man too. But he has good authors on his side: "I excuse myself with Peter Godefridus, Valleriola, Ficinus, Langius, Cadmus Milesius, who writ fourteen books of love." Surely, he would be very critical who should ask more than this.

The apology once made, with what gusto he sets forth, how he luxuriates in golden tidbits from love's delicate revels! "A little soft hand, pretty little mouth, small, fine, long fingers, 't is that which Apollo did admire in Daphne." "Of all eyes (by the way) black are most amiable, enticing, and fair." "Oh, that pretty tone, her divine and lovely looks, her everything lovely, sweet, amiable, and pretty, pretty, pretty." Is it not the mere ecstasy of amorous frenzy? Again, he gives us a very banquet, a rosy wreath of old, simple English names, a perfect old-fashioned garden: "Modest Matilda, pretty, pleasing Peg, sweet, singing Susan, mincing, merry Moll, dainty, dancing Doll, neat Nancy, jolly Jone, nimble Nell, kissing Kate, bouncing Bess with black eyes, fair Phillis, with fine white hands, fiddling Frank, tall Tib, slender Sib, etc." Do you not hear their merry laughter, as he heard it in his dim study, a dream of fair faces and bright forms twisting, and turning, and flashing back and forth under the harvest moon?

Yet, after all, love is a tyrant and a traitor, a meteor rushing with blind fury among the placid orbs of life. What is a man to make of these wild contrasts and tragical transitions? At one moment the lover seems to be on the pinnacle of felicity, "his soul sowced, imparadised, imprisoned in his lady; he can do nothing, think of nothing but her; she is his cynosure, Hesperus, and Vesper, his morning and evening star, his goddess, his mistress, his life, his soul, his everything; dreaming, waking, she is always in his mouth; his heart, eyes, ears, and all his thoughts are full of her." But then something goes wrong and the

note is altogether changed. "When this young gallant is crossed in his love, he laments, and cries, and roars downright. The virgin's gone and I am gone, she's gone, she's gone, and what shall I do? Where shall I find her? whom shall I ask? what will become of me? I am weary of this life, sick, mad, and desperate.'

It becomes the sage, then, to be clear of these toys. If he is to write about Love Melancholy, let him cure it. Let him hold up a warning to the unwary. What is the use of days and nights spent in toiling over learned authors, if the young and foolish are not to have the benefit of one's experience? If only the young and foolish would profit! If only the unwary would beware! Still we must do our part. Let us remind them that beauty fades. It is a rather wellknown fact, but youth is so prone to forget it. "Suppose thou beholdest her in a frosty morning, in cold weather, in some passion or perturbation of mind, weeping, chafing, etc., riveled and illfavored to behold. . . . Let her use all helps art and nature can yield; be like her, and her, and whom thou wilt, or all these in one; a little sickness, a fever, small-pox, wound, scar, loss of an eye or limb, a violent passion, mars all in an instant, disfigures all." Then let us exalt the charms of a bachelor's life. It has its weak points, as I feel, writing here alone in the dust and chill, with nothing but books about me, no prattle of children, no merry chatter of busy wo

men.

But what then? It is quieter, after all. "Consider how contentedly, quietly, neatly, plentifully, sweetly, and how merrily he lives! He hath no man to care for but himself, none to please, no charge, none to control him, is tied to no residence, no cure to serve, may go and come when, whither, live where he will, his own master, and do what he list himself." Nevertheless, it all sounds a little hollow, and as I sit here in the winter midnight with my old pipe, I

wonder if it might not have been otherwise.

I have made my quotations with very little skill, if the ingenious reader does not by this time feel that Burton was in his way a great master of style. His skill and power as a writer, more than anything else, show that he was not a mere pedant or Dryasdust. It is true, he himself disclaims any such futile preoccupation. He has not "amended the style, which now flows remissly, as it was first conceived." His book is "writ with as small deliberation as I do ordinarily speak, without all affectation of big words, fustian phrases, jingling terms." But the facts belie him, and one shudders to think what must have been his idea of the big words he does not use. A careful collation of the first edition of the Anatomy with the last published in the author's lifetime not only shows a great number of additions and alterations, but proves conclusively that these changes were made, in many cases, with a view to style and to style only. Take a single instance. In the first edition Burton wrote: "If it be so that the earth is a moon, then are we all lunatic within." Later he amplified this as follows, with obvious gain in the beauty of the phrase: "If it be so that the earth is a moon, then are we also giddy, vertiginous, and lunatic within this sublunary maze." Amended, I think, but oh, for the "big words, fustian phrases, jingling terms"!

Yes, Burton was a master of style. He could bend language to his ends and do as he willed with it. If he is often rough, harsh, wanton in expression, it is simply because, like Donne, he chose to be so. Does he wish to tell a plain story ? Who can do it more lightly, simply, briefly? "An ass and a mule went laden over a brook, the one with salt, the other with wool; the mule's pack was wet by chance; the salt melted, his burden the lighter; and he thereby much eased. He told the ass, who, thinking to speed

as well, wet his pack likewise at the next water; but it was much the heavier, he quite tired."

Does he wish to paint the foul and horrible? I know of nothing in Swift or Zola more replete with the luxury of hideousness than the unquotable description of the defects which infatuated love will overlook, a description which Keats tells a correspondent he would give his favorite leg to have written. Here, as in so many passages I have quoted, Burton piles up epithet after epithet, till it seems as if the dictionary would be exhausted, a trick which, by the bye, he may have caught from Rabelais, and which would become very monotonous, if it were not applied with such wonderful variety and fertility.

Then, at his will, the magician can turn with ease from the bitter to the sweet. When he touches love or beauty, all his ruggedness is gone. His words become full of grace, of suave, vague richness, of delicacy, of mystery, as in the phrase which Southey quotes in The Doctor : "For peregrination charms our senses with such unspeakable and sweet variety that some count him unhappy that never traveled, a kind of prisoner, and pity his case, that from his cradle to his old age beholds the same still; still, still the same, the same.” Or, to take a more elaborate picture, see this, which might be a Tintoretto or a Spenser: 'Witty Lucian, in that pathetical lovepassage or pleasant description of Jupiter's stealing of Europa and swimming from Phoenicia to Crete, makes the sea calm, the winds hush, Neptune and Amphitrite riding in their chariot to break the waves before them, the Tritons dancing round about with every one a torch; the sea-nymphs, half-naked, keeping time on dolphins' backs and singing Hymenæus; Cupid nimbly tripping on the top of the waters; and Venus herself coming after in a shell, strawing roses and flowers on their heads."

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I have dwelt thus long on Burton's

style because it is absolutely characteristic, and because it proves by its eminent artistic qualities that he was not simply a compiler and quoter, but a thinking and feeling man, a strong, shrewd, passionate temperament, gazing with intense interest out of his scholastic windows at the strange and moving spectacle of life. In his fullness and abundance he, more than any other English author, recalls Montaigne, whom he quotes so frequently he has less fluidity, more conventional prejudice, but also more sincerity, more robust moral force. Again, he in a certain sense resembles a greater than Montaigne, his own greatest contemporary, Shakespeare, whom he also quotes enough to show that he knew and loved his writings, at any rate, if not himself. Shakespeare's work is like a glorious piece of tapestry, a world of rich and splendid hues, woven into a thousand shapes of curious life. Burton's is like the reverse side of the same: all the bewildering wealth of color, but rough, crude, misshapen, undigested.

One of the characteristic oddities of Burton's style is his perpetual use of the phrase etc. When his quick and fluent pen has heaped together all the nouns or adjectives in heaven and in earth, and in the waters under the earth, he completes the picture with the vast, vague

gesture of an etc. Take an often-quoted passage in the introduction, in which he describes his own life as an observer and contemplator: "Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays; then again, as in a newshifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villanies in all kinds, funerals, burials, death of princes, new discoveries, expeditions, now comical, then tragical matters; to-day we hear of new lords and officers created, to-morrow of some great men deposed, and again of fresh honors conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned; one purchaseth, another breaketh; he thrives, his neighbor turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps, etc."

So we may sum up The Anatomy of Melancholy in an etc. The general tone of the book, with its infinite multiplicity, reminds one of nothing more than of the quaint blending of mirth, mystery, and spiritual awe so deliciously expressed in Stevenson's baby couplet,

"The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings." Only Burton would have laid a mischiev ous and melancholy emphasis on should. Gamaliel Bradford, Jr.

