SOURCE: Webber, Joan. “Robert Burton: The Anatomy of Democritus, Jr.” In The Eloquent “I”: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose, pp. 80-114. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968.

In the essay below, Webber discusses how the “I” persona of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy combines the two distinct modes of life and art by manipulating the reader through an anecdotal and gossip-oriented analysis of sources rather than through a methodical investigation of the facts.

We have seen in Donne the Anglican's persistent effort to turn life into art and to find in art among other things a means to anticipate one's own death and look back upon his life. The same dizzying confusion of one mode of being with another occurs in the life and work of Robert Burton, onetime fellow of Christ Church, Oxford, and author of that huge 842-page folio volume, The Anatomy of Melancholy.¹ The epitaph which...