material into refined ore. He used Burton in a way which savors, to say the least, of plagiarism. We could at least have wished for some passing allusion to the poor old author whose stores he was using so freely. Had the thief acknowledged his debts in the most cursory way, no one could have objected, even on moral grounds, to the admirable transformation of Burton into the elder Shandy. The extent of Sterne's obligations was revealed in Ferriar's "Illustrations," but one case will be sufficient to exhibit the nature of the procedure. Burton, in one of his chapters (it is the fifth number of the third section of the second partition, being part of a "consolatory digression containing remedies to all discontents and passions of the mind "), goes through the good old series of reflections upon the death of friends. We know them all, alas! too well, and in new dresses they still do duty on occasions of administering "vacant chaff."""Tis an inevitable chance," says Burton, "the first statute in Magna Charta, an everlasting act of Parliament, all must die," and Sterne puts the phrase without alteration into Mr. Shandy's mouth. "Is it not much better not to hunger at all than to eat; not to thirst, than to drink to satisfy thirst; not to be cold, than to put on clothes to drive away cold?" asks Burton, translating from Lucian, and anticipating some modern pessimists; and Sterne appropriates not merely the venerable sophistry, but the words of his author. But the general style of Burton is most happily ridiculed, and the keynote of the sentiment struck in the opening passage:

'Tis either Plato, or Plutarch, or Seneca, or Xenophon, or Epictetus, or Theophrastus, or Lucian, or some one, perhaps, of later date-either Cardan, or Budæus, or Petrarch, or Stella-or possibly it may be some divine or father of the Church, St. Austin, or St. Cyprian, or Bernard, who affirms that it is an irresistible and natural passion to weep for the loss of our friends or children-and Seneca (I'm positive) tells us somewhere that such griefs evacuate themselves best by that particular channel. And accordingly we find that David wept for his son Absalom, Adrian for his Antinous, Niobe for her children, and Apollodorus and Crito shed tears for Socrates before his death.

The passage gives virtually Sterne's criticism of Burton. It shows the point of view from which he had contemplated his victim, poring over the old folio, then a neglected curiosity, and chuckling to himself over curiosities so seldom disturbed as to permit him a sense of personal proprietorship. He just takes a characteristic passage from Burton, accentuates slightly the ludicrous side of his manner, and turns him out as an exquisite portrait of the ideal pedant. The art is inimitable, though possibly, in the passage just quoted, Sterne

is just a trifle too anxious to show that he is laughing with his reader, and so suggests the question whether Burton did not see the joke himself. My impression would be that, in spite of his elaborate mask of pedantry, Burton was at bottom quite conscious of the comic aspect of his preaching, and would have appreciated "Tristram Shandy" as well as any of its readers. After all, though the Oxford don of those days was nourished on great masses of obsolete scholasticism, there must have been sharp fellows enough in the common rooms, where Burton displayed his "merry and facete" wit, to understand the humor of serving up the tritest commonplaces with this portentous sauce of learned authority. When James was king, even humor loved to masquerade in quaint scholastic forms, and wit to resolve itself into queer logical quibbling.

The whole scheme of the book strikes us, in fact, as a semi-humorous affectation of elaborate system. Burton professes to "anatomize this humor of melancholy," melancholy being a name used with most convenient vagueness. From one point of view it is the general sense for human folly; it includes those who are " metaphorically mad, who are stupid, angry, drunken, sulky, sottish, proud, vainglorious, ridiculous, beastly, peevish, obstinate, extravagant, dry, doting, dull, desperate, hare-brained," and so forth. More properly, it seems, it is a disease so common “in this crazed age of ours, that scarce one in a thousand is free from it, and that splenetical, hypochondriacal wind especially, which proceeds from the spleen and short ribs." Every age, indeed, seems to have the same pride in claiming a monopoly of hypochondria as was instituted by the excellent Mrs. Pullet in her array of bottles. But also it seems that melancholy may have pretty much its modern significance, as in the charming verses which are supposed to have given a hint to Milton:

"When I go musing all alone,

Thinking of divers things foreknown;
When I build castles in the air,
Void of sorrow and void of fear;
Pleasing myself with phantasms sweet,
Methinks the time runs very fleet.

All my joys to this are folly,
Naught so sweet as melancholy.

"When I lay waking all alone,
Recounting what I have ill done;
My thoughts on me then tyrannize,
Fear and sorrow me surprise,
Whether I tarry still or go,
Methinks the time moves very slow.

All my griefs to this are jolly,
Naught so bad as melancholy."

