The anatomy of melancholy Author:Robert Burton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: melancholy. To procure ease of mind he turned over such medical treatises as he could find in public libraries or in his friends' collections. Why add to the num... more »ber of books ? It is but repetition and pilfering. Our eyes ache with reading, and our fingers are weary of turning the page. Burton shelters himself behind Macrobius' saying, " Omne nteum, nihil meum, 'tis all mine and none mine." He owns that he has laboriously " collected this cento out of divers authors," but declares that he had given every author his due. He had digested what others had written, but the method was all his own. His apology for his borrowings is made in a spirit of pleasantry, but at the same time with a full sense of his own dignity and literary skill:—" The composition and method is ours only, and shows a scholar." A scholar, and much besides: a curious master of language; a shrewd observer, a subtle enquirer; a spirit dowered with kindliest humour and inexhaustible fancy. Having vindicated his claim to originality, Burton is pleasantly apologetical again. His book, he protests, is a vain, idle treatise, not worth the reading :—" I should be peradventure loth myself to read him or thee so writing, 'tis not opera pretium." In the course of his apology, he states that it had been his original intention to write in Latin. But " our mercenary stationers" would not take the risk of issuing the book in Latin ; so he was compelled (happy compulsion!) to employ English. He would have been glad to revise the matter, and correct the style, more carefully ; but opportunity was wanting. He begs the reader's indulgence on the ground that he had no amanuenses or assistants. Pancrates (in Lucian) was able by magic to turn a door-bar into a serving man, but Burton never arrived at such skill in magic. Origen was all...« less