'He Is a Rammy Fulsome Fellow'

“He is a rammy fulsome fellow, a goblin faced fellow, he smells, he stinks, et caepas simul alliumque ructat [he reeks of onion and garlic].” 

The object of the slander is that figure familiar to readers of English literature at least since Chaucer, the cuckhold. Robert Burton (1577-1640) looks at the faithless wife and often oblivious husband from all sides. In one passage he seems to find excuses for the wife’s behavior, as when the husband has a “goatish complexion”: “[S]i quando ad thalamum [should he approach the nuptial couch], how like a dizzard [OED: "foolish fellow, idiot, blockhead"], a fool, an ass, he looks, how like a clown he behaves himself! she will not come near him by her own good will, but wholly rejects him, as Venus did her fuliginous Vulcan at last.”

 

Rammy in the sentence at the top means “rank, pungent, rammish,” from ram, the presumably malodorous male sheep. What I love most about Burton and his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621, followed by five additional editions during Burton’s lifetime, each larger than the one before), is the bounty of his language, his love of catalogues, the way he revels in sumptuous redundancy.   

 

To give the book its full title: The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is. With all the Kindes, Cavses, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Severall Cures of It. Considering its size – roughly 500,000 words in modern editions, often published in three volumes – and Burton’s chronically digressive narrative style, it’s a simple book to navigate.  It’s systematically organized into partitions, sections, members and subsections. Many editions come with a subject index. Thus, the passages quoted above can be found in Partition 3, Section 3, Member 1, Subsection 2. See “Jealousy” under “Cure of Love-Melancholy.”

 

Another reason for loving the Anatomy is Burton’s understanding of human nature. Nothing surprises him about our behavior. All of us are subject, at least periodically, to bouts of madness and moral lapses. He has a Theophrastian gift for illustrating moral types. You can read potions of the Anatomy as early incarnations of the self-help treatise. I say these things to soothe intimidated readers. Be patient. Read slowly. Keep the Oxford English Dictionary handy. Milton, Dr. Johnson, Sterne, Lamb, Keats and Melville, among others, read him with pleasure and the concentration of Talmudic scholars. The Anatomy is the ultimate example of what Max Beerbohm called the “dippable-into” book.

 

Burton died on this date, January 25, in 1640 at age sixty-two.