Melancholy is here a name for the ambiguous

mood in which we hold the lessons of sweet silent thought. But, again, we drop to the most physiological, and, as we should now call it, materialistic view. Melancholy is "black choler," as its name imports; and we are treated to the definitions of the whole series of physicians, the question having been agitated by Galen, Avicenna, Valesius, Montanus, Cappivaccius, Bright, Fiennes, and others, with a variety of results anything but encouraging to the patient. We can not but sympathize with the excellent Trincavellius, who, being demanded what he thought of a certain melancholy young man, “ingenuously confessed that he was indeed melancholy, but he knew not to what kind to reduce it." Trincavellius, indeed, being consulted on another occasion along with Fallopius and Francanzanus, each of these three famous doctors gave a different opinion-an unprecedented and startling phenomenon!

Undaunted, however, by this want of agreement, or rather encouraged by the boundless field of conjecture which it opened, Burton constructs a vast and systematic scheme of analysis, a network so comprehensive, with its judicious divisions and subdivisions, partitions and members, and sections and subsections, that the fish must indeed be strange which can not be somewhere entangled in his toils. The causes of melancholy range from the highest of all causes, down through magicians, witches, the stars, old age, sickness, poverty, sorrow, and affright, to special peculiarities of diet, such as the consumption of "dried, soused, indurate fish, as ling, fumados, red herring, sprats, stock-fish, haberdine, poorjohn, all shell-fish"; and even in detail we are generally left in a painful attitude of doubt. "Mesarius commends salmon, which Bruerimus contradicts," and who is to decide between Mesarius and Bruerimus? The physiology, indeed, which forms so large a part of the book is a very amusing illustration of the chaotic state of medical theory, which gave so many openings for the satirists of the period, and which has so happily been succeeded by perfect unanimity. Johnson was not improbably attracted to the "Anatomy" by the title, which promised to give him some hints in his life-long struggle with disease. If so, he must indeed have been edified. The general tone of the decisions of the physicians of the period is excellently given by the controversy as to hellebore. This drug fell out of its old repute, it appears, owing to the authority of Mesue and some other Arabians; and it is "still oppugned to this day by Crato and some junior physicians. Their reasons are briefly that Aristotle and Alexander Aphrodiseus called it a poison, while Constantine the Emperor, in his Graponics,' attributes no other virtue to it than to kill mice and rats, flies and mouldwarps." The most prominent argu

ment, however, is that, according to Nicholas Leonicus, Solon, when "besieging I know not what city," poisoned the springs with hellebore, and so weakened the inhabitants that they could not bear arms. Recent writers, however, especially Paracelsus and Matthiolus, have restored the reputation of the injured drug. For so venerable and classical a medicine, it was perhaps natural to go back to the records of Solon's siege of "I know not what city." Indeed, another statement may remind us that, even in the reign of experimental philosophy, the effects of familiar drugs are not always established beyond possibility of dispute. "Tobacco," exclaims Burton, "divine, rare, and superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all panaceas, potable gold and philosopher's stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases. A good vomit, I confess, a virtuous herb, if it be well qualified, opportunely taken, and medicinally used; but, as it is commonly abused by most men, who take it as tinkers do ale, 'tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, lands, health, hellish, devilish, and damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of body and soul." The controversy, as many contemporary allusions testify, was as keen at that time as it is at the present day. Bobadil, we may remember, professed to have lived for twenty-one weeks on the fumes of this simple, while Justice Overdo entreats all men to avoid "the creeping venom of this subtle serpent."

Burton, to do him justice, does not fail to insinuate a sly hit or two at his physicians, under due shelter of learned names. "Common experience," he points out, shows that those "live freest from all manner of infirmities that make least use of apothecaries' physic"; though apothecaries might possibly argue that he is here inverting cause and effect. But he goes further: "The devil himself was the first inventor of medicine," he argues; "for Apollo invented it, and what was Apollo but the devil?" He points out with more cogent logic the discord of the doctors of his day, and remarks: "This art is wholly conjectural, if it be an art, uncertain, imperfect, and got by killing of men; they are a kind of butchers, leeches, menslayers, chirurgeons and apothecaries especially, that are indeed the physicians' hangmen and common executioners, though, to say truth, the physicians themselves come not far behind, for, according to that facete epigram of Maximilianus Urentius" (which, in Burton's phrase, I here voluntarily pretermit), "what's the difference?" And, though Burton's skepticism is judiciously tempered by a consideration which has restrained many of his fellow satirists-namely, that when he is ill he will probably want a physician himself-he significantly prefaces his selections from the "infinite variety

of medicines which he finds in every pharmacopoeia" by the warning that they should be used "very moderately and advisedly," and only when diet will not answer the purpose. The skepticism, indeed, was never pushed to any excess. He was slightly scandalized, he tells us, when he saw his mother apply a spider in a nutshell wrapped in silk for the cure of a sufferer from ague; but, on finding the very same remedy prescribed by Dioscorides, Matthiolus, and Alderovandus, he began to "have a better opinion of it," and decides wisely with Renodæus that such amulets are "not altogether to be rejected."

