Robert Burton, author of the “Anatomy of Melancholy,” was born at Lindley, Leicestershire, on the 8th February 1576. He attended the grammar schools of Nuneaton and Sutton Coldfields, and at the age of seventeen entered Brasenose College, Oxford. In 1599 he was elected student of Christ Church, and in 1614 took the degree of B.D. In 1616 he was presented to the Vicarage of St. Thomas, and in 1636 to the rectory of Segrave. He died on the 25th of January 1639–40. “The Anatomy of Melancholy, what it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and several cures of it: In three partitions, with their several sections, members, and sub-sections, philosophically, medicinally, historically opened and cut up: By Democritus Junior, with a satyrical preface conducing to the following discourse,” was published in 1621. Our information with regard to the strange author of this strange book is very scanty.

Personal

  He was an exact mathematician, a curious calculator of nativities, a general read scholar, a thoro’-pac’d philologist, and one that understood the surveying of lands well. 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 Ch. Ch. 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 poets or sentences from classical authors. Which being then all the fashion in the university, made his company more acceptable…. He the said R. Burton paid his last debt to nature, in his chamber in Ch. Ch. at, or very near that time, which he had some years before foretold from the calculation of his own nativity. Which being exact, several of the students did not forbear to whisper among themselves, that rather than there should be a mistake in the calculation, he sent up his soul to heaven thro’ a slip about his neck. His body was afterwards with due solemnity buried near that of Dr. Rob. Weston, in the north aisle which joyns next to the choir of the Cath. of Ch. Church, on the 27 of January in sixteen hundred thirty and nine. Over his grave was soon after erected a comely monument on the upper pillar of the said isle, with his bust painted to the life: On the right hand of which, is the calculation of his nativity, and under the bust this inscription made by himself; all put up by the care of William Burton his brother. Paucis notus, paucioribus ignotus, hic jacet Democritus junior, cui vitam dedit, &c., mortem Melancholia. Obiit viii. Id. Jan. A. C. M. DCXXXIX. He left behind him a very choice library of books, many of which he bequeathed to that of Bodley, and a hundred pounds to buy five pounds yearly for the supplying of Ch. Ch. library with books.

  The earl of Southampton went into a shop and inquired of the bookseller for Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholly.” Mr. Burton sate in a corner of the shop at that time. Says the bookseller, My lord, if you please, I can shew you the author. He did so. Mr. Burton, says the earl, your servant. Mr. Southampton, says Mr. Burton, your servant, and away he went.

  Mr. Burton was one of the most facetious and pleasant companions of that age, but his conversation was very innocent. It was the way then to mix a great deal of Latin in discoursing, at which he was wonderfull ready, (in the manner his book is wrote,) which is now looked upon as pedantry. Ant. à Wood was a great admirer of Mr. Burton, and of the books he bequeathed to the Bodleian library, a great many of which were little historicall diverting pamphlets, now grown wonderfull scarce, which Mr. Burton used to divert himself with, as he did with other little merry books, of which there are many in his benefaction, one of which is “The History of Tom Thumb.”

Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621

  Wherein he hath piled up variety of much excellent Learning…. Scarce any Book of Philology in our Land hath in so short a time passed so many Impressions.

  ’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. Several authors have unmercifully stolen matter from the said book without any acknowledgment.

  If you never saw Burton upon Melancholy, printed 1676, pray look into it, and read the ninth page of his Preface, “Democritus to the Reader.” There is something there which touches the point we are upon; but I mention the author to you, as the pleasantest, the most learned, and the most full of sterling sense. The wits of Queen Anne’s reign, and the beginning of George the First, were not a little beholden to him.

  Jan. 23.  No book sold better formerly than Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy,” in which there is great variety of learning, so that it hath been a common-place for filchers. It hath a great many impressions, and the bookseller got an estate by it; but now ’tis disregarded, and a good fair perfect copy (altho’ of the 7th impression) may be purchased for one shilling, well bound, which occasion’d a gentleman yesterday (who observ’d how many books, that were topping books formerly, and were greedily bought at great prices, were turn’d to wast paper) to say, that sir Isaac Newton he believ’d, would also in time be turned to wast paper; an observation which is very likely to prove true.

