taste of
the character and style of the text, though, unlike that text, it is not
scholastically divided. The division begins with the text itself, and even
the laziest reader will find the synopses of Burton's "partitions" a
curious study. It is impossible to be, at least in appearance, more
methodical, and all the typographical resources of brackets (sub-bracketed
even to the seventh or eighth involution) and of reference letters are
exhausted in order to draw up a conspectus of the causes, symptoms, nature,
effects, and cure of melancholy. This method is not exactly the method of
madness, though it is quite possible for a reader to attach more (as also
less) importance to it than it deserves. It seems probable on the whole
that the author, with the scholastic habits of his time, did actually draw
out a programme for the treatment of his subject in some form not very
different from these wonderful synopses, and did actually endeavour to keep
to it, or at any rate to work on its lines within the general compass of
the scheme. But on each several head (and reducing them to their lowest
terms the heads are legion) he allowed himself the very widest freedom of
digression, not merely in extracting and applying the fruits of his
notebook, but in developing his own thoughts,--a mine hardly less rich if
less extensive than the treasures of the Bodleian Library which are said to
have been put at his disposal.

The consequence is, that the book is one quite impossible to describe in
brief space. The melancholy of which the author treats, and of which, no
doubt, he was in some sort the victim, is very far from being the mere
Byronic or Wertherian disease which became so familiar some hundred years
ago. On the other hand, Burton being a practical, and, on the whole, very
healthy Englishman, it came something short of "The Melencolia that
transcends all wit," the incurable pessimism and quiet despair which have
been thought to be figured or prefigured in Durer's famous print. Yet it
approaches, and that not distantly, to this latter. It is the Vanity of
Vanities of a man who has gone, in thought at least, over the whole round
of human pleasures and interests, and who, if he has not exactly found all
to be vanity, has found each to be accompanied by some _amari aliquid_. It
is at the same time the frankly expressed hypochondria of a man whose
bodily health was not quite so robust as his mental constitution. It is the
satiety of lear