Robert Burton

Robert Burton was an English scholar and clergyman, a long-time student of Christ Church, Oxford, and the author of the encyclopaedic prose work The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Gilfillan gives his birth year as 1576.

His one celebrated poem, the lyric Abstract of Melancholy, stands at the head of the Anatomy and is printed by Gilfillan under the title On Melancholy.