Burton, ROBERT, author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, was born at Lindley in Leicestershire, in 1577, and educated at Nuneaton and Sutton Coldfield. He entered Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1593, and in 1599 was elected scholar of Christ Church. In 1614 he took his B.D., and two years later was presented by the dean and chapter of Christ Church to the vicarage of St Thomas at Oxford, and about 1630 by Lord Berkeley to the rectory of Segrave in his native county. Both livings he kept 'with much ado to his dying day,' and appears to have continued all his life at Christ Church, where he died 25th January 1639, leaving behind him a fine collection of books, many of which were bequeathed to the Bodleian. He was buried in the north aisle of Christ Church Cathedral, where a monument was erected to his memory, on which his bust was placed, with the calculation of his nativity inscribed above it, and beneath the epitaph he had composed for himself: Paucis notus, paucioribus ignotus, hic jacet Democritus Junior, cui vitam dedit et mortem Melancholia. His death took place at or very near the time he had foretold some years before by the calculation of his own nativity. This gave rise, Wood tells us, to a report that he had 'sent up his soul to heaven thro' a slip about his neck.' Burton is thus described by Anthony à Wood: 'He was an exact mathematician, a curious calculator of nativities, a general read scholar, a thro' paced philologist, and one that understood the surveying of lands well. As he was by many accounted a severe student, a devourer of authors, a melancholy and humorous person; so by others, who knew him well, a person of great honesty, plain dealing, and charity. I have heard some of the antients of Christ Church often say that his company was very merry, facete and juvenile, and no man in his time did surpass him for his ready and dextrous interlarding his common discourses among them with verses from the poets or sentences from classical authors, which being then all the fashion in the university, made his company more acceptable.' Little is known of his life, but there is one story in Bishop Kennet's Register and Chronicle (1728) that must not be omitted, from the light it throws on a passage about Vapours he would be extremely pleasant, and raise Laughter in any Company. Yet I have heard that nothing at last could make him laugh, but going down to the Bridge-foot in Oxford, and hearing the Barge-men scold and storm and swear at one another, at which he would set his Hands to his Sides, and laugh most profusely.'
The first edition of the Anatomy of Melancholy was in quarto form, and appeared in 1621. Four more editions in folio were published within the author's lifetime, each with successive alterations and additions, spite of the author's announcement in the preface to the third (1628) that he would make no more changes. In this edition also first appeared the famous emblematic frontispiece. The final form of the book was the sixth edition (1651-52), printed from an annotated copy given just before Burton's death to the publisher, Henry Cripps, who gained, Wood tells us, great profit out of the book. This great work is divided into three divisions, each subdivided into sections, members, and subsections, and each preceded by an elaborate synopsis of its contents. Part I. treats of the causes and symptoms of melancholy, Part II. of the cure of melancholy, and Part III. of love melancholy and religious melancholy. One of the most interesting parts of the book is the long preface, 'Democritus to the Reader,' in which Burton gives indirectly an account of himself and his studies, and apologises for not having bestowed his time on the composition of books of divinity, for which he saw 'no such great need,' there being 'so many books in that kind, so many commentators, treatises, pamphlets, expositions, sermons, that whole teemes of oxen cannot draw them.' Burton has had no better critic than himself in this same preface. He says: 'I have laboriously collected this Cento out of divers Writers, and that sine injuria, I have wronged no authors, but given every man his own.' And further, of his style he says: 'I neglect phrases, and labor wholly to inform my reader's understanding, and not to please his ear; 'tis not my study or intent to compose neatly, which an Orator requires, but to express myself readily and plainly as it happens. So that as a River runs sometimes precipitate and swift, then dul and slow; now direct, then per ambages; now deep, then shallow; now muddy, then clear; now broad, then narrow; doth my stile flow: now serious, then light; now comical, then satirical; now more elaborate, then remisse, as the present subject required, or as at that time I was affected.' In the same preface he tells us 'I writ of melancholy, by being busie to avoid melancholy . . . to comfort one sorrow with another, idleness with idleness, ut ex vipera theriacum, make an Antidote out of that which was the prime cause of my disease.'
This strange book is unique in its interest, and is far more systematic in its construction than the superficial or merely occasional reader is apt to imagine. It is indeed a farrago from all, even the most out-of-the-way classical and medieval writers, yet not one quotation out of all his ponderous learning but lends strength or illustration to his argument. Every page is marked by keen irony, profound and often gloomy humour, and by strong and excellent sense; while throughout the book there runs a deep undertone of earnestness that fits well with its concluding sentences, and at times rises into a grave eloquence of quite singular charm. The 'fantastic old great man' is as certain of immortality as the greatest masters in English literature, and his readers will ever love him with no common love. Boswell tells us that Dr Johnson said Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise; and Charles Lamb shows the influence of the book not less in many a turn of his own quaint style than in that marvellous direct imitation, the 'Curious Fragments' extracted from a Common-Place Book which belonged to Robert Burton, the famous author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1801 in the small volume containing the tragedy of John Woodvil. Milton's L'Allegro and Il Penseroso owed much to 'The Author's Abstract of Melancholy' prefixed to his book, and Ferriar in 1798 pointed out to the world the indebtedness of Sterne. Byron speaks of its great value as materials 'for literary conversation,' but Wood had long before pointed out this merit: 'Tis a book so full of variety of reading, that gentlemen who have lost their time and are put to a push for invention, may furnish themselves with matter for common or scholastical discourse and writing.'