On Melancholy

Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy is one of the great, but unclassifiable, prose works in English literature: diverting, delightfully rambling and filled with recondite learning and peculiar facts and speculations. Burton, frustrated at the stagnant, disorderly society in which he found himself, became convinced that the problems of England lay in its inclination to melancholy. This is the starting-point, or pretext, for a hugely wide-ranging survey of the causes, descriptions (and cures) of melancholy. Burton's unsystematic approach to his subject contributes greatly to its charm and interest, for much of it is composed of digressions that are, in effect, self-contained essays on all manner of subjects: cosmology, religious fanaticism, devils and spirits, food, love and sex.
Robert Burton was a seventeenth-century academic. He lived the life of a humanist scholar and college bachelor, reading widely and taking undemanding donnish exercise: fishing, walking and generally pleasing himself. He liked to think of himself as a latter-day Democritus, the Greek thinker who was styled 'the laughing philosopher'.