John Vance Cheney.

THE manner of my initiation was this. There was living in the town of Wheatland an old man who knew everybody in the county, for indeed he had helped a good part of the inhabitants into this vale of tears, and, to speak truly, I fear had hastened the departure from it of not a few. This was the celebrated Dr. John Claggett, the greatest story-teller, the best companion with whom to share a mint julep, the welcome guest at every wedding, the friend of every child, the good physician, whose presence was worth a moderate sickness. For he brought the latest news from the farthest borders of the county; he had stories new as well as old; he played practical jokes in, as it seemed, the presence of death itself, and drove pain off with hearty human laughter. Perhaps the wit was rather too Elizabethan for the taste of to-day. Here was one that the country people liked more than the aroma of humor; they wanted to taste it, and thought that a joke, like whiskey, improved with age. Mother, and then daughter, had listened to it without shame. It is a wedding, not complete without the Doctor. Two, three, perhaps more, glasses of apple-jack have been drunk; it's time to break up, but first the Doctor must salute the bride. This he does, and adds, with a meaning look, "I'll see you later," answered by a push and a La, Doctor!" from the buxom bride, and a fatuous giggle from the embarrassed groom. I fear we were not a refined people, but then, on the other hand, we were not divorced and married again the same day!

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Next morning at nine o'clock I stood before the Doctor's house, red brick, with a high stoop built along the front. An alleyway, arched over, gave protection to a little brown mare, hitched to a staple in the wall, and kept the rain from a buggy that was splashed to the top with cakes of yellow mud that had dried and made the whole vehicle almost invisible at a distance, so near was it to the color of the crossroads. In this vehicle I was destined to ride for the next two years, every day save Sunday, as the companion, the friend, and, as he said, the colleague of the man who had the largest practice in the county. In that way I began to practise medicine.

The little brown mare, named Lucy, turned to the right, and, passing through the square, turned to the right again on the Sharpesburg pike, then to the left, and stretched herself comfortably eastward on the Frederick road toward the blue mountains, shining like a long turquoise in the early winter sun.

"Do you know where you are going?" said my new, indeed my first friend. "No, sir."

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Oh, the terror of that drive! It must be death, or at least endless exile, that affronted me. "Jerusalem and Jordan "I knew the names. Indeed, they represented all I knew of geography. They were far away, I knew. Could I ever return? I think here I should have wept had I not been roused from my sad forebodings by Lucy's stopping at the toll gate. A wonderful place, that! What authority resided here! Why, even the tow-headed boy sitting on the fence could swing that bar to, and all the traffic would cease. "There wa'n't nobody dasen't go through when the bar was swung in." I did not know that then, but I learned it later from the same tow-headed boy, when he became my friend. The toll keeper was a shoemaker, too, and well-mannered people drove close to the step, so that he had only to reach out a hand to take the fare. A woman came through the orchard, where she had been feeding hens, to have a chat with the old Doctor.

"There! This is Jerusalem, and that is the river Jordan, that we've crossed; and, yes, there they are, in that window, bull's eyes, two for a penny,

and soon we shall be going home." Oh, how proud the child was that be had not cried! He laughed, too, with a new sensation. He had become conscious of thought! This wise old man had taken a child, who needed rousing and an interest to make it seem worth while to life to keep in its delicate frame, and plunged it into the cold water of apprehension, and now it was tingling with the reaction of satisfaction. Like many puzzles, the explanation was simple. The Dunkers had a yearly baptism in the Antietam, hence the Antietam became Jordan, and Funkstown, Jerusalem. A parable, if you will, of the power of faith. For, as the early Italian painters dressed the Magi and the Holy Family in the gorgeous robes of Venice or Verona, and saw no incongruity, so these simple-minded peasants, for they were little more, in the illustration of the great experience, saw the insignificant stream changed to the river that cleansed Naaman, and the mean little village into the city of the great King.

This was the beginning of an education, impossible in school, of course, but most important. I mean the education of teasing. It is like teaching a puppy to jump by holding the dainty a little higher than he can reach. It is a sort of mental tickling, that may indeed become cruel, but is, in kindly hands, a delicious experience. And I think, in all the pharmacopoeia of that day there was