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Hindhead

Hindhead is a village in the Waverley district of the ceremonial county of Surrey, England. It is the highest village in the county and its buildings are between 185 m and 253 m above sea level. The village forms part of the Haslemere parish. Situated on the county border with Hampshire, it is best known as the location of the Devil's Punch Bowl, a beauty spot and site of special scientific interest.

The A3 between Portsmouth and London was crossed by the A287 between Hook and Haslemere. The A3 now passes under Hindhead in the Hindhead Tunnel and its route along the Punch Bowl has been removed and landscaped, but the crossroads still exists for local traffic, as a double mini-roundabout. Hindhead is 11 miles south-west of Guildford and on the border with Hampshire. It is a ward in the district of Waverley, and part of the civil parish of Haslemere. The ward, which includes Beacon Hill, had a population of 4,292 at the 2011 Census. The name "Hindhead" is first attested in 1571, and means "hill frequented by hinds", or female deer.

Land use, elevations and soil types
The settled parts of the village are elevated relative to all of the surrounding parishes and are a mixture of paved streets and wooded roads as well as agricultural smallholdings, which are few compared with other parts of Waverley District. Hindhead has the 2nd and 13th highest hills in Surrey: Gibbet Hill and Hatch Farm Hill, at 272 m and 211 m above sea level respectively. These rise gradually from the rest of the village towards the north of the Greensand Ridge, upon which the village wholly lies. The soil is near its surface a sort of crumbly sandstone here known as greensand which breaks up forest into acidic heathland in many places. It supports endemic types of fungi, ferns, gorse and heather.

Features
The north of the village forms the Devil's Punch Bowl, a large wooded beauty spot and a site of special scientific interest. Much of the north and east of the village is rolling woodland which forms part of the Surrey Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

History
This area was notorious for highwaymen. In 1736, Stephen Phillips, a robber tried and convicted at the Old Bailey, admitted to the Newgate chaplain to having stolen 150 guineas in gold on the road towards London. In 1786, three men were convicted of the murder of an unknown sailor on his way from London to rejoin his ship, a deed commemorated by several memorials in the area. The perpetrators were hung in chains to warn others on Gibbet Hill, a short walk away on top of the Devil's Punch Bowl. With an increase in traffic and opening of the London to Portsmouth railway line removing much of the road transport of freight, such incidents reduced during the 19th century.

Hindhead became a substantial settlement in the late 19th century. In 1904 a temporary mission church was built to serve the new community. An architectural competition to design a permanent church, that of St Albans in Beacon Hill, was held in 1906, and John Duke Coleridge (1879–1934) was chosen as the architect. The first phase, comprising the chancel, north chapel, transept and the lower stage of a projected bell tower, was completed by 1907, and the church gained its own parish in the same year. A series of windows by the Arts and Crafts designers Karl Parsons and Christopher Whall were installed in the unfinished church between 1908 and 1912. The three eastern bays of the nave were consecrated in 1915, but the two western bays were not built until 1929–31; the bell-tower was never completed and became in effect a south transept. There followed two additional stained-glass windows: by Christopher Webb in 1945 and by Francis Skeat in 1950. A large vestry extension was added in 1964. A fire in 1999 destroyed the original high altar and reredos paintings.

Notable people

 * Grant Allen (1848–1899), the Canadian-born novelist, lived at "Hilltop". Conan Doyle was one of Allen's neighbours and became his friend; he completed Allen's novel Hilda Wade after Allen's death.
 * Peter Alliss (1931–2020), professional golfer and commentator, lived in Hindhead.
 * Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lived at "Undershaw" from 1897 to 1907. Here he wrote some of his best-known novels, including The Hound of the Baskervilles. Undershaw later became a hotel and restaurant, but this closed in 2004 and the property is now a school. Conan Doyle was Hindhead Golf Club's first President in 1904.
 * Miss James built and lived at West Down, donating land to the National Trust which now features Miss James' Walk and the Miss James footbridge over the A3 road.
 * Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery (1887–1976) took the title of "Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, of Hindhead in the County of Surrey" when he was raised to the peerage in 1946.
 * Playwright George Bernard Shaw lived at "Blen Cathra" in Hindhead, now the site of St Edmund's School.
 * Diplomat and writer Humphrey Trevelyan was born at the parsonage in Hindhead.
 * The scientist John Tyndall (1820–1893) lived and died at "Tyndalls", now known as "Hindhead House". He is best known for his work on the discovery of the greenhouse effect.

Government
For the purposes of local government, Hindhead is within the civil parish of Haslemere, the district of Waverley and the county of Surrey. Hindhead forms a ward for elections to Haslemere Town Council and Waverley Borough Council, and is part of the Waverley Western Villages electoral division for Surrey County Council elections. The ward elects a single county councillor, two district councillors and five town councillors.

Hindhead is within the UK constituency of South West Surrey and was in the European constituency of South East England.

Transport
Until 2011, Hindhead village was situated on the main A3 road between London and Portsmouth. In that year, a £371 million bypass was completed, reducing the amount of traffic passing through the village. The bypass includes the 1.9 mi twin-bore tunnel, the longest non-estuarial road tunnel in the UK.

