'Broad-minded, Bold-tongued Devourer of Books'

This is as fine a description of the ideal life, one mingling intellectual fitness and emotional health, as I’ve ever encountered:

“Henceforth, then, he did little else than read, write, and laugh.”

The author is Charles Whibley (1859-1930), the English literary journalist writing in Literary Portraits (1904). His subject is Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, born on this date, February 8, in 1577. Whibley includes in his book portraits of Rabelais, Philippe de Commines, Montaigne and Casanova. He writes of Burton:

“Though he, too, like Montaigne, was a desultory reader, he was desultory for another reason. Montaigne skipped from book to book, because an idle temper made close application impossible. Burton was so greedy in the acquisition of knowledge, that he could not read fast enough, and confusedly tumbled over divers authors in his haste to make their wisdom his own. Yet he was not in any sense what to-day we should call a specialist. It was his aim to have an oar in every man’s boat, to taste of every dish, to sip at every cup.”

I like Whibley’s metaphorical overload. His prose is violet shading into purple, an offspring of Burton’s baroque revelries, endlessly qualified, interpolated and glossed. Both at times seem to tip into parody, mocking their own methods. If one rare word does the job, three will do it better. Here is Whibley echoing Burton:

“Even if learning did not make men mad, it availed them little. The scholar, who escaped melancholy, was always richer in ridicule than in pence. He lost his wits, neglected health, wealth, and all worldly affairs, became no better than a dizzard, merely that he might pierce profitless mysteries, or confer immortality upon another. His very knowledge was useless to him, since it did not help him to pay court to a lady, or make a congee, like a common swasher; and he must perforce live out his life either a parasite, ‘crouching to a rich chuff for a meal’s meat,’ or wearing the ragged livery of the Muses.”

A dizzard, the OED tells us, is “a foolish fellow, idiot, blockhead” and thrived in Burton’s lifetime and seldom since. A congee is a “ceremonious dismissal and leave-taking,” and a swasher is defined as “a blustering braggart or ruffian.” Chuff has many meanings but here Burton and Whibley seem to mean “any person disliked; esp. . . . a rude coarse churlish fellow.” Language like this moves a word-lover to salivate. Whibley judges Burton a “broad-minded, bold-tongued devourer of books.” Some of us would proudly claim that as an epitaph.