Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/247

Rh for human melancholy. By melancholy he practically means, or comes to mean, unhappiness, discontent. His book is thus a survey, enormously erudite, occasionally eloquent, always shrewd, and quietly humorous, of "the ills that flesh is heir to." Democritus Junior the author calls himself, after the philosopher who, according to tradition, always laughed at the follies and vanities of mankind. In a long ironical and humorous preface, which contains the quintessence of the whole work, he gives some account of himself, and a broad survey of human misery. Thereafter he plunges into a systematic discussion of the causes, symptoms, and cure of melancholy. This is followed by a more particular description of Love Melancholy and Religious Melancholy. There is a certain parade of anatomy and medicine, but the author takes a wider range than the merely medical. Everything is a cause of melancholy—God, the devil and other evil spirits, magicians and witches, nurses, education, study, &c.; and on each and every one of these sources he dilates with an infinite display of learning—there is not a sentence without a quotation—occasionally passages of real eloquence, and a never-failing undercurrent of irony. In the division entitled Love of Learning or Overmuch Study, with a Digression of the Misery of Scholars and why the Muses are Melancholy, he discusses with a gusto, fully appreciated by Dr Johnson, who strikes the same note in The Vanity of Human Wishes, the sorrows of scholars, and closes with a vigorous, partly English, partly Latin, denunciation of Simony. He opens the