The village is served by the A287, between Hook and Haslemere, and the A333, a stretch of the former A3 that links the village south to the new bypass. The section of the old A3 north of Hindhead and alongside the Devil's Punch Bowl has been returned to tree-interspersed heathland.

The nearest railway station is at Haslemere, 2.6 mi away, on the Portsmouth Direct Line between London Waterloo and Portsmouth Harbour stations. Hindhead is served by several Stagecoach South bus routes linking nearby towns and villages and connections further afield, and National Express Coaches between Portsmouth and London.

Nearest settlements
Neighbouring settlements are Beacon Hill (administratively part of Hindhead, while geographically separate) and Grayshott village. The town of Haslemere is 2 miles to the southeast, whilst the considerably larger town of Guildford is 10.5 miles to the north-east. London is 38 miles to the north-east.

title: Hindhead


text:
Talk:Napier

Because of the number of disambiguation notes appearing at the top of the Napier pages I have created Napier as a Disambiguation page

I have REDIRECTed the original entry, about Napier,_New_Zealand to that title. kiwiinapanic 01:21 Jan 26, 2003 (UTC)

nice page, I enjoyed so much, thanks. Missingdata1 (talk) 15:04, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Talk:Napier


text:
Fetcham

Fetcham is a suburban village in the Mole Valley district, in Surrey, England west of the town of Leatherhead, on the other side of the River Mole and has a mill pond, springs and an associated nature reserve. The housing, as with adjacent Great Bookham, sits on the lower slopes of the North Downs north of Polesden Lacey (NT). Fetcham Grove has Leatherhead and the village's main leisure centre and football club, between the two settlements. Fetcham has two short parades of shops and services, several sports teams and parks and a small number of large pubs and food premises.

Neighbouring Bookham and Leatherhead have railway stations and a junction of the M25 London Orbital Motorway is a 3-mile (4.8-km) journey from it passing alongside the River Mole beyond a brief upland made up of most of Fetcham's remaining farms and wooded Great Bookham Common demarcating Fetcham's northern border. The northern few square miles and the larger North Downs are protected Green Belt, forming a buffer between Stoke D'Abernon (the south of Cobham post town) and Dorking respectively.

History
The name Fetcham is derived from the Anglo-Saxon "Fecca's ham" – Fecca's settlement. Fetcham lay within the Copthorne hundred.

Indeed, there is evidence that there were even earlier settlements, with the discovery of Stone and Bronze Age tools and Roman artefacts, as well as three ancient burial grounds.

Fetcham appears in Domesday Book of 1086 as Feceham. It was held partly by William the Conqueror; partly by Richard from the Bishop of Bayeux partly by Oswald the Thegn. Its Domesday assets were: 7 hides; 5½ mills worth 17s; 10½ ploughs; 2 oxen; 30 acre of meadow; woodland, herbage and pannage worth 23 hogs. It rendered £10 10s 0d per year to its feudal system overlords per year. Fetcham, therefore, was referenced in the Domesday survey as three manors; one known as King's Manor was probably Fetcham Park; another was given to Odo, Bishop of Bayeux after the Norman conquest. The third was an Augustinian foundation from Merton Priory, at Cannon Court, which Henry VIII dissolved in 1538.

Its small manorial farming community numbered 176 in the survey, but halved as a result of the Black Death in 1349. In the first half of the nineteenth century the population was still only around 370. In the 1931 census it had reached 1,318 and by 1972 was 7,331.

St Mary's Church has been a place of Christian worship for over 1000 years. Built during Anglo-Saxon and early Norman periods, it is probably on the site of an even earlier timber church. There are many hints of its past in its structure. These include the south-west quoin of the nave, and a single splay window high on the south wall with traces of Roman brick as well as arches that are presumed to pre-date 1066.

In 1951 the civil parish had a population of 4178. On 1 April 1974 the parish was abolished.

Topography
The village of Fetcham is slightly larger than the English non-city parish average; extending from the River Mole at the village's east side, it is bounded by the neighbouring villages of Great Bookham and Little Bookham on its west.

Amenities and landmarks
Although at the eastern extreme, the historic B2122 Guildford Road/Waterlow Road which has mixed use splits north and east with two bridges to Leatherhead, Fetcham is centred on its own road The Street, with wide-ranging convenience shops, some small restaurants/take-aways, community halls, large public houses as well as nearby churches.

The Fetcham Conservation Area includes the impressive 18th-century mansion of Fetcham Park House. The Salt Box, The Well House, The Dower House and Ballands Hall are four of a cluster of old buildings in that area. Others are sparingly strewn throughout Fetcham including at Grade II*: Le Pelerin and Thorncroft Manor.

The Mill Pond springs are a large number of chalk springs, still used to supply potable tap water. These springs continued to supply water during the droughts of 1976 and 2006.

There are four Christian congregations in the village:
 * Cannon Court Evangelical Church, in Cannonside
 * Church of the Holy Spirit (RC), in Bell Lane
 * Christ Church Fetcham, which meets in Oakfield Junior School
 * St Mary's Church Grade II* listed medieval, off The Ridgeway

To its south are the Fetcham and Leatherhead Downs, which are a part of the North Downs.

