One of the major documents of modern European civilization, Robert Burton’s astounding compendium, a survey of melancholy in all its myriad forms, has invited nothing but superlatives since its publication in the seventeenth century. Lewellyn Powys called it “the greatest work of prose of the greatest period of English prose-writing,” while the celebrated surgeon William Osler declared it the greatest of medical treatises. And Dr. Johnson, Boswell reports, said it was the only book that he rose early in the morning to read with pleasure. In this surprisingly compact and elegant new edition, Burton’s spectacular verbal labyrinth is sure to delight, instruct, and divert today’s readers as much as it has those of the past four centuries.
It is a curiosity, a marvel. It is singular. It attempts to catalog the ills -- spiritual, mental, and physical -- of mankind, diagnosing them in terms drawn from the author's prodigious mastery of several millennia of classical literary heritage. It is Johnsonian in this regard (and Johnson himself is reported to have said that The Anatomy, published in 1621, was ''the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise''-- high praise indeed), humbly depending on a catena of earlier authors to describe any subject at hand. If you ask us if we have read its 1382 pages through, we will again quote Dr. Johnson and reply, ''we have looked into it...do you read books through?'' Whether you ''look into it'' or ''read it through,'' we guarantee vastly more than your money's worth of eloquence, humor, and imaginative nourishment. Includes two introductions (notable in their own right) and the Greek and Latin notes of Burton's original text.
It is a curiosity, a marvel. It is singular. It attempts to catalog the ills -- spiritual, mental, and physical -- of mankind, diagnosing them in terms drawn from the author's prodigious mastery of several millennia of classical literary heritage. It is Johnsonian in this regard (and Johnson himself is reported to have said that The Anatomy, published in 1621, was ''the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise''-- high praise indeed), humbly depending on a catena of earlier authors to describe any subject at hand. If you ask us if we have read its 1382 pages through, we will again quote Dr. Johnson and reply, ''we have looked into it...do you read books through?'' Whether you ''look into it'' or ''read it through,'' we guarantee vastly more than your money's worth of eloquence, humor, and imaginative nourishment. Includes two introductions (notable in their own right) and the Greek and Latin notes of Burton's original text.
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