chè dir nol posson con parola integra.
Accidie did not disappear with the monasteries and the Middle Ages. The Renaissance was also subject to it. We find a copious description of the symptoms of acedia in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. The results of the midday demon’s machinations are now known as the vapours or the spleen. To the spleen amiable Mr. Matthew Green, of the Custom House, devoted those eight hundred octosyllables which are his claim to immortality. For him it is a mere disease to be healed by temperate diet:
Hail! water gruel, healing power,
Of easy access to the poor;
by laughter, reading and the company of unaffected young ladies:
Mothers, and guardian aunts, forbear
Your impious pains to form the fair,
Nor lay out so much cost and art
But to deflower the virgin heart;
by the avoidance of party passion, drink, Dissenters and missionaries, especially missionaries: to whose undertakings Mr. Green always declined to subscribe: