Op of the Sherif bin Aun, now said to be a "haunted house.»* posite to it lies the Jannat el Maala, the holy cemetery of Meccah. Thence, turning to the right, we entered the Sulaymaniyah or Afghan quarter. Here the boy Mohammed, being an inhabitant of the Shamiyah or Syrian ward, thought proper to display some apprehension. These two are on bad terms; children never meet without exchanging volleys of stones, and men fight furiously with quarter-staves. Sometimes, despite the terrors of religion, the knife and sabre are drawn. But these hostilities have their code. If a citizen be killed, there is a subscription. for blood-money. An inhabitant of one quarter, passing singly through another, becomes a guest; once beyond the walls, he is likely to be beaten to insensibility by his hospitable foes. At the Sulaymaniyah we turned off the main road into a by-way, and ascended by narrow lanes the rough heights of Jebel Hindi, upon which stands a small whitewashed and crenellated building called a "fort." Thence descending, we threaded dark streets, in places crowded with rude cots and dusky figures, and finally at 2 A. M. we found ourselves at the door of the boy Mohammed's house. We arrived on the morning of Sunday the 7th Zu'l Hijjah (11th September, 1853), and had one day before the beginning of the pilgrimage to repose and visit the Haram. From El Medinah to Meccah the distance, according to my calculation, was 248 English miles, which was accomplished in eleven marches. *I cannot conceive what made the accurate Niebuhr fall into the strange error that "apparitions are unknown in Arabia.» Arabs fear to sleep alone, to enter the bath at night, to pass by cemeteries during dark, and to sit amongst ruins, simply for fear of apparitions. And Arabia, together with Persia, has supplied half the Western World - Southern Europe - with its ghost stories and tales of angels, demons, and fairies. To quote Milton, the land is struck "with superstition as with a planet." 2904 ROBERT BURTON (1577-1640) HERE are some books of which every reader knows the names, but of whose contents few know anything, excepting as the same may have come to them filtered through the work of others. Of these, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy' is one of the most marked instances. It is a vast storehouse from which subsequent authors have always drawn and continue to draw, even as Burton himself drew from others,-though without always giving the credit which with him was customary. Few would now have the courage to read it through, and probably fewer still could say with Dr. Johnson that it was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise." ROBERT BURTON Of Robert Burton himself very little is known. He was born in 1577, a few years later than Shakespeare,-probably at Lindley, in Leicestershire; and died at Oxford in 1640. He had some schooling at Sutton Coldfield in Warwickshire, and was sent to Brasenose College at Oxford in 1593; was elected a student at Christ Church College in 1599, and took his degree of B. D. in 1614. He was then thirty-seven years of age. Why he should have been so long in reaching his degree, does not appear. Two years later he was presented by the Dean and Chapter of Christ Church to the vicarage of St. Thomas in the suburbs of Oxford. To this, about 1630, through presentation by George, Lord Berkeley, was added the rectory of Segrave in Leicestershire, and he retained both livings until his death. This is about the sum and substance of his known history. Various legends remain regarding him; as, that he was very good and jolly company, a most learned scholar, very ready in quotations from the poets and classical authors, - and indeed no reader of the Anatomy' could imagine otherwise. Yet was he of a melancholy disposition, and it is said that "he composed this book with a view of relieving his own melancholy, but increased it to such a degree that nothing could make him laugh but going to the foot-bridge and hearing the ribaldry of the bargemen, which rarely failed to throw him into a violent fit of laughter." He says himself, "I write of melancholy, by being busie, to avoid melancholy." He was expert in the calculation of nativities, and cast his own horoscope; having determined in which, the time at which his death should occur, it was afterward shrewdly believed that he took measures to insure the fulfillment of the prophecy. His life was almost wholly spent in his study at Oxford. He was a wide and curious reader, and the book to the composition of which he devoted himself quotes authorities without end. All was fish which came to his net: divines, poets, astrologists, doctors, philosophers, men of science, travelers, romancers- he draws from the whole range of literature; and often page after page - scores and hundreds of pages, is filled with quotations, sometimes of two or three words only, sometimes translated and sometimes not, an almost inextricable network of facts, of fancies, and of phrases. He says: "As those old Romans rob'd all the cities of the world, to set out their bad-sited Rome, we skim off the cream of other men's wits, pick the choice flowers of their till'd gardens to set out our own steril plots." Yet when he sets about it, his handling is steady and assured, and he has distinctly the literary touch, as well as the marks of genius; having a very great quaintness withal. The title of his famous book is 'The Anatomy of Melancholy. What It Is, with All the Kinds, Causes, Symptoms, Prognostics, and several Cures of it. In three Partitions. With their several Sections, Members, and Subsections, Philosophically, Medically, Historically