Education
There are two village schools:
 * Fetcham Infants School for ages 4–7 with an attached pre-school for ages 2½–4. The original school, nearby, opened in 1820. On the present site, the distinctive white former main building, now a classroom, was built in 1854 and added to and enlarged in 1874 and 1886. A four-classroom block and staff room was built in 1936, to accommodate children from the significant residential growth in the village. A new hall and servery were added in 1982.
 * Oakfield Junior School for 256 pupils ages 7–11. The present school opened (as Fetcham County School) in September 1963.

Culture, sport and social life
Fetcham's sole pub, The Bell was built in brick in the 1930s on the site of an earlier pub, opposite Fetcham Infants School. It changed ownership several times in the late 20th century until it was bought by the Youngs brewery chain in 2004, when it had a major refit, followed by another in late 2007. The Bell is mentioned in The Good Food Guide and holds a pub quiz on Mondays.

The large Village Hall in The Street is home to several organisations, including Fetcham Village Women's Institute. It was also the venue for several early performances by the influential band John's Children, which included sometime frontman Marc Bolan.

There is also a small reading room that can be hired for private functions, on Cobham Road just north of the railway.

There was a social club, called the Fetcham Sports and Social Club, but this closed in 2001 after the membership dwindled. The building is now used as offices.

1st Fetcham Scout Group, headquartered in Cock Lane, has three Cub Scout packs and two Scout Troops, as well as Beavers. Fetcham Explorers share the 1st Fetcham Scout Group hall and facilities.

Fetcham FC football club no longer exists, Fetcham Park United formed in 1971 is now an adult amateur Charter Standard football club affiliated with the Surrey FA. Its two teams play in Division 1 and Division 5 of the Leatherhead & District Sunday Football League. The home ground was formerly the Cock Lane Recreation Ground in Fetcham but the teams now play home games at Priest Hill Playing Fields, in Epsom.

Transport
All parts of the large village are within 1.5 mi of a railway station giving easy access to London. The M25 motorway's nearest access is J9, just after the one-way square in Leatherhead town centre (enclosing public gardens) or from the south of the village via the Leatherhead bypass and A246. Guildford, Cobham, Epsom and Leatherhead can be reached by the A-road network that has a choice of routes through and around the village.

Roads
The main village thoroughfare is the A245 Cobham Road and is partly bounded by and contains partly in the south the east-west, part-dualled A246.

Local bus operator Falcon Buses provides hourly route 479 between Epsom and Guildford through the village.

Rail
The New Guildford Line skirts the north of most of the houses in Fetcham, but there is currently no station in the village. There were proposals for a station in the village centre during the 1930s/40s which would have served the main village centre and been located at what is now Hilley Field Lane . The nearest stations are Leatherhead, Cobham & Stoke D'Abernon and Bookham.

Emergency services
Fetcham is served by the following emergency services:
 * Surrey Police
 * South East Coast Ambulance Service as of 1 July 2006. The Surrey, Sussex, and Kent Ambulance services have merged, and no longer exist separately.
 * Surrey Fire & Rescue Service, Leatherhead Fire Station is in Fetcham, off Guildford Road, close to the River Mole boundary with Leatherhead.
 * Fetcham (Leatherhead) fire station has 28 personnel and one fire engine (water tender ladder). It also has special vehicles, one that is capable of transporting a large quantity of water or foam to an incident (water carrier), and a fire victim support vehicle crewed by the Red Cross.
 * Appliances:
 * 1 x water tender ladder
 * 1 x water carrier

Demography and housing
The average level of accommodation in the region composed of detached houses was 28%, the average that was apartments was 22.6%. The proportion of households who owned their home outright compares to the regional average of 35.1%. The proportion who owned their home with a loan compares to the regional average of 32.5%. The remaining % is made up of rented dwellings (plus a negligible % of households living rent-free).

Notes and references

 * Notes
 * References

title: Fetcham


text:
Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Alpha Archive 1

 * Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style
 * Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style--Archive Directory

Advocating &nbsp;
What do you say about a section advocating the usage of the non-breakable space? Cases I would start with are:

 * 1) Separating the initials from a name, or other cases distinguishing an abbreviation ending from the end-of-sentence period, as in B.N. Delaunay
 * 2) Preventing a stand-alone (before a comma or a period) numeral or short acronym/abbreviation carried over to a new line
 * 3) em-dash tying, as with the "Tom and Jerry" example in the Sections:Introduction in the article

