point of view and not merely from ours. Some cases which would come under this heading have already, for convenience’ sake, been treated above. There is the melancholia of Penthea, hardly distinguishable from madness, and utilised dramatically in a similar way. There is also the melancholy of Palador, which seems to us less a case for the physician than it did to the author. Ford’s conception of melancholy as a disease is clearly influenced by Burton, and he would no doubt have agreed with the doctors of Christopher Sly that “Melancholy is the Nurse of frenzy,”[128:1] if, indeed, he would not have gone farther and declined to distinguish between them. Other cases of melancholia are merely described, and will hardly repay study. Such is Viola’s well-known description of one (imaginary) girl who
“Never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i’ the bud
Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief.”[128:2]
Shakespeare’s King John is thinking of another kind of melancholy when he says to Hubert:
“. . . that surly spirit, melancholy,
Had baked thy blood and made it heavy-thick.”[128:3]