between Pleasure and Pain," anecdotes I ever perused. But a superficial or "The Author's Abstract of Melancholy," reader must take care, or his intricacies will bewilder him. If, however, he has patience to go through his volumes, he will be more improved for literary conversation than by the perusal of any twenty other works with which I am acquainted-at least in the English language." We cannot so far endorse this statement of Lord Byron as to recommend a reading-up of the Anatomy in *Moore's Life of Byron (Murray, 1832), vol. i.

p. 144.

which Burton prefixed to his book; though the dazzling wealth of language and fancy with which Milton has clothed the thought has no prototype in his quaint predecessor, whose verses, nevertheless, have considerable beauty of their own. We may presume that most of the plunderers to whom Wood and others allude have escaped the notice of posterity because the stolen property has passed into oblivion with the rest of their work: the only thief who appears to have

"I have lived a silent, sedentary, solitary, private life, mihi et Musis, in the university, as long almost as Xenocrates at Athens, ad senectam fere, to learn wisdom as he did, penned up most part in my study. . . . For thirty years I have continued a scholar-left to a solitary life and my own domestic dismeutiar), as Diogenes went into the city and contents; saving that sometimes (ne quid Democritus to the haven, to see fashions, I did for my recreation now and then walk abroad, look into the world, and could not choose but make some little observation."

been convicted and executed is Sterne. Dr. in Leicestershire, but at neither of these Ierriar brought him to justice; and if any places does he ever appear to have resided. proof were required of the little acquaintance which the reading world in Sterne's time had with the remarkable work of Burton, it may be found in the fact that amongst all the admirers of Tristram Shandy not one seems to have recognized the borrowed feathers of wit and fancy which the writer so unblushingly paraded. It seems to a reader of the present day almost incomprehensible that one who possessed such remarkable original powers as Sterne did, should have ventured to risk his reputation as an author by such bold plagiarisms as those, for instance, which Dr. Ferriar points out in the "Fragment on Whiskers." Nothing can satisfactorily explain it, but an impudent confidence that the literary triflers of the day, who delighted in his clever double entendres, and took out their scented handkerchiefs at his tinsel sentiment, would have only sneered at the officious bookworm who should be so troublesome as to refer them to an old, musty folio for the source of some of their favorite's originalities.

The character which Wood gives of him is somewhat contradictory; "as he was by many accounted a severe student, a devourer of authors, a melancholy and humorous person; so by others, who knew him well, a person of great honesty, plain dealing, and charity. I have heard some of the ancients of Christchurch often say that his company was very merry, facete, and juvenile; and no man in his time did surpass him for his ready and dexterous interlarding his common discourses among them with verses from the But it is time to introduce our present poets, or sentences from classic authors, readers to Burton himself. Of his life, un- which being then all the fashion in the unifortunately, little is known beyond the very versity, made his company the more acceptdriest facts. That he was a younger son of able." There is no doubt but that he was an old Leicestershire family, educated at what we should now call a very eccentric Sutton Coldfield and Nuneaton grammar- character; he had probably injured his schools, entered as a commoner of Brasen- health by close reading, and had that mornose at the age of seventeen, and thence bid self-consciousness which has often been elected a student of Christchurch, are not the bane of scholars. There seems also to particulars which help us much towards a have been a certain amount of affectation in picture of the man. It was within the walls his character. He was not content with asof the latter college that he appears to have suming the name of "Democritus junior "in passed his life, with only occasional visits his book, but appears to have worked himto the country. There he wrote the Anat- self up into the notion that he really bore omy, and there he died and was buried. He some resemblance to the original Democriwas presented by his college to the vicarage tus. The character which he draws of his of St. Thomas in Oxford; together with prototype in the "Address to the Reader," which he held, from the gift of private pa- which serves as the long preface to his Anattrons, first the rectory of Walesby in Linomy, is applicable in almost every particular colnshire, and afterwards that of Seagrave to his own tastes and pursuits as described * Tristram Shandy, vol. v. ch. i. orig. edit.," The both by himself and others. The philosoLady Baussiere rode on," etc. We refer our read-pher of Abdera was, he says,—

ers to Ferriar's Illustrations of Sterne for the comparison of this passage with the original in the Anatomy (part iii. sect. 1, memb. 3): "Show some

"A little wearish old man, very melan

...

