w-shipped scene, treasons, cheatings, tricks,
robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals, deaths, new
discoveries, expeditions; now comical, then tragical matters.....

So the record continues, till one rubs his eyes and thinks he must have
picked up by mistake the last literary magazine. And for all these
kaleidoscopic events there were waiting a multitude of writers, ready to
seize the abundant material and turn it to literary account for a tract, an
article, a volume, or an encyclopedia.

If one were to recommend certain of these books as expressive of this age
of outward storm and inward calm, there are three that deserve more than a
passing notice, namely, the _Religio Medici_, _Holy Living_, and _The
Compleat Angler_. The first was written by a busy physician, a supposedly
scientific man at that time; the second by the most learned of English
churchmen; and the third by a simple merchant and fisherman. Strangely
enough, these three great books--the reflections of nature, science, and
revelation--all interpret human life alike and tell the same story of
gentleness, charity, and noble living. If the age had produced only these
three books, we could still be profoundly grateful to it for its inspiring
message.

ROBERT BURTON (1577-1640). Burton is famous chiefly as the author of the
_Anatomy of Melancholy_, one of the most astonishing books in all
literature, which appeared in 1621. Burton was a clergyman of the
Established Church, an incomprehensible genius, given to broodings and
melancholy and to reading of every conceivable kind of literature. Thanks
to his wonderful memory, everything he read was stored up for use or
ornament, till his mind resembled a huge curiosity shop. All his life he
suffered from hypochondria, but curiously traced his malady to the stars
rather than to his own liver. It is related of him that he used to suffer
so from despondency that no help was to be found in medicine or theology;
his only relief was to go down to the river and hear the bargemen swear at
one another.

Burton's _Anatomy_ was begun as a medical treatise on morbidness, arranged
and divided with all the exactness of the schoolmen's demonstration of
doctrines; but it turned out to be an enormous hodgepodge of quotations and
references to authors, known and unknown, living and dead, which seemed to
prove chiefly that "much study is a weariness to the flesh." By some freak
of taste it became instantly popular, and