Please add more. BACbKA 22:55, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * I'd prefer to keep the amount of HTML in the style guide to a minimum, and for the style guide to focus on language. Maurreen 06:42, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * Should, following this logic, - and – and — and $$-$$, be treated all the same and therefore interchangeable? What about the "Use straight quotation marks and apostrophes" section — do you consider it redundant as well? I fully agree with the "don't get fancy" section that one should not abuse the HTML power in the articles here, but I think that using the non-breakable space where needed is a necessary part of markup, i.e., a part of the necessary minimum. Any of the cases I have enumerated above looks REALLY ugly without a non-breakable space, in case the line is actually gets broken there. Pity the wikireader creators, on the paper it is even uglier...
 * But, maybe, both things are needed — one document about language/wording and the other dealing more with the fonts selection/selection of the punctuation signs/markup? BACbKA 09:41, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * Those are valid cases you make, but I still think HTML entities should be kept to a minimum in source. Most editors do not know what they mean. -- Tarquin 09:55, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
 * Your point makes a lot of sense, but then there has to be some other way to minimize the ugliness induced by the lack of proper markip. Maybe we should ask the software to be configured to recognize additional shorthand in the source (e.g., like in TeX: -- for an en-dash, --- for an em-dash;, and ~ for a non-breakable space)? BACbKA 11:08, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
 * I am sure there will be a very old post by me on the mailing list suggesting that -- and --- be turned into en and em dashed ;) It's very easy and it's clear to editors. I'd certainly support this. For the non-breakable space I'm less sure. The French WP has a big problem with this, because all numbers (eg 100 000) and punctutation (the space before : ? ! etc) need nbsp, and this makes markup pretty ugly. -- Tarquin 16:34, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * I agree with having this information in a different section. Maurreen 16:31, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Alternate vs. Alternative
The MOS currently states: ''If a word or phrase is generally regarded as correct, then prefer it to an alternative that is often regarded as incorrect. Thus "alternative meaning" should be used rather than "alternate meaning" since dictionaries often discourage or do not even recognize the latter. For example, the American Heritage Dictionary "Usage Note" at alternative simply says: "Alternative should not be confused with alternate." ''

I think this unnecessarily deprecates "alternate" for "alternative". There is an absolute distinction between the two when used as nouns. However, one very common meaning of alternate as and adjective (at least in the U.S.) is Serving or used in place of another; substitute: an alternate plan. "Alternative" (again, at least in the U.S.), also has the additional very common meaning ''a. Existing outside traditional or established institutions or systems: an alternative lifestyle. b. Espousing or reflecting values that are different from those of the establishment or mainstream: an alternative newspaper; alternative greeting cards.'' I think alternate is preferable to alternative for adjectival use. I think alternative has unintended connotations which I find distracting when I come across it. older ≠ wiser 13:37, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * The problem is that's exactly the reaction I have (and presumably that other author has) to the word alternate, which to me implies a pre-decided option—Plan B if you like, or a substitute in a sporting game—whether there might be more than one such or not. Alternative on the other hand allows rather more freedom: there's not a laid-down list you have to pick from, you can make it up. HTH HAND --Phil | Talk 15:20, Jul 12, 2004 (UTC)

 * The term 'alternate' means every second one, which is quite different from 'alternative' (allowing/necessitating a choice).
 * To quote Eric Partridge in Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good English, Third Edition, 1999:
 *  alternate and alternative. The first means 'every other'. Alternate days are Monday, Wednesday, Friday ... The related adverb is alternately, meaning 'by turns'. 'He walked and ran alternately.' Alternate cannot replace alternative, which means 'available instead of another', as in 'We took an alternative route.' The adv. of alternative is alternatively, 'offering a choice'. 'You could fly, or alternatively go by sea.' Alternative has been overused in official jargon, in such contexts as 'alternative accommodation', 'make alternative arrangements', 'find alternative employment', where it is often better replaced by other or new. But there is no really satisfactory synonym for the more recent sense 'nontraditional, offering a substitute for the conventional thing', as in 'alternative medicine', 'alternative cinema', 'alternative technology'. In this sense, it is a vogue word.
 * An alternative meaning, you will agree, is certainly not a meaning in rotation; it is, rather, 'available instead of another'.
 * Granted, of course, there is the American English habit of using alternate in place of alternative. Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary gives the second definition of 'alternate' such that could be used in the sense of 'alternative' above – it gives to it no qualification on register or suitability, however. Nonetheless, the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, Cambridge dictionaries and the Concise Oxford Dictionary – which is more or less the authority on English usage – all state this is North American English. A useful note given by the COED: 'The use of alternate to mean alternative (as in we will need to find alternate sources of fuel) is common in North American English, though still regarded as incorrect by many in Britain.'
 * And this is precisely what the Manual of Style warns against.
 * —Sinuhe 16:32, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * So if we have a British vs. U.S. usage difference, why are we recommending one over the other? Shouldn't this follow the more general policy of using whichever form is appropriate for the context of the article? older ≠ wiser 16:51, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * No, this is not primarily a US vs Commonwealth difference. The term alternative is correct everywhere; and as such, it should be used in preference to a term which is not. In other words, alternative is – I should believe – always preferable to alternate in the sense of choice, even in subjects entirely related to the USA. The spirit of the passage from the style guide in question is exactly that: if something (='alternate') is considered not correct by many (in this case, virtually all speakers of English bar North Americans – I fear that I live in ignorance as regards Canadian usage), and there is an alternative (='alternative') considered correct by all, use the correct term so as to suit the most. Or can you think of a context in which alternate is the better option of the two? —Sinuhe 18:16, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * (continuing the discussion from Talk:American and British English differences: The usage recommendations by traditionalists for alternative is more complex than has been conveyed so far. Many traditionalists indicate that alternative should ONLY be used in cases where there are exactly two alternatives. So in contexts such as "alternative meanings", the usage is contrary to traditional usage. Alternative is also undesirable in this context because in AmEng it also has the strong connotation of "non-traditional" or "out-of-the-mainstream", which is certainly not what is meant in most cases. Because both alternate and alternative are problematic, perhaps the MoS should recommend using "other meanings" instead. older ≠ wiser 18:14, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Ampersand
At Talk:Ampersand, User:66.32.255.51 wrote:

 * Has anyone talked about when to use and and when to use & in Wikipedia??