;

pitty, for Christ's sake," etc. Other instances of choly by nature, averse from company in his Sterne's obligations to Burton are, Mr. Shandy's latter days, and much given to solitariness letter to Uncle Toby, with its obsolete medical wholly addicted to his studies to the practices; his philosophical consolations upon last, and to a private life; a great divine, acUncle Toby's death; his notions on government; the story of Abderites raving about "O Cupid, prince of gods and men," etc."

I.e., in the old sense of the word, "whimsical, capricious."

cording to the divinity of those times, an a Boswell, his biography might have been expert physician, a politician, an excellent almost as amusing as the great doctor's. mathematician, as Diacosmus and the rest Here is a quaint sketch of him which Hearne of his works do witness. He was much dehas preserved :lighted with the studies of husbandry, saith Columella. . . . In a word, he was omnifariam doctus, a general scholar, a great student;... a man of an excellent wit, profound conceit,... wholly betaking himself to his studies and a private life, saving that sometimes he would walk down to the haven, and laugh heartily at such variety of ridiculous objects which there he saw."

Aug. 2, 1713.-The Earl of Southampton went into a shop and inquired of the bookseller for Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Mr. Burton sat in a corner of the shop at that time. Says the bookseller, My lord, if you please, I can show you the author.' He did so. 'Mr. Burton,' says the earl, 'your servant.' 'Mr. Southampton,' says Mr. Burton, 'your servant.' And away he

went.

He died at his rooms in Christchurch, Jan. 6, 1639; so near the time which he had himself foretold some years before from a calculation of his own nativity, that, as we are

"several of the students did not forbear to

The philosopher of Christchurch resembled his model in very many points of this character, and perhaps believed himself to resemble it even more completely. "He was an exact mathematician," says Wood "a curious calculator of nativities, a general told by Antony Wood (who never misses an read scholar, a thorough-paced philologist, opportunity of saying an ill-natured thing), and one that understood the surveying of lands well." That he was also an able divine, whisper among themselves, that rather than and possessed sufficient medical knowledge there should be a mistake in the calculation, to have set him up as a very respectable he sent up his soul to heaven through a slip physician, is evident from the testimony of about his neck." He was buried, as we have seen, in the cathedral, with a short Latin epitaph, said to have been composed by himself, and which is not free from the tinge of vanity and affectation which marked his character:

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his remarkable book. As to Democritus' love of husbandry, "if my testimony were ought worth, I could say as much of myself," writes Burton. "I am vere Saturninus; no man ever took more delight in springs, woods, groves, gardens, walks, fish-ponds, rivers, etc." But there is one curious habit recorded of him, which seems to show that he studied for the character, and was quite willing that the world of Oxford should recognize in him the eccentricities as well as the learning of the original Laughing Philosopher: "Nothing could make him laugh but going to the bridge-foot and hearing the ribaldry of the bargemen, which rarely failed to throw him into a violent fit of laughter."* It is impossible not to see in this an absurd copy of Democritus at the haven of Abdera. Probably the facilities of modern railway traffic, which have interfered so seriously with the profits of the Oxford Navigation Company, have also had a depressing effect upon the jocosity of the bargemen; for Democritus himself would find a difficulty in catching a joke upon Folly Bridge now.

It is a great pity that more anecdotes of Burton have not been recorded, for he must have been a singular character as well as an amusing companion. We can fancy that, if he had been fortunate enough to meet with * Granger's Biog. Hist.

"Paucis notus, paucioribus ignotus,
Hic jacet Democritus junior,
Cui vitam dedit et mortem
Melancholia."

The only known productions of his pen, besides that which has handed him down to fame, were a Latin comedy called Philosophaster, acted at Christchurch in 1617, of which no copy is known to exist; and some epitaphs in Latin verse, which are by no means equal in neatness and elegance to the elegiac lines, "Ad lribum suum," prefixed to the Anatomy. But it is probable that other productions of his pen existed in MS. (and may exist still), since in his will he leaves to the disposal of his executors "all such books as are written with my own hands." He made a bequest to the Bodleian Library of a curious collection of pamphlets and tracts, historical and miscellaneous, very many of which are probably unique.

