They delight in floods and waters, desert places, to walk alone in orchards, gardens, private walks, back lanes, averse from company, as Diogenes in his tub, or Timon Misanthropus [2533], they abhor all companions at last, even their nearest acquaintances and most familiar friends, for they have a conceit (I say) every man observes them, will deride, laugh to scorn, or misuse them, confining themselves therefore wholly to their private houses or chambers, fugiunt homines sine causa (saith Rhasis) et odio habent, cont. l. 1. c. 9. they will diet themselves, feed and live alone.  It was one of the chiefest reasons why the citizens of Abdera suspected Democritus to be melancholy and mad, because that, as Hippocrates related in his Epistle to Philopaemenes, [2534]"he forsook the city, lived in groves and hollow trees, upon a green bank by a brook side, or confluence of waters all day long, and all night.” Quae quidem (saith he) plurimum atra bile vexatis et melancholicis eveniunt, deserta frequentant, hominumque congressum aversantur; [2535]which is an ordinary thing with melancholy men.  The Egyptians therefore in their hieroglyphics expressed a melancholy man by a hare sitting in her form, as being a most timorous and solitary creature, Pierius Hieroglyph. l. 12. But this, and all precedent symptoms, are more or less apparent, as the humour is intended or remitted, hardly perceived in some, or not all, most manifest in others.  Childish in some, terrible in others; to be derided in one, pitied or admired in another; to him by fits, to a second continuate:  and howsoever these symptoms be common and incident to all persons, yet they are the more remarkable, frequent, furious and violent in melancholy men.  To speak in a word, there is nothing so vain, absurd, ridiculous, extravagant, impossible, incredible, so monstrous a chimera, so prodigious and strange, [2536]such as painters and poets durst not attempt, which they will not really fear, feign, suspect and imagine unto themselves:  and that which [2537]Lod.  Vives said in a jest of a silly country fellow, that killed his ass for drinking up the moon, ut lunam mundo redderet, you may truly say of them in earnest; they will act, conceive all extremes, contrarieties, and contradictions, and that in infinite varieties. Melancholici plane incredibilia sibi persuadent, ut vix omnibus saeculis duo reperti sint, qui idem imaginati sint (Erastus de Lamiis), scarce two of two thousand that concur in the same symptoms.  The tower of Babel never yielded such confusion of tongues, as the chaos of melancholy doth variety of symptoms.  There is in all melancholy similitudo dissimilis, like men’s faces, a disagreeing likeness still; and as in a river we swim in the same place, though not in the same numerical water; as the same instrument affords several lessons, so the same disease yields diversity of symptoms.  Which howsoever they be diverse, intricate, and hard to be confined, I will adventure yet in such a vast confusion and generality to bring them into some order; and so descend to particulars.