I replied:

 * I think, in general, "and" should be used unless the ampersand is part of a work's proper name (for example, Dungeons & Dragons or Beyond Good & Evil (video game)). I've brought the question up at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style.

Is there any previous discussion on when or if ampersands should be used instead of "and" in article text or titles? -Sean Curtin 02:09, Dec 5, 2004 (UTC)

 * I don't recall seeing such a discussion in the archives. And I agree with your usage. Maurreen 02:16, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

This subject was also brought up on Radiojon's User talk page. 66.245.97.5 23:14, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Anyway to remove underlining?
Is there a way to remove underlining from links? The reason I want to do this is because the underlining can be confused as part of a Chinese character if the character appears in a link. See Chinese family name. ☞spencer195 00:02, 29 May 2004 (UTC)

 * Check your preferences Dysprosia 02:30, 29 May 2004 (UTC)

Article on style guides
I am looking for a input to help resolve a dispute about the article on style guides. The question is this: Was the article better before or after the rewrite? Thanks. Maurreen 15:30, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

 * No, that's not the question in dispute. The question is should it be clearly mentioned that style guides may be descriptive and/or prescriptive or should the article be restricted to a discussion of prescriptive style guides with no reference to descriptive ones. jguk 15:44, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

 * What would be the point of a descriptive style guide? Hyacinth 03:07, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

 * Or, the question is: Are style guides prescriptive by definition? Maurreen 03:34, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

 * I would say not. A "guide" is often something that shows you around an area, so I see no reason why a style guide couldn't be a map rather than a set of rules. I can't see what use this would be of (outside of in the development of future style guides, maybe a synthesis of guides). Hyacinth 04:05, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

 * The latest version of the best known British English style guide, Fowler's Modern English Usage (3rd Edition), is a mostly descriptive style guide. An interesting read, if you're into that kind of thing, though there are other style guides out there that are even more descriptive. . Birchfield's rewrite of Fowler into a far less prescriptive (and thereforE into a descriptive) form was not universally popular. See in particular the first reviewer's comments. As far as the point of them: well, they are not suitable for publishers and newspapers as they don't impose consistency. They are suitable for users interested in how language is used and help the user decide what form of words, spelling, etc to choose for the particular audience the user is addressing. jguk 07:24, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * While a style guide could be descriptive, most style guides are not. I know of none that I would call mostly descriptive that also has a title indicating it is a style guide or style manual. A truly descriptive style guide would be one of those linguistic books about New England dialects, a guide to different styles of usage. I am not aware of a book of that kind being called a style guide, though such a book could in theory be called something like A Guide to Styles of English Midland Language. Birchfield's rewrite of Fowler was more descriptive than the two previous versions of Fowler's work. But it was a far cry from being only an informed and dispassionate study on the current state of the English language. The Chicago Manual of Style is also increasingly descriptive in recent editions, providing alternative ways of doing things, though still purportedly mainly for use as the style guide for the University of Chicago Press. That limitation provides freedom. One can prescribe firmly and absolutely without also making any claim that one's preferred way of doing things is the only correct way. One would, I think, be better to refer to Birchfield's work as "more descriptive" rather than simply "descriptive". But almost all guides of that kind for the general public must be so today. Jallan 23:44, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

 * This dispute has been settled. Maurreen 08:49, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Article structuring
I tried to find some good advice on structuring articles in wikipedia namespaces. All I found were some pages in the Style and How-to Directory, some pages in the Manual of Style, and some links on template:FAPath. They mostly deal with the issue from a general stylistic and aesthetic viewpoint, and only touch on the underlying reasons for giving a logical and fairly standardized structure to encyclopedia articles.

I've therefore written up a draft guideline for writing articles in a "pyramid structure". Being mostly based on common sense, it is in part a description of what we already do, but its goal is also to explain why structuring articles in this way is good. It's at User:Zocky/Pyramid structure. Please feel free to improve and comment.

I'm not sure how to proceed. Proper structure should obviously be a FA requirement, and this should probably also be in the how-to series. But since structure is a fundamental editorial issue which heavily affects both quality and NPOV, it could also be a part of the Manual of Style. Zocky 19:45, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Article title in bold
Manual_of_Style states that "All articles should have the title or subject in bold...", and the examples show triple quote marks as the way to mark text as bold.

It turns out that a free link which is the same as the article name automatically displays as bold, so I've been using that method instead of triple quotes. Is there any preference or policy regarding this?