Burton's collection of the prescriptions of the day is a curious illustration of the time in which the most virtuous and benevolent men went about bleeding fever-struck patients to death, flogging others out of madness, and with equal confidence administering spiders in nutshells—and all from the best possible motives. Yet it is perhaps the least amusing part of the matter forced into an elaborate framework, which, as I have said, is contrived with a view to including the most heterogeneous stores of learning. One could wish that he had not bothered himself with any ostensible method, and had avowedly presented himself as a mere rambler, diverging hither and thither in obedience to any accidental association. Southey's "Doctor," the last book of any note which may be regarded as in some degree belonging to the same class, is so far more judiciously constructed, though Southey perhaps falls into the contrary error of forcibly contorting the natural flow of his thought into an appearance of more arbitrary digressiveness than really belongs to him. A deliberate resolution to be funny and fanciful is perhaps more annoying than a forced appearance of methodical order. And there is certainly something characteristic in this thoroughgoing affectation which seems to be a part of the very nature of the old pedant. He can not get rid of his academical costume even when he is disposed for a game of "high jinks." He discusses the philosophy of love-melancholy with all the airs of an anatomical demonstrator, and, if there is just a sly twinkle in his eye, he never permits himself such a smile as would be inconsistent with his views of professorial dignity. He proves with his usual array of imposing authorities that men often fall in love with beautiful women; and reminds us that "Achilles was moved in the midst of a battle by fair Briseis; Ajax by Tecmessa; Judith captivated that great captain Holofernes; Delilah, Samson; Rosamond, Henry II.; Roxalana, Solyman the Magnificent, etc."; and we dimly wonder whether this comprehensive "etc." could even have included the excellent Burton himself. There is perhaps no class of men which is more apt to

pride itself upon a knowledge of the world than the university don of modern times. A Fellow of a college resents the traditional estimate which would make of him a mere smoke-dried bachelor, ignorant, in virtue of his position, of the ordinary play of human passion. But old Burton accepts and prides himself upon his character of learned recluse. He has looked at the world, perhaps, more closely than he allows. He had been further from his common-room than merely to the bridge end to hear the ribaldry of the bargees. But he thinks it necessary to defend himself for discoursing upon love by more than his usual affectation of learned authority. "It is part of my treatise," he says roundly, "and I must and will perform my task," though in a spirit becoming a grave divine. And certainly no fair reader will complain that he has shown undue levity even in this department, where an access of gravity borders most closely upon the ludicrous.

To get a little closer to Burton himself, to catch a glimpse of the real man behind the elaborate mask, we naturally turn to the chapters in which his personal experience is forced to come nearer to the surface. "Democritus junior," the professional laugher at all human folly, might be expected to show his bitterness when he treats of his own craft. Beyond a doubt study is a cause of melancholy, and indeed, as Lavinius Lemmius assures us, the commonest of all causes. The theme should be a fruitful one, and, indeed, we find some touches of genuine feeling. It must be admitted, however, that Burton has a decidedly matter-of-fact and prosaic mode of regarding the subject. The most obvious reason, he tells us, of the melancholy of students is their ill-health. They alone, of all men, as Marsilius Ficinus observes, habitually neglect their tools. A painter washes his brushes, a smith looks to his anvil, a huntsman takes care of his hawks and hounds, and a musician of his lute; but a scholar never thinks of attending properly to his brains. Moreover, Saturn and Mercury, the patrons of learning, are both of them dry planets, so that the brains of their subjects become withered, and the animal spirits, used up for contemplation, do not keep the other organs properly employed. Whence it follows that bald students are commonly troubled with " gouts, catarrhs, rheums, cachexia, bradiopepsia," and a long list of other diseases due to "overmuch sitting," exceeding even those which beset a famous lady at Diss in Norfolk. A modern writer of Burton's meditative turn would despise this physiological cause; he would call his "bradiopepsia" Welt-Schmerz, and elaborate a philosophical pessimism, proving conclusively that a man's disposition to melancholy must be proportioned to the depth of his knowledge of the general system of things. Bur

ton, in his old-fashioned way, considers melancholy to be at bottom a disease, and frequently due to direct Satanic agency; and therefore, though he certainly considers that the evil-one plays a very conspicuous part in human affairs, he can not properly pride himself upon his melancholy as a proof of intellectual and moral superiority. We must not complain of him for not anticipating a modern discovery.

