those who made plaint to him from the Jew's forfeitures, and he despised and spat upon the wretched usurer. When real trouble comes upon him, his melancholy disappears. He will gladly release himself from the penalties of the bond. The apparent submission to his fate, because he is “a tainted wether
of the flock,” and will by death avoid “the hollow eye and rumpled brow, and age of poverty,” all this is spoken in the magnanimous desire to relieve the wretchedness of his friends;
but when the wealth, of which he was formerly so careless, is regained, there is no expression of melancholy in its re ception.
“Sweet lady, ye have given me life and living.” Monotonous prosperity is the cause of his morbid sadness; a strong dose of adversity its cure. The more wholesome condition is that of the middle state prayed for by the wise Agur, “give me neither poverty nor riches, feed me with food convenient for me.”
The melancholy of the Queen in King Richard the Second bears a strong resemblance to that of Antonio. A new element, however, is added, in the vague apprehension of coming evil. The sadness of the Queen, like that of Antonio, is partly constitutional, and arises in the midst of prosperity; but unlike it, it does not rest in the present; but throws its dark shadow into the future. This union of sadness and fear is constantly met with among the insane ; very frequently, indeed, groundless fear is the sole apparent cause of melancholia, or rather its prominent feature. In the following passage, the Queen's explanation of the origin of sadness from fear, and Bushy's rejoinder upon the origin of fear from sadness, is a wonderful example of psycho logical acumen. It is remarkable that in Richard's Queen, as in Antonio, the real stroke of adversity is described as
adverse to the melancholy which had free sway in prosperous
