SOURCE: Fish, Stanley E. “Thou Thyself Art the Subject of My Discourse: Democritus Jr. to the Reader.” In Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature, pp. 322-52. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972.

In the following essay, Fish detects a unity of style and substance in Burton's frequent digressions and shifts of subject in The Anatomy of Melancholy.

I Refer It to You

The reader who manages to make his way through the preface to Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy may be excused if he is unable to take its concluding sentences at face value:

but I presume of thy good favour, and gracious acceptance (gentle reader). Out of an assured hope and confidence therof, I will begin.

(123)¹

It is not simply that, given the treatment he has received, “gentle reader” is mockingly ironic, but that the same reader knows (if he knows anything at this point) that the promise...