He speaks, however, feelingly of the folly of intellectual labor. Do not scholars labor like Thebet Benchorat, who spent forty years in finding out the motion of the eighth sphere, till they become "dizzards," and are scoffed at by gallants for not knowing how to manage a hack, salute a gentlewoman, carve at table, and make cringes and congés," as every common swasher can do"? The greatest scholars are generally fools in all worldly matters, such as Paglarensis, who thought that his farmer must be a cheat for reporting that his sow had eleven pigs and his mare only one foal. This test of the imbecility of scholars was one upon which Hazlitt has dwelt in some vigorous essays, and which has doubtless come home more or less to many an honest senior wrangler, who has discovered that his mathematics did not enable him to tie his neckcloth after the latest model. But the man who could seriously whine over such a distress would be showing a deficiency of self-respect only too much in Hazlitt's vein. If here and there, in this polished age, a scholar is a bit of a clown, it is generally from puerile conceit, and his incapacity for business means only that he has admirers enough ready to do his dirty work. Burton has a much more serious ground for lamentation. Scholars, he says, are generally enforced to "want, poverty, and beggary." He quotes a passage from Vergil (applied by Johnson to precisely the same purpose) enumerating the terrible forms which surround the gates of hell-grief, care, labor, fear, hunger, and poverty-and observes that they are the familiar attendants of the scholar. His best chance was to keep a school, or turn lecturer or curate, for which he might receive “falconer's wages," ten pounds a year and his food, so long as he pleased the parish or his parson; or he might become chaplain in a gentleman's family, marry an old housekeeper or chambermaid, and be settled in a small living-the natural aspiration of a poor clergyman for a century later, according to the satirists and pamphleteers. The scholar, again, might get into a great man's family, and live, at the cost of gross flattery, as a worthless parasite; or, seeing the worthlessness of the higher learning, might take to one of the "bread studies," and become a lawyer, to struggle against successful pettifoggers-or a physician, to find that in every village there were

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many mountebanks, empirics, quacksalvers, Paracelsians," and others, that he could scarcely find a patient. The "grasping patrons," who plunder the Church for their own base purposes, are at the roots of the evil. It is useless to denounce them; they care not so long as they have money. "Dea Moneta, Queen Money," the almighty dollar, was even then, it seems, the “goddess we adore." We need not wonder, then, that patrons were a "base, profane, epicurean, hypocritical rout. .. So cold is my charity, so defective in this behalf, that I shall never think better of them, than that they are rotten at core, their bones are full of epicurean hypocrisy and atheistical marrow, they are worse than heathens." And then Burton proceeds to lament over the contempt for learning characteristic of his time, and, of course, of his time alone. Gentlemen thought it unworthy of them; merchants might study arithmetic, spectacle-makers optics, and "landleapers" geography—a rich man had no need of such knowledge. In that base, utilitarian age men only thought of practical advantages; in "former times "-a very comprehensive period-the highest were scholars themselves, and loved scholars. "Evax, that Arabian prince," was "a most expert jeweler and exquisite philosopher"; Alexander sent Xenophanes fifty talents, because he was poor; and “Archelaus, that Macedonian king, would not willingly sup without Euripides (among the rest, he drank to him at supper one night, and gave him a cup of gold for his pains)." Those days are gone; though we still have our Cæsar, commonly called James I., "our amulet, our sun, our sole comfort and refuge; . . . a famous scholar himself, and the sole patron, pillar, and sustainer of learning," to which, in later editions, it had to be added that James had left a worthy successor. But, after making his reverence to the king's majesty, and to certain rather hypothetical exceptions to the general ignorance of the gentry, Burton returns to his lamentations. Our modern nobles are abandoned to field-sports, gaming, and drinking; they need nothing but some romance, play-book, or pamphlet, and know only a few scraps of French and Italian picked up in a foreign journey. And yet such must be the patrons! and those will thrive who please them best. "If the patron be precise, so must the clerk be; if he be papistical, his clerk must be so too, or be turned out. These "-parasites and time-servers, to wit

are those clerks which serve the turn, while, in the mean time, we, that are university men, like so many hide-bound calves in a pasture, tarry out our time, wither away as a flower ungathered in a garden, and are never used; or as so many candles, illuminate ourselves alone, obscuring one another's light, and are not discerned here at all—