SOURCE: Tillman, James S. “The Satirist Satirized: Burton's Democritus Jr.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 10, No. 2 (1977): 89-96.

In the following essay, Tillman compares Burton's satiric style in his preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy to Horatian and Juvenalian satire, emphasizing the classical origins of the work's rhetorical personae rather than seventeenth-century concerns about the self and the stability of the authorial voice.

Although most critics of seventeenth-century literature are familiar with the rhetorical personae typical of various genres, such as the self-deprecating speaker of orations or the piping shepherd of pastorals, generic approaches to the character of Democritus Jr. in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy have been neglected. Even two recent studies of prose with a strong emphasis upon personae, Joan Webber's The Eloquent “I” and Stanley E. Fish's Self-Consuming Artifacts, give little attention to Burton's classical and neo-classical models for a voice to meet the rhetorical demands of...