the other corpus per animam as [168]our Regius Professor of physic well informed us in a learned lecture of his not long since.  One helps the vices and passions of the soul, anger, lust, desperation, pride, presumption, &c. by applying that spiritual physic; as the other uses proper remedies in bodily diseases.  Now this being a common infirmity of body and soul, and such a one that hath as much need of spiritual as a corporal cure, I could not find a fitter task to busy myself about, a more apposite theme, so necessary, so commodious, and generally concerning all sorts of men, that should so equally participate of both, and require a whole physician.  A divine in this compound mixed malady can do little alone, a physician in some kinds of melancholy much less, both make an absolute cure.

[169] “Alterius sic altera poscit opem.”

------“when in friendship joined
A mutual succour in each other find.”

And ’tis proper to them both, and I hope not unbeseeming me, who am by my profession a divine, and by mine inclination a physician.  I had Jupiter in my sixth house; I say with [170]Beroaldus, non sum medicus, nec medicinae prorsus expers, in the theory of physic I have taken some pains, not with an intent to practice, but to satisfy myself, which was a cause likewise of the first undertaking of this subject.

If these reasons do not satisfy thee, good reader, as Alexander Munificus that bountiful prelate, sometimes bishop of Lincoln, when he had built six castles, ad invidiam operis eluendam, saith [171]Mr. Camden, to take away the envy of his work (which very words Nubrigensis hath of Roger the rich bishop of Salisbury, who in king Stephen’s time built Shirburn castle, and that of Devises), to divert the scandal or imputation, which might be thence inferred, built so many religious houses.  If this my discourse be over-medicinal, or savour too much of humanity, I promise thee that I will hereafter make thee amends in some treatise of divinity.  But this I hope shall suffice, when you have more fully considered of the matter of this my subject, rem substratam, melancholy, madness, and of the reasons following, which were my chief motives:  the generality of the disease, the necessity of the cure, and the commodity or common good that will arise to all men by the knowledge of it, as shall at large appear in the ensuing preface.  And I doubt not but that in the end you will say with me, that to anatomise this humour aright, through all the members of this our Microcosmus, is as great a task, as to reconcile those chronological errors in the Assyrian monarchy, find out the quadrature of a circle, the creeks and sounds of the north-east, or north-west passages, and all out as good a discovery as that hungry [172]Spaniard’s of Terra Australis Incognita, as great trouble as to perfect the motion of Mars and Mercury, which so crucifies our astronomers, or to rectify the Gregorian Calendar.  I am so