  He compiled “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” a book which has been universally read and admired. This work is, for the most part, what the author himself styles it “a Cento;” but it is a very ingenious one. His quotations, which abound in every page, are pertinent; but if he had made more use of his invention, and less of his common-place book, his work would perhaps have been more valuable than it is. He is generally free from the affected language, and ridiculous metaphors, which disgrace most of the books of his time.

  Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy,” he said, was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise.

  It will be no detraction from the power of Milton’s original genius and invention, to remark, that he seems to have borrowed the subject of “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” together with some particular thoughts, expressions, and rhymes, more especially the idea of a contrast between these two dispositions, from a forgotten poem prefixed to the first edition of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, entitled, “The Author’s Abstract of Melancholy; or, A Dialogue between Pleasure and Pain.” Here pain is Melancholy. It was written, as I conjecture, about the year 1600. I will make no apology for abstracting and citing as much of this poem as will be sufficient to prove, to a discerning reader, how far it had taken possession of Milton’s mind. The measure will appear to be the same; and that our author was at least an attentive reader of Burton’s book, may be already concluded from the traces of resemblance which I have incidentally noticed in passing through the “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.”… As to the very elaborate work to which these visionary verses are no unsuitable introduction, 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.

  The book, in my opinion, most useful to a man who wishes to acquire the reputation of being well read, with the least trouble, is Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy,” the most amusing and instructive medley of quotations and classical anecdotes I ever perused. But a superficial 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.

  After all, we know little or nothing of the extraordinary author of this extraordinary production—which, it has been said, was the only work that could force Dr. Johnson from his bed two hours earlier than he wished to rise. This might have happened once—in his life: for Burton’s book is, in a great measure, a task to peruse. You can scarcely travel through thirty pages, without taking at least a good long breathing pause. The multiplicity, the redundancy, the faint forced analogy, of the quotations—the utter absurdity of the physical illustrations—and the limited knowledge of pathology, are heavy clogs to a free and unrestrained, perusal.

  Mary bids me warn you not to read the “Anatomy of Melancholy” in your present low way. You’ll fancy yourself a pipkin or a headless bear, as Burton speaks of. You’ll be lost in a maze of remedies for a labyrinth of diseasements—a plethora of cures.

  He is clogged by excess of reading, like others of his age; and we may peruse entire chapters without finding more than a few lines that belong to himself. This becomes a wearisome style; and, for my own part, I have not found much pleasure in glancing over the “Anatomy of Melancholy.” It may be added, that he has been a collector of stories, far more strange than true, from those records of figments, the old medical writers of the sixteenth century, and other equally deceitful sources.

  The book was, in truth, no mere literary feat, but the genuine counterpart, in a strange literary form, of a mind as unusual. Burton’s place is in that extraordinary class of humorists, of which, in modern times, Rabelais, Swift, and Jean Paul are, though with obvious mutual differences, the other best known examples.

  As a writer, Burton ranks, in some points, with Montaigne, and in others with Sir Thomas Browne. He resembles the first in simplicity, bonhommie, and miscellaneous learning, and the other in rambling manner, quaint phraseology, and fantastic imagination. Neither of the three could be said to write books, but they accumulated vast storehouses, whence thousands of volumes might be, and have been compiled. There is nothing in Burton so low as in many of the “Essays” of Montaigne, but there is nothing so lofty as in passages of Browne’s “Religio Medici” and “Urn-Burial.” Burton has been a favourite quarry to literary thieves, among whom Sterne, in his “Tristram Shandy,” stands pre-eminent.