Given that the self-ref bold display is a deliberately designed feature of Wiki, and adds more information, I think it's a Good Thing. -- Paul Richter 11:44, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)

 * That feature is a relatively recent addition to the wiki software. In the interest of consistency, please use the standard triple quote. →Raul654 20:19, Jun 9, 2004 (UTC)

 * I agree with Raul. I think bold formatting should always be bold formatting, not a link just because that happens to produce bold formatting. Additionally, I think (though I'm not certain) that using the link would cause the page to show up in the "list of pages with self links" queries. You also run into problems if the page is moved and the part you have linked is then a link to a redirect to itself, rather than being bold text. Angela. 01:04, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Making the article title bold is also discussed in the Article names section (the first one on the page):
 * "Bold article titles using  three apostrophes  — do not self-link to bold the title."

Shouldn't that sentence contain some reference to the first line of the article? Mightn't someone get confused and literally try to create an article whose title contains triple-apostrophes? Or, sitting on the edit page, wonder how to "get at the title" to insert them? — Or is this just my overactive imagination? - dcljr 03:20, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)

British versus American casing
This section includes the pronouncement "Remember also, American English tends to lowercase most titles except in the most formal settings, while British English uses capitals far more widely, with all words of a title being capitalised except for prepositions, articles and conjunctions." To which I say: huh? What types of titles are being referred to here? The rules I know (and consistently see applied here in the US) are exactly as described for British English. See, for example, something filled with titles such as the All Music Guide.

I'll also note that this section of the style guide uses UK vs. US spellings inconsistently, even for multiple uses of a single word within a single sentence. While recognizing that this might be done with some ironic intent, we must also recognise that the implication is that it is acceptable (desirable, even?) to switch back and forth within a single article, which seems sub-optimal to me. Jgm 21:51, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * I'd like to point out that the Florida-based All Music Guide actually goes in the opposite direction of the above statement of supposed "American English" capitalization. Its band name and album title entries do indeed follow the so-called "British English" capitalization rules, but most of the songs are listed in all-capitalized form. Not only is this an easier rule to follow (unlike the exception-riddled "standard" rules that seem to be merely a holdover from the Germanic origins of the English language), but it's more in keeping with the way song titles, album titles, and even band names are currently printed on the actual media (e.g., commercial CDs). (See my statement under Talk:List of songs whose title includes personal names for details.) Personally, I think we should abandon the confusing and poorly-practiced "standard" capitalization rules and just adopt the capitalize-all method for proper nouns like titles. (The Wiki article title policy also seems reasonable, too, as it simple gets rid of unnecessary capitalization. Its only serious problem is that mandatory initial capital letter, which can introduce undesirable error and ambiguity.) -- Jeff Q 22:44, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I'm going to change the above sentence and change all spellings to US variants within the next couple of days unless objections are raised here. Jgm 23:59, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * Why US spellings? The original author of the section, User:Jtdirl, used Commonwealth spellings. Is there a specific reason to use US spellings rather than English ones? Sinuhe 08:50, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * I just read the section from which the above quote is taken, and I realize now that both Jgm and I have misunderstood the context of the word "title" in the original text. It refers specifically to office titles (e.g., "president" and "prime minister"), not artistic work titles (such as one may find in All-Music Guide). Because of this, I must object to any changes based on what Jgm and I have said here. It is good to be consistent, but we need to be consistent within the correct context, and the one described in this section is even more complicated than the messy "rules" of artistic work capitalization. P.S. Jgm, please forgive my reformatting and rearrangement of your most recent posting. I did it in order to preserve the flow of dialog here and eliminate the confusion between the indent- and bullet-based formatting of Talk page dialogs. If you feel the point you raised should maintain your preferred bullet format, feel free to change the format, but please preserve the flow for the sake of other readers who may come upon this issue at a later date. -- Jeff Q 07:20, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * No, I do not believe you are right; it refers to headings. The previous section refers to job titles. It would be senseless to talk about the very same thing in two consecutive sections. As for capitalisation in the music industry, see the article on capitalisation. –Sinuhe 08:50, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * Heh heh. Now I'm hopelessly confused.  Going back to my original statement, I have trouble parsing the sentence I quoted as referrring to honorary or office titles, but I suppose (given the confusion between readers) that various people may have edited the section thinking it was referring to different types of "titles".  In any event, now it's even more clear to me that the section needs rewriting, but of course there must fisrt be a consensus as to what kind of "title" we are talking about here.

 * As to Sinuhe's question of "why American spellings", my main objective would be consistency. I understand that the Wikipedia is going to be inherently (and perhaps appropriately, though I'm not completely sold there) inconsistent in this area, but I think spellings should be consistent within a given article and also that a usage guide is a special case in that it is (should be) simultaneously descriptive and prescriptive.  Also I thought the idea was that the "appropriate" type of spelling for a given article isn't so much a function of who wrote it but what it is about -- if, indeed we agree that there should be consistency within an article and know that editors from multiple places will be contributing to an article that approach (which I think is backed up elsewhere in this very style guide) would seem to be the only way.  Jgm 13:50, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Taking another look at this, and re-reading the entire Manual of Style, I'm inclined to propose that this entire section is unnecessary. There are entire sections devoted to UK vs. US style guidance; the only thing this paragraph has that isn't covered elsewhere is the claim that US and UK casing traditions may be different, and, again, I disagree with this claim from the outset (and others seem to back me up on this). There does seem to be a gap in the WMoS regarding capitalization for titles (of works rather than people), but this isn't filling it. What would be lost if this paragraph (British versus American casing) were deleted outright? Jgm 16:03, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)

