Miseries of Scholars

Now because they are commonly subject to such hazards and inconveniences as dotage, madness, simplicity, &c. Jo. Voschius would have good scholars to be highly rewarded, and had in some extraordinary respect above other men, "to have greater [2000]privileges than the rest, that adventure themselves and abbreviate their lives for the public good." But our patrons of learning are so far nowadays from respecting the muses, and giving that honour to scholars, or reward which they deserve, and are allowed by those indulgent privileges of many noble princes, that after all their pains taken in the universities, cost and charge, expenses, irksome hours, laborious tasks, wearisome days, dangers, hazards, (barred interim from all pleasures which other men have, mewed up like hawks all their lives) if they chance to wade through them, they shall in the end be rejected, contemned, and which is their greatest misery, driven to their shifts, exposed to want, poverty, and beggary. Their familiar attendants are,

[2001]Pallentes morbi, luctus, curaeque laborque
Et metus, et malesuada fames, et turpis egestas,
Terribiles visu formae———

Grief, labour, care, pale sickness, miseries,
Fear, filthy poverty, hunger that cries,
Terrible monsters to be seen with eyes.

If there were nothing else to trouble them, the conceit of this alone were enough to make them all melancholy. Most other trades and professions, after some seven years' apprenticeship, are enabled by their craft to live of themselves. A merchant adventures his goods at sea, and though his hazard be great, yet if one ship return of four, he likely makes a saving voyage. An husbandman's gains are almost certain; quibus ipse Jupiter nocere non potest (whom Jove himself can't harm) ('tis [2002]Cato's hyperbole, a great husband himself); only scholars methinks are most uncertain, unrespected, subject to all casualties, and hazards. For first, not one of a many proves to be a scholar, all are not capable and docile, [2003]ex omniligno non fit Mercurius: we can make majors and officers every year, but not scholars: kings can invest knights and barons, as Sigismund the emperor confessed; universities can give degrees; and Tu quod es, e populo quilibet esse potest; but he nor they, nor all the world, can give learning, make philosophers, artists, orators, poets; we can soon say, as Seneca well notes, O virum bonum, o divitem, point at a rich man, a good, a happy man, a prosperous man, sumptuose vestitum, Calamistratum, bene olentem, magno temporis impendio constat haec laudatio, o virum literarum, but 'tis not so easily performed to find out a learned man. Learning is not so quickly got, though they may be willing to take pains, to that end sufficiently informed, and liberally maintained by their patrons and parents, yet few can compass it. Or if they be docile, yet all men's wills are not answerable to their wits, they can apprehend, but will not take pains; they are either seduced by bad companions, vel in puellam impingunt, vel in poculum (they fall in with women or wine) and so spend their time to their friends' grief and their own undoings. Or put case they be studious, industrious, of ripe wits, and perhaps good capacities, then how many diseases of body and mind must they encounter? No labour in the world like unto study. It may be, their temperature will not endure it, but striving to be excellent to know all, they lose health, wealth, wit, life and all.

excerpt from The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton, (first edition 1621).
full book in the Project Gutenberg Library