There are some books of which every reader knows the names, but of whose contents few know anything, excepting as the same may have come to them filtered through the work of others. Of these, Burton's 'Anatomy of Melancholy' is one of the most marked instances. It is a vast storehouse from which subsequent authors have always drawn and continue to draw, even as Burton himself drew from others,--though without always giving the credit which with him was customary. Few would now have the courage to read it through, and probably fewer still could say with Dr. Johnson that it "was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise." [Illustration: ROBERT BURTON] Of Robert Burton himself very little is known. He was born in 1577, a few years later than Shakespeare,--probably at Lindley, in Leicestershire; and died at Oxford in 1640. He had some schooling at Sutton Coldfield in Warwickshire, and was sent to Brasenose College at Oxford in 1593; was elected a student at Christ Church College in 1599, and took his degree of B.D. in 1614. He was then thirty-seven years of age. Why he should have been so long in reaching his degree, does not appear. Two years later he was presented by the Dean and Chapter of Christ Church to the vicarage of St. Thomas in the suburbs of Oxford. To this, about 1630, through presentation by George, Lord Berkeley, was added the rectory of Segrave in Leicestershire, and he retained both livings until his death. This is about the sum and substance of his known history. Various legends remain regarding him; as, that he was very good and jolly company, a most learned scholar, very ready in quotations from the poets and classical authors,--and indeed no reader of the 'Anatomy' could imagine otherwise. Yet was he of a melancholy disposition, and it is said that "he composed this book with a view of relieving his own melancholy, but increased it to such a degree that nothing could make him laugh but going to the foot-bridge and hearing the ribaldry of the bargemen, which rarely failed to throw him into a violent fit of laughter." He says himself, "I write of melancholy, by being busie, to avoid melancholy." He was expert in the calculation of nativities, and cast his own horoscope; having determined in which, the time at which his death should occur, it was afterward shrewdly believed that he took measures to insure the fulfillment of the prophecy.