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 poets, or sentences from
classical authors; which, being then all the fashion in the university,
made his company more acceptable.'

Burton left behind him a large and curious collection of books, the
nature of which he well describes in his Address to the Reader of his
_Anatomy of Melancholy_: 'I hear new news every day, and those ordinary
rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres,
meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken,
cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, etc., daily
musters and preparations, and such like, which these tempestuous times
afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks,
piracies, and sea-fights; peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh
alarms.... New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole
catalogues of volumes of all sorts.... Now come tidings of weddings,
maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilies, embassies, tilts and
tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays: then again, as
in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous
villanies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of princes, new
discoveries, expeditions, now comical, then tragical matters.' He
appears to have purchased indiscriminately almost everything that was
published.

In his will, dated August 15th, 1639, he gives directions for the
disposal of his books:--

'Now for my goods I thus dispose them. First I give an Cth pounds to
Christ Church in Oxford where I have so long lived to buy five pounds
Lands per Ann. to be Yearly bestowed on Books for the Library. Item I
give an hundreth pound to the University Library of Oxford to be
bestowed to purchase five pound Land per Ann. to be paid out Yearly on
Books.... If I have any Books the University Library hath not, let them
take them. If I have any Books our own Library hath not, let them take
them.' After bequeathing books to various friends, he directs, 'If any
books be left let my Executors dispose of them with all such books as
are written with my own hands and half my Melancholy Copy for Crips hath
the other half. To Mr. Jones Chaplin and Chanter my Surveying Books and
Instruments.'

In addition to _The Anatomy of M