All that refers to is office and personal titles, ie, offices of state. It was never intended in way cover other titles, certainly not album casing. The reason it was put in was because there was a serious problem arising over how office titles were being used; major work had been done by a group of people in cleaning what had in reality become a farcical mess in pages relating to pages about presidents, prime ministers, peerage references, monarchical references, etc., only for the work to be undone by people who did not realise that (i) there is a difference between AE, BE, CE, HE, IE etc in how they capitalise, (ii) as most of the offices were non-American, applying American english capitalisation rules to titles that even American sources refer to using other forms of english, was causing friction and revert wars. The whole point was to tell people not to apply blanket AE rules in areas such as titles where AE is not used even in the US. And most people thought the addition achieved that, it being important that the page there as well as elsewhere warned people off making blanket capitalisation generalisations. And yes, there is a fundamental difference in CE and AE casing structure and traditions. FearÉIREANN 17:14, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * In that case, I think the seperate section header for this paragraph needs to go, since this is just an extension of the previous section on titles in general. Are you OK with that?  And, what if anything do you think we should do about the mix of US and UK spellings in this paragraph?  Jgm 17:51, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)


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Henri, Count of Chambord

Henri, Count of Chambord and Duke of Bordeaux (Henri Charles Ferdinand Marie Dieudonné d'Artois, duc de Bordeaux, comte de Chambord; 29 September 1820 – 24 August 1883) was the Legitimist pretender to the throne of France as Henri V from 1844 until his death in 1883.

Henri was the only son of Charles Ferdinand, Duke of Berry, born after his father's death, by his wife, Princess Carolina of Naples and Sicily, daughter of King Francis I of the Two Sicilies. The Duke himself was the younger son of Charles X. As the grandson of Charles X, Henri was a Petit-Fils de France. He was the last legitimate descendant of Louis XV of France in the male line.

Early life
Henri d'Artois was born on 29 September 1820, in the Pavillon de Marsan, a portion of the Tuileries Palace that still survives in the compound of the Louvre Palace in Paris. His father, the duc de Berry, had been assassinated seven months before Henri's birth.

At birth, Henri was given the title of duc de Bordeaux. Because of his birth after his father's death, when the senior male line of the House of Bourbon was on the verge of extinction, one of his middle names was Dieudonné (French for "God-given"). Royalists called him "the miracle child". Louis XVIII was overjoyed, bestowing 35 royal orders to mark the occasion. Henri's birth was a major setback for the Duke of Orleans' ambitions to ascend the French throne. During his customary visit to congratulate the newborn's mother, the duke made such offensive remarks about the baby's appearance that the lady holding him was brought to tears.

Titular King

On 2 August 1830, in response to the July Revolution, Henri's grandfather, Charles X, abdicated, and twenty minutes later Charles' elder son Louis Antoine, Duke of Angoulême, himself renounced his rights, in favour of the young Duke of Bordeaux. Charles X urged his cousin Louis Philippe of Orléans, as Lieutenant général du royaume, to proclaim Henri as Henry V, King of France. Louis Philippe requested the Duke of Bordeaux to be brought to Paris to have his rights recognised. The duchess of Berry was forbidden to escort her son; therefore, both the grandfather and the mother refused to leave the child in France. As a consequence, after seven days, a period in which legitimist monarchists considered that Henri had been the rightful monarch of France, the Chamber of Deputies decreed that the throne should pass to Louis Philippe, who was proclaimed King of the French on 9 August.

Henri and his family left France and went into exile on 16 August 1830. While some French monarchists recognised him as their sovereign, others disputed the validity of the abdications of his grandfather and of his uncle. Still others recognised the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe. With the deaths of his 79-year-old grandfather in 1836 and of his uncle in 1844, young Henri became the genealogically senior claimant to the French throne. His supporters were called Legitimists, to distinguish them from the Orléanists, the supporters of the family of Louis Philippe.

Henri, who preferred the courtesy title of Count of Chambord (from the château de Chambord, which had been presented to him by the Restoration government, and which was the only significant piece of personal property of which he was allowed to retain ownership upon his exile), continued his claim to the throne throughout the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe, the Second Republic and Empire of Napoléon III, and the early years of the Third Republic.

In November 1846, the Count of Chambord married his second cousin Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria-Este, daughter of Duke Francis IV of Modena and Princess Maria Beatrice of Savoy. The couple had no children.

Hope of a restoration
In 1870, as the Second Empire collapsed following its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War at the battle of Sedan on 2 September 1870, the royalists became a majority in the National Assembly. The Orléanists agreed to support the Count of Chambord's claim to the throne, with the expectation that upon his death, with him lacking any sons, he would be succeeded by their own claimant, Philippe d'Orléans, Count of Paris. With Henri backed by both Legitimists and Orléanists, the restoration of monarchy in France seemed a likely possibility. However, he insisted that he would accept the crown only on condition that France abandon its tricolour flag (associated with the French Revolution) and return to the use of the fleur de lys flag, comprising the historic royal arms of France. He rejected a compromise whereby the fleur-de-lys would be the new king's personal standard, and the tricolour would remain the national flag. Pope Pius IX, upon hearing Henri's decision, notably remarked "And all that, all that for a napkin!"