A few glances at hazard into the pages of the Anatomy will be enough to enable any one to understand the secret of the enthusiasm with which it has been regarded by some *Hearne's Reliquiæ, edit. Bliss, vol. i. p. 288.

readers, and the neglect which it has experienced at the hands of others. Every page is loaded with quotations; and, what with the Latin and the italics, has such a learned and technical look, that one can easily imagine many a rambler in an old library shutting such a book in hopeless dismay. The amount of Latin in the text itself is considerable, though sometimes the author has the consideration to translate his quotations, and remit the original to the footnotes; but there is quite enough even in the allusions to make the book unsatisfactory except to a classical scholar. Indeed, so full is it of sentences in the more learned tongue, that Nicholls * says, "It has been doubted whether it was originally written in Latin or English." Burton seems at least to have had some hesitation in the choice; he almost apologizes to himself and his readers for using the vulgar tongue; "It was not mine intent to prostitute my muse in English, or to divulge secreta Minerva, but to have exposed this more contract in Latin if I could have got it printed. Any scurrile pamphlet is welcome to our mercenary stationers in English, but in Latin they will not deal." When he gets upon the subject of abuses in the Church (which he probably considered as among Minerva's secrets), and wishes to lash out into that classical billingsgate of which critics were once so fond, he gives us whole pages of original Latin. † It is not fair to say of it, as has been said, that it is a mere cento of quotations, though it is true that such is the title which Burton himself bestows upon it in his preface, perhaps with some little affectation of humility—" I have laboriously collected this cento out of divers writers." He professes also, though only half in earnest, to use the shield of authority against those who might feel offended at the severity of his satire,-"It is not I, but they, that say it." Yet, while the author thus guarded himself against ill-natured critics by this self-denying ordinance at the outset, he would have been little pleased to have heard this term applied to it by any one except himself. If it be a cento, it is not to that fact that it owes either its interest or its reputation. No work ever more fully illustrated the words of Horace

"Tantum series juncturaque pollet." Hist. of Leicestershire, vol. iii. part i. p. 558. † See part i. sect. 2, memb. 3, subs. 15.

Burton could say with the greatest truth"The matter is theirs most part, and yet mine ;-that which nature does with the aliment of our bodies, incorporate, digest, assimilate, I do-concoquere quod hausi-dispose of what I take. The method only is mine own." It is this method-this lucidus ordo-which is at once the merit and the charm of the book. To make it a detraction from Burton's claims as an author, that he collected his materials instead of manufacturing them, is much like complaining of a successful architect, that, after all, he did not make his own bricks.

But full indeed it is, in every sense, of rich material collected from all sources. One does not know whether most to admire the wealth of the learning or the originality of many of the applications. Heathen classics, Fathers of the Christian Church, Arabian physicians, German scholars, Dutch historians, travellers and philosophers of all nations and ages, are pressed into the service

frequently only a few words from each, fitted into the context in a sort of literary mosaic, wonderful to examine. Never was criticism less happy than that of Granger, that "if he had made more use of his invention, and less of his commonplace book, his work would perhaps have been more valuable than it is." No one would have been more disgusted at so mistaken a compliment than Democritus himself. He would have us believe, indeed, with that affectation from which no author seems quite to escape, that he wrote his treatise somewhat in haste:

"I was enforced, as a bear doth her whelps, to bring forth this confused lump; I had not time to lick it into form, as she doth her young ones, but even so to publish it as it was first written, quidquid in buccam venit; in an extemporean style (as I commonly do all other exercises), effudi quidquid dictavit genius meus; out of a confused company of notes, and writ with as small deliberation as I do ordinarily speak."

It is remarkable to find so acute a critic as Dr. Ferriar accepting this statement of Burton's as a true history of his authorship, and believing that he poured his quotations out on paper as fast as they came into his head. On the contrary, Burton's arrangement is, as has been already observed, a peculiar excellency in his book, and shows it to have