Burton on Beer

I began reading The Anatomy of Melancholy on the recommendation of Ford Maddox Ford, who praised it in The March of Literature. He mentions that another of his favorite authors, Samuel Johnson, used to read it in bed in the morning as a way of preparing for the day. I took this advice and have been reading it on the porch or in front of the fire in the morning for 15 years. I haven’t finished it and I hope I never do. Burton is a master prose stylist. Ford asserts that the 17th century was the golden age of English prose because it had not yet become so regular of spelling and expression as to become cliched. They did not join words together yet into stock phrases (freezing cold, pitch black, high dudgeon etc). But the prose style is not the only interest of the book by any means. It is a tome on depression; a last, gorgeous compendium of the old science and wisdom that would, within a hundred years, become an object of merely antiquarian or occult interest, as the Enlightenment, modern medicine and philosophy began to evolve and with them, the concept of madness. There is no facet of madness and depression, of spiritual, physical and emotional delusion and darkness that escapes his pen. In the section on alcohol, which he sees naturally as one of the causes of Melancholy, he takes up and puts down every known liquid intoxicant. Ever the Englishman however, he stops short of beer, so long as it isn’t German:

“Beer, if it be over new or over stale, over strong, or not sod, smell of the cask, sharp, or sour, is most unwholesome, frets and galls &c. Henricius Ayrerus, in a consultation of his, for one that laboured of hypochondriacal melancholy, discommends beer. So doth Crato, in that excellent counsel of his, as too windy, because of the hop. But he means belike that thick black Bohemian beer used in some other parts of Germany: Nothing comes in so thick/Nothing goes out so thin/It must needs follow then/The dregs are left within. As that old poet scoffed, calling it a monstrous drink, like the River Styx. But let them say as they list, to such as are accustomed unto it, ’tis a most wholesome (so Polydore Virgil calleth it) and a pleasant drink, it is more subtle and better for the hop that rarefies it, hath an especial virtue against melancholy, as our Herbalists confess, Fuchsias approves, and many others.”