ghosts, strike, or strut, &c., grow humorous in the end; like him in the poet, saepe ducentos, saepe decem servos, ("at one time followed by two hundred servants, at another only by ten”) he will dress himself, and undress, careless at last, grows insensible, stupid, or mad. [2616]He howls like a wolf, barks like a dog, and raves like Ajax and Orestes, hears music and outcries, which no man else hears.  As [2617]he did whom Amatus Lusitanus mentioneth cent. 3, cura. 55, or that woman in [2618]Springer, that spake many languages, and said she was possessed:  that farmer in [2619]Prosper Calenius, that disputed and discoursed learnedly in philosophy and astronomy, with Alexander Achilles his master, at Bologna, in Italy.  But of these I have already spoken.

Who can sufficiently speak of these symptoms, or prescribe rules to comprehend them? as Echo to the painter in Ausonius, vane quid affectas, &c., foolish fellow; what wilt? if you must needs paint me, paint a voice, et similem si vis pingere, pinge sonum; if you will describe melancholy, describe a fantastical conceit, a corrupt imagination, vain thoughts and different, which who can do?  The four and twenty letters make no more variety of words in diverse languages, than melancholy conceits produce diversity of symptoms in several persons.  They are irregular, obscure, various, so infinite, Proteus himself is not so diverse, you may as well make the moon a new coat, as a true character of a melancholy man; as soon find the motion of a bird in the air, as the heart of man, a melancholy man.  They are so confused, I say, diverse, intermixed with other diseases.  As the species be confounded (which [2620]I have showed) so are the symptoms; sometimes with headache, cachexia, dropsy, stone; as you may perceive by those several examples and illustrations, collected by [2621] Hildesheim spicel. 2. Mercurialis consil. 118. cap. 6 and 11. with headache, epilepsy, priapismus.  Trincavelius consil. 12. lib. 1. consil. 49. with gout:  caninus appetitus.  Montanus consil. 26, &c. 23, 234, 249, with falling-sickness, headache, vertigo, lycanthropia, &c.  J. Caesar Claudinus consult. 4. consult. 89 and 116. with gout, agues, haemorrhoids, stone, &c., who can distinguish these melancholy symptoms so intermixed with others, or apply them to their several kinds, confine them into method?  ’Tis hard I confess, yet I have disposed of them as I could, and will descend to particularise them according to their species.  For hitherto I have expatiated in more general lists or terms, speaking promiscuously of such ordinary signs, which occur amongst writers.  Not that they are all to be found in one man, for that were to paint a monster or chimera, not a man:  but some in one, some in another, and that successively or at several times.