Opened and Cut Up. By Democritus Junior.' The first edition appears to have been issued in 1621. He continued to modify and enlarge it from time to time throughout his life; and for the sixth edition, which appeared some years after his death, he prepared a long address to the reader, describing his student life, accounting for his choice of subject, and full of quaint fancies and scathing criticisms of the ill habits and weaknesses of mankind. "Melancholy" means with Burton Melancholia, but it means also all sorts of insanity, and apparently all affections of the mind or spirit, sane or insane. On the one hand he heaps up, in page after page and chapter after chapter, all the horrid ills to which flesh is heir, or which it cultivates for itself, and paints the world as a very pandemonium of evil and outrage. And anon the air blows soft and sweet, the birds sing, both brotherly love and domestic happiness are possible, and "God's in his heaven, all's right with the world." To the first volume is prefixed 'The Author's Abstract of Melancholy,' beginning: "When I go musing all alone, Void of sorrow and void of feare Pleasing myself with phantasms sweet, All my joys to this are folly, Naught so sweet as melancholy." It does not need an expert to tell, after reading this, whence Milton drew the suggestion of 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso.' G CONCLUSIONS AS TO MELANCHOLY ENERALLY thus much we may conclude of melancholy: that it is most pleasant at first, I say, mentis gratissimus error, a most delightsome humor, to be alone, dwell alone, walk alone, meditate, lie in bed whole days, dreaming awake as it were, and frame a thousand phantastical imaginations unto themselves. They are never better pleased than when they are so doing; they are in Paradise for the time, and cannot well endure to be interrupt; with him in the Poet: "pol! me occidistis, amici, Non servâstis, ait:" you have undone him, he complains, if you trouble him: tell him what inconvenience will follow, what will be the event, all is one, canis ad vomitum, 'tis so pleasant he cannot refrain. He may thus continue peradventure many years by reason of a strong temperature, or some mixture of business, which may divert his cogitations: but at the last læsa imaginatio, his phantasy is crazed, & now habituated to such toys, cannot but work still like a fate; the Scene alters upon a sudden; Fear and Sorrow supplant those pleasing thoughts, suspicion, discontent, and perpetual anxiety succeed in their places; so little by little, by that shoeing-horn of idleness, and voluntary solitariness, Melancholy this feral fiend is drawn on, et quantum vertice ad auras Æthereas, tantum radice in Tartara tendit; "extending up, by its branches, so far towards Heaven, as, by its roots, it does down towards Tartarus;" it was not so delicious at first, as now it is bitter and harsh: a cankered soul macerated with cares and discontents, tædium vitæ, impatience, agony, inconstancy, irresolution, precipitate them unto unspeakable miseries. They cannot endure company, light, or life itself, some unfit for action, and the like. Their bodies are lean and dried up, withered, ugly; their looks harsh, very dull, and their souls tormented, as they are more or less entangled, as the humor hath been intended, or according to the continuance of time they have been troubled. To discern all which symptoms the better, Rhasis the Arabian makes three degrees of them. The first is falsa cogitatio, false conceits and idle thoughts: to misconstrue and amplify, aggravating everything they conceive or fear: the second is falso cogitata loqui, to talk to themselves, or to use inarticulate incondite voices, speeches, obsolete gestures, and plainly to utter their minds and conceits of their hearts, by their words and actions, as to laugh, weep, to be silent, not to sleep, eat their meat, &c.; the third is to put in practice that which they think or speak. Savanarola, Rub. 11, Tract. 8, cap. 1, de ægritudine, confirms as much: when he begins to express that in words, which he conceives in his heart, or talks idly, or goes from one thing to another, which Gordonius calls nec caput habentia nec caudam [having neither head nor tail], he is in the middle way: but when he begins to act it likewise, and to put his fopperies in execution, he is then in the extent of melancholy, or madness itself. This progress of melancholy you shall easily observe in them that have been so affected, they go smiling to themselves at first, at length they laugh out; at first solitary, at last they can endure no company, or if they do, they are now dizzards, past sense and shame, quite moped, they care not what they say or do; all their actions, words, gestures, are furious or ridiculous. At first his mind is troubled, he doth not attend what is said, if you tell him a tale, he cries at last, What said you? but in the end he mutters to himself, as old women do many times, or old men when they sit alone; upon a sudden they laugh, whoop, halloo, or run away, and swear they see or hear Players, Devils, Hobgoblins, Ghosts, strike, or strut, &c., grow humorous in the end: like him in the Poet, sæpe ducentos sæpe decem servos [he often keeps two hundred slaves, often only ten], he will dress himself, and undress, careless at last, grows insensible, stupid or mad. He howls like a wolf, barks like a dog, and raves like Ajax and Orestes, hears Music and outcries which no man else hears. Who can sufficiently speak of these symptoms, or prescribe rules to comprehend them? As Echo to the painter in Ausonius, vane, quid affectas, &c.— foolish fellow, what wilt? if you must |