children,
Europeans; Asians, hot and cold climes; sanguine are merry, melancholy sad,
phlegmatic dull, by reason of abundance of those humours, and they cannot
resist such passions which are inflicted by them. For in this infirmity of
human nature, as Melancthon declares, the understanding is so tied to, and
captivated by his inferior senses, that without their help he cannot
exercise his functions, and the will being weakened, hath but a small power
to restrain those outward parts, but suffers herself to be overruled by
them; that I must needs conclude with Lemnius, _spiritus et humores maximum
nocumentum obtinent_, spirits and humours do most harm in [2408]troubling
the soul. How should a man choose but be choleric and angry, that hath his
body so clogged with abundance of gross humours? or melancholy, that is so
inwardly disposed? That thence comes then this malady, madness, apoplexies,
lethargies, &c. it may not be denied.

Now this body of ours is most part distempered by some precedent diseases,
which molest his inward organs and instruments, and so _per consequens_
cause melancholy, according to the consent of the most approved physicians.
[2409]"This humour" (as Avicenna _l. 3. Fen. 1. Tract. 4. c. 18._ Arnoldus
_breviar. l. 1. c. 18._ Jacchinus _comment. in 9 Rhasis, c. 15._ Montaltus,
_c. 10._ Nicholas Piso _c. de Melan._ &c. suppose) "is begotten by the
distemperature of some inward part, innate, or left after some
inflammation, or else included in the blood after an [2410]ague, or some
other malignant disease." This opinion of theirs concurs with that of
Galen, _l. 3. c. 6. de locis affect_. Guianerius gives an instance in one
so caused by a quartan ague, and Montanus _consil. 32._ in a young man of
twenty-eight years of age, so distempered after a quartan, which had
molested him five years together; Hildesheim _spicel. 2. de Mania_, relates
of a Dutch baron, grievously tormented with melancholy after a long
[2411]ague: Galen, _l. de atra bile, c. 4._ puts the plague a cause.
Botaldus in his book _de lue vener. c. 2._ the French pox for a cause,
others, frenzy, epilepsy, apoplexy, because those diseases do often
degenerate into this. Of suppression of haemorrhoids, haemorrhagia, or
bleeding at the nose, menstruous retentions, (although they deserve a
larger explication, as being the sole cause of a proper kind of melancholy,
in more ancient maids, nuns and widows, handled apart by Rodericus a
Castro, and Mer