“Humorous they (melancholiacs) are beyond measure; sometimes profusely laughing, extraordinary merry, and then again weeping without a cause; groaning, sighing, pensive, sad, almost distracted, restless in their thoughts and actions, continually meditating. Velut agri somnia, vanae Finguntur species; -
more like dreamers than men awake, they feign a company of antick fantastical conceits.”
There is an intimate relationship between melancholy and humour. The fact is finely touched in the Yorick of Lawrence Sterne, and, what is more to the purpose, in the
real history of many of the most celebrated humourists; and the truth even descends to those humourists of action,
theatrical clowns. Who has not heard the story of one of the most celebrated of these applying incognito to a physician for the relief of melancholy, and being referred for a remedy to his own laughter-moving antics Not that humour is always attended by any tinge or tendency to melancholy, as the plenitude of this faculty exhibited by jolly Sir John fully proves. Still there is this in common to the roystering humour of Falstaff, the melancholy humour of Jacques, and the sarcastic humour of Hamlet, that they have each a perverse ingenuity in contemplating the weakness and sel fishness of human motive.
Wit deals with ideas and their
verbal representations; humour with motives and emotions; and that melancholy cast of thought, which tends to exhibit our own motives in an unfavourable light, is apt to probe the motives of others with searching insight, and to represent
them in those unexpected contrasts, and those true, but unusual, colours which tickle the intelligence with their novelty and strangeness.
The character of Hamlet presents another contrast, which, if not more obvious than the above, has at least attracted
more attention, perhaps because he himself comments upon
