y [1052]discontented,
passionate, and miserable persons, swarthy, black; but such as are most
merry and pleasant, scoffers, and high coloured." "Generally," saith
Rhasis, [1053]"the finest wits and most generous spirits, are before other
obnoxious to it;" I cannot except any complexion, any condition, sex, or
age, but [1054]fools and stoics, which, according to [1055]Synesius, are
never troubled with any manner of passion, but as Anacreon's _cicada, sine
sanguine et dolore; similes fere diis sunt_. Erasmus vindicates fools from
this melancholy catalogue, because they have most part moist brains and
light hearts; [1056]they are free from ambition, envy, shame and fear; they
are neither troubled in conscience, nor macerated with cares, to which our
whole life is most subject.

SUBSECT. III.--_Of the Matter of Melancholy_.

Of the matter of melancholy, there is much question betwixt Avicen and
Galen, as you may read in [1057]Cardan's Contradictions, [1058]Valesius'
Controversies, Montanus, Prosper Calenus, Capivaccius, [1059]Bright,
[1060]Ficinus, that have written either whole tracts, or copiously of it,
in their several treatises of this subject. [1061]"What this humour is, or
whence it proceeds, how it is engendered in the body, neither Galen, nor
any old writer hath sufficiently discussed," as Jacchinus thinks: the
Neoterics cannot agree. Montanus, in his Consultations, holds melancholy to
be material or immaterial: and so doth Arculanus: the material is one of
the four humours before mentioned, and natural. The immaterial or
adventitious, acquisite, redundant, unnatural, artificial; which [1062]
Hercules de Saxonia will have reside in the spirits alone, and to proceed
from a "hot, cold, dry, moist distemperature, which, without matter, alter
the brain and functions of it." Paracelsus wholly rejects and derides this
division of four humours and complexions, but our Galenists generally
approve of it, subscribing to this opinion of Montanus.

This material melancholy is either simple or mixed; offending in quantity
or quality, varying according to his place, where it settleth, as brain,
spleen, mesaraic veins, heart, womb, and stomach; or differing according to
the mixture of those natural humours amongst themselves, or four unnatural
adust humours, as they are diversely tempered and mingled. If natural
melancholy abound in the body, which is cold and dry, "so that it be more
[1063]than the body is well able to bear,