His work is certainly a most curious and bewitching medley of thought, information, wit, learning, personal interest, and poetic fancy. We all know it was the only book which ever drew the lazy Johnson from his bed an hour sooner than he wished to rise. The subject, like the flesh of that 'melancholy' creature the hare, may be dry, but, as with that, an astute cookery prevails to make it exceedingly piquant; the sauce is better than the substance. Burton's melancholy is not, like Johnson's, a deep, hopeless, 'inspissated gloom,' thickened by memories of remorse, and lighted up by the lurid fires of feared perdition; it is not, like Byron's, dashed with the demoniac element, and fretted into universal misanthropy; it is not, like Foster's, the sad, fixed fascination of a pure intelligence contemplating the darker side of things, as by a necessity of nature, and ignoring, without denying, the existence of the bright; nor is it, like that of the 'melancholy Jacques,' in 'As you Like it,' a wild, woodland, fantastical habit of thought, as of one living collaterally and aside to the world, and which often explodes into laughter at itself and at all things else;--Burton's is a wide- spread but tender shade, like twilight, diffused over the whole horizon of his thought, and is nourished at times into a luxury, and at times paraded as a peculiar possession. In his form of melancholy there are pleasures as well as pains. 'Most pleasant it is,' he says, 'to such as are to melancholy given, to lie in bed whole days and keep their chambers; to walk alone in some solitary grove, betwixt wood and water, by a brook-side, to meditate upon some delightsome and pleasant subject; and a most incomparable delight it is so to melancholise and build castles in the air.' Religious considerations have little to do with Burton's melancholy, and remorse or fear apparently nothing. Hence his book, although its theme be sadness, never shadows the spirit, but, on the contrary, from his dark, Lethean poppies, his readers are made to extract an element of joyful excitement, and the anatomy, and the cure, of the evil, are one and the same. As a writer, Burton ranks, in some points, with Montaigne, and in others with Sir Thomas Browne. He resembles the first in simplicity, _bonhommie_, and miscellaneous learning, and the other in rambling manner, quaint phraseology, and fantastic imagination. Neither of the three could be said to write books, but they accumulated vast storehouses, whence thousands of volumes might be, and have been compiled. There is nothing in Burton so low as in many of the 'Essays' of Montaigne, but there is nothing so lofty as in passages of Browne's 'Religio Medici' and 'Urn-Burial.' Burton has been a favourite quarry to literary thieves, among whom Sterne, in his 'Tristram Shandy,' stands pre-eminent. To his 'Anatomy' he prefixes a poem, a few stanzas of which we extract. ON MELANCHOLY.