  It is an extraordinary accumulation of out-of-the-way learning, interspersed, somewhat in the manner of Montaigne’s “Essays,” with original matter, but with this among other differences,—that in Montaigne the quotations have the air of being introduced, as we know that in fact they were, to illustrate the original matter, which is the web of the discourse, they but the embroidery; whereas in Burton the learning is rather the web, upon which what he has got to say of his own is worked in by way of forming a sort of decorative figure. Burton is far from having the variety or abundance of Montaigne; but there is considerable point and penetration in his style, and he says many striking things in a sort of half-splenetic, half-jocular humor, which many readers have found wonderfully stimulating.

  Burton had an odd sort of humor, and an idle hour may be whiled away pleasantly enough by opening his book almost anywhere; but, as for science, it is not to writers of his stamp that one must go for that.

  An ecclesiastic and university recluse, who passed his life in libraries, and dabbled in all the sciences, as learned as Rabelais, of an inexhaustible and overflowing memory; unequal, moreover, gifted with enthusiasm, and spasmodically gay, but as a rule sad and morose, to the extent of confessing in his epitaph that melancholy made up his life and his death; in the first place original, enamoured of his own intelligence, and one of the earliest models of that singular English mood which, withdrawing man within himself, develops in him, at one time imagination, at another scrupulousness, at another oddity, and makes of him, according to circumstances, a poet, and eccentric, a humorist, a madman, or a puritan. He read on for thirty years, put an encyclopædia into his head, and now, to amuse and relieve himself, takes a folio of blank paper. Twenty lines of a poet, a dozen lines of a treatise on agriculture, a folio column of heraldry, the patience, the record of the fever fits of hypochondria, the history of the particle que, a scrap of metaphysics,—this is what passes through his brain in a quarter of an hour: it is a carnival of ideas and phrases, Greek, Latin, German, French, Italian, philosophical, geometrical, medical, poetical, astrological, musical, pedagogic, heaped one on the other; an enormous medley, a prodigious mass of jumbled quotations, jostling thoughts with the vivacity and the transport of a feast of unreason.

  One of the most fascinating books in literature…. Commonplace writers have described the “Anatomy” as a mere collection of quotations, a piece of patchwork. The description is utterly untrue. On every page is the impress of a singularly deep and original genius. As a humorist Burton bears some resemblance to Sir Thomas Browne; this vein of semi-serious humour is, to his admirers, one of the chief attractions of his style.

  An excellent book to steal from—whether quotations or crusty notions of the author’s own.

  Burton occupied rather more than twenty years, from the time of his election to a position of learned ease, in shaping his book for its first appearance in 1621: he spent rather less than another twenty in refashioning and perfecting the work. Frequently as it has been reprinted, no attempt has ever yet been made to execute a critical edition, indicating the variations which were thus introduced by him on the four occasions when reissues were called for in his own lifetime. These alterations and additions are very numerous and very considerable, and the author not unfrequently draws attention to them in the text. But he has never, in making them, broken through the singular unity and control of treatment which the book shows. As far as the minutiæ of style are concerned, Burton’s characteristics are well marked, and not very numerous. His method of quotation obliges him of necessity to immense sentences, or rather clauseheaps. But it is noteworthy that when he intermits citation and narrates or argues in his own person he is less, not more, given than his contemporaries to the long sentence, and frequently has a distinctly terse and crisp arrangement of the members of his paragraph.

  There is entertainment in old Burton, because the man sometimes gets the better of his memory.

  It is in his consolatory chapters that Burton’s true worth shines forth, and compels our admiration. He is here no longer the disappointed, churlish cynic, nor does he in these pages, as he often seems to do elsewhere, exhibit a longing, Paracelsus-like, to save mankind, while he yet tramples on it, but, throwing off his ill-fitting disguise, shows himself the good honest fellow he really is—a comforter of the distressed, a sympathiser with the afflicted, a compassionate friend, a true, staunch champion of the oppressed and sorrowful.

  Accumulates epithets and multiplies quotations, until it is these, and not his theme, that engage the amused and bewildered mind.