The former of these was the work of an Oxford
scholar, an astrologer, who cast his own horoscope, and a victim
himself of the atrabilious humor, from which he sought relief in
listening to the ribaldry of bargemen, and in compiling this _Anatomy_,
in which the causes, symptoms, prognostics, and cures of melancholy are
considered in numerous partitions, sections, members, and subsections.
The work is a mosaic of quotations. All literature is ransacked for
anecdotes and instances, and the book has thus become a mine of
out-of-the-way learning in which later writers have dug. Lawrence Sterne
helped himself freely to Burton's treasures, and Dr. Johnson said that
the _Anatomy_ was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours
sooner than he wished to rise.
The vulgar and common errors which Sir Thomas Browne set himself to
refute were such as these: That dolphins are crooked, that Jews stink,
that a man hath one rib less than a woman, that Xerxes's army drank up
rivers, that cicades are bred out of cuckoo-spittle, that Hannibal split
Alps with vinegar, together with many similar fallacies touching Pope
Joan, the Wandering Jew, the decuman or tenth wave, the blackness of
negroes, Friar Bacon's brazen head, etc. Another book in which great
learning and ingenuity were applied to trifling ends was the same
author's _Garden of Cyrus; or, the Quincuncial Lozenge or Network
Plantations of the Ancients_, in which a mystical meaning is sought in
the occurrence throughout nature and art of the figure of the quincunx
or lozenge.
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