uller, he is
never, as Fuller sometimes is, puerile, and the greater concentration of
his thoughts and studies has produced what Fuller never quite produced, a
masterpiece. At the same time it must be confessed that Burton's more
leisurely life assisted to a great extent in the production of his work.
The English collegiate system would have been almost sufficiently justified
if it had produced nothing but _The Anatomy of Melancholy_; though there is
something ironical, no doubt, in the fact that this ideal fruit of a
studious and endowed leisure was the work of one who, being a beneficed
clergyman, ought not in strictness to have been a resident member of a
college. Yet, elsewhere than in Oxford or Cambridge the book could hardly
have grown, and it is as unique as the institutions which produced it.

The author of the _Anatomy_ was the son of Ralph Burton of Lindley in
Leicestershire, where he was born on the 8th of February 1577. He was
educated at Sutton Coldfield School, and thence went to Brasenose College,
Oxford. He became a student of Christchurch--the equivalent of a fellow--in
1599, and seems to have passed the whole of the rest of his life there,
though he took orders and enjoyed together or successively the living of
St. Thomas in Oxford, the vicarage of Walsby in Lincolnshire, and the
rectory of Segrave in Leicestershire, at both of which latter places he
seems to have kept the minimum of residence, though tradition gives him the
character of a good churchman, and though there is certainly nothing
inconsistent with that character in the _Anatomy_. The picture of him which
Anthony a Wood gives at a short second hand is very favourable; and the
attempts to harmonise his "horrid disorder of melancholy" with his "very
merry, facete, and juvenile company," arise evidently from almost ludicrous
misunderstanding of what melancholy means and is. As absurd, though more
serious, is the traditionary libel obviously founded on the words in his
epitaph (_Cui vitam et mortem dedit melancholia_), that having cast his
nativity, he, in order not to be out as to the time of his death, committed
suicide. As he was sixty-three (one of the very commonest periods of death)
at the time, the want of reason of the suggestion equals its want of
charity.

The offspring in English of Burton's sixty-three years of humorous study of
men and books is _The Anatomy of Melancholy_, first printed in 1621, and
enlarged afterwards by the autho