writers before Esquirol used the word melancholy, to convey the idea of derangement on some particular point, whether accompanied by gloom or mirth. Thus Cullen included under melancholy ‘hallucinations about the prosperous' as well as ‘the dangerous condition of the body; and Dr. Good speaks of ‘a self-complacent melancholy.” Other writers appear to have used the term in a non-medical sense, with equal diversity of meaning. Thus Henry More makes melancholy synonymous with enthusiasm.
“It is a strong temptation with a melancholist when he feels a storm of devotion and zeal come upon him like a mighty wind— all that excess of zeal and affection, and fluency of words is most palpably to be resolved into the power of melancholy, which is a kind of natural inebriation”—“the vapour and fumes of melancholy partake of the nature of wine.”
Milton uses the word melancholy in the sense of contem plative thought, and invokes and deifies the emotion in Il Penseroso :
“But hail thou goddess, sage and holy, Hail divinest melancholy.” Since then the term has been gradually settling down into its present meaning of emotional dejection. It is not however properly used even now to signify a morbid state, unless periphrasis for that purpose be made use of ; and care should be taken, which is not always done, to distinguish between melancholy and melancholia, the latter being the proper technical term applied to a form of mental disease. Shakespeare uses the word melancholy with many modi fications in its meaning, but with far less of laxity than that employed by other authors, and in a sense more approaching that of melancholia. In “Love's Labour Lost,” the grandi loquent Spaniard in his letters to the King uses the term in
its strictly medical sense :
“Besieged with sable-coloured melancholy, I did commend
