[6303] “Pergite Pieridies, medio nec calle vagantem
        Linquite me, qua nulla pedum vestigia ducunt,
        Nulla rotae currus testantur signa priores.”

I have no pattern to follow as in some of the rest, no man to imitate.  No physician hath as yet distinctly written of it as of the other; all acknowledge it a most notable symptom, some a cause, but few a species or kind. [6304]Areteus, Alexander, Rhasis, Avicenna, and most of our late writers, as Gordonius, Fuchsius, Plater, Bruel, Montaltus, &c. repeat it as a symptom. [6305]Some seem to be inspired of the Holy Ghost, some take upon them to be prophets, some are addicted to new opinions, some foretell strange things, de statu mundi et Antichristi, saith Gordonius.  Some will prophesy of the end of the world to a day almost, and the fall of the Antichrist, as they have been addicted or brought up; for so melancholy works with them, as [6306]Laurentius holds.  If they have been precisely given, all their meditations tend that way, and in conclusion produce strange effects, the humour imprints symptoms according to their several inclinations and conditions, which makes [6307]Guianerius and [6308]Felix Plater put too much devotion, blind zeal, fear of eternal punishment, and that last judgment for a cause of those enthusiastics and desperate persons:  but some do not obscurely make a distinct species of it, dividing love melancholy into that whose object is women; and into the other whose object is God.  Plato, in Convivio, makes mention of two distinct furies; and amongst our neoterics, Hercules de Saxonia lib. 1. pract. med. cap. 16. cap. de Melanch. doth expressly treat of it in a distinct species. [6309] “Love melancholy” (saith he) “is twofold; the first is that (to which peradventure some will not vouchsafe this name or species of melancholy) affection of those which put God for their object, and are altogether about prayer, fasting, &c., the other about women.”  Peter Forestus in his observations delivereth as much in the same words:  and Felix Platerus de mentis alienat. cap. 3. frequentissima est ejus species, in qua curanda saepissime multum fui impeditus; ’tis a frequent disease; and they have a ground of what they say, forth of Areteus and Plato. [6310]Areteus, an old author, in his third book cap. 6. doth so divide love melancholy, and derives this second from the first, which comes by inspiration or otherwise. [6311]Plato in his Phaedrus hath these words, “Apollo’s priests in Delphos, and at Dodona, in their fury do many pretty feats, and benefit the Greeks, but never in their right wits.”  He makes them all mad, as well he might; and he that shall but consider that superstition of old, those prodigious effects of it (as in its place I will shew the several furies of our fatidici dii, pythonissas, sibyls, enthusiasts, pseudoprophets, heretics, and schismatics in these our latter ages) shall instantly confess, that all