In 1873 another attempt to restore the monarchy failed for the same reasons. Henri traveled to Paris and tried to negotiate with the government, to no avail; and on 20 November, the National Assembly confirmed Marshal The 1st Duke of Magenta as Chief of State of France for the next seven years.

Defeat
The Third Republic was established (with then Chief of State, the Duke of Magenta, as President of the Republic) to wait for Henri's death and his replacement by his distant cousin, the more liberal Count of Paris, of the Orléanist branch of the House of Bourbon. Initially, the monarchist majority in Parliament believed this to be temporary, until such time as the Count of Paris could return to the throne. However, by the time this occurred in 1883, public opinion had swung behind the Republic as the form of government which, in the words of the former President Adolphe Thiers, "divides us least". Thus, Henri could mockingly be hailed by republicans such as Georges Clemenceau as "the French Washington" – the one man without whom the Republic could not have been founded.

Henri died on 24 August 1883 at his residence in Frohsdorf, Austria, at the age of 62, bringing the male line of Louis XV to an end. He was buried in the crypt of his grandfather Charles X, in the church of the Franciscan Kostanjevica Monastery in Gorizia, Austria (now Slovenia). His personal property, including the Château de Chambord, was left to his nephew Robert I, Duke of Parma, son of Henri's late sister.

Henri's death left the Legitimist line of succession distinctly confused. On the one hand, Henri himself had accepted that the head of the House of France (as distinguished from the House of Bourbon) would be the head of the Orléans line, i.e. Prince Philippe, Count of Paris. This was accepted by many Legitimists, and was the default on legal grounds; the only surviving Bourbon male line more senior was the branch of the Kings of Spain, descended from King Philip V, which had however renounced its right to inherit the throne of France as a condition of the Treaty of Utrecht. However, several of Henri's supporters, including his widow, chose to disregard his statements and the Treaty, arguing that no one had the right to deny that the senior direct male-line Bourbon was the head of the House of France and thus the legitimate King of France; the renunciation of the Spanish branch would be, under this interpretation, illegitimate and therefore void. Thus the Blancs d'Espagne, as they would come to be known, settled on Infante Juan, Count of Montizón, the former Carlist pretender to the Spanish throne, as their claimant to the French crown.

Honours

 * Royal Standard of the King of France.svg House of Bourbon: Grand Master and Grand Croix of the Order of the Holy Spirit
 * 🇪🇸 Spain: Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece (1823)

title: Henri, Count of Chambord


text:
Great Bookham

Great Bookham is a village in the Mole Valley district, in Surrey, England, one of six semi-urban spring line settlements between the towns of Leatherhead and Guildford. With the narrow strip parish of Little Bookham, it forms part of the Saxon settlement of Bocham ("the village by the beeches"). The Bookhams are surrounded by common land, and Bookham railway station in Church Road, Great Bookham, serves both settlements.

The villages are astride the A246, which is the non-motorway and direct route between the two towns. Once two distinct villages, the Bookhams have long been interconnected with residential roads that give the impression of one large village.

On the southern edge of the village is Polesden Lacey, a country house surrounded by more than 1000 acre of grounds. It is owned by the National Trust and open to the public.

History
According to a charter c.675, the original of which is lost but which exists in a later form, there were granted to the Abbey twenty dwellings at Bocham cum Effingham. This was confirmed by four Saxon kings; King Offa of Mercia and of the nations roundabout in 787; King Æthelstan who was "King and ruler of the whole island of Britain" in 933 confirmed the privileges to the monastery; King Edgar, "Emperor of all Britain" in 967 confirmed "twelve mansiones" in Bocham, and King Edward the Confessor, King of the English, in 1062 confirmed twenty mansae at Bocham cum Effingham, Driteham and Pechingeorde.

Great Bookham lay within the Anglo-Saxon administrative district of Effingham half hundred.

The Domesday Book of 1086, which was a survey for taxation purposes, makes the first known distinction between the parishes of Great and Little Bookham, if it is assumed that there was no separate parish at the time of the charter of Edward the Confessor in 1062. Driteham and Pechingeorde are both referred to in the Domesday Book and appear to have been absorbed into the manors of Effingham and Effingham East Court. Great Bookham appears in the Domesday Book in the ancient hundred of Effingham as Bocheham. It was held by St Peter's Abbey, Chertsey. Its Domesday Assets were: 13 hides; 1 church, 1 mill worth 10s, 20 ploughs, 6 acre of meadow, woodland and herbage worth 110 hogs. It rendered (in total): £15.

It seems probable, as the number of cottages in Bookham and Effingham remained constant, that the later charters must have been copies of earlier charters which were not revised to accord with the actual number of cottages at any one time.

In 1951 the civil parish had a population of 7885. On 1 April 1974 the parish was abolished.

Polesden Lacey

A regency villa on the southern edge of the village, Polesden Lacey has been the site of a house since at least 1336. The current house dates from the 17th century, and was bequeathed by its last owner, the Hon. Mrs. Greville, a legendary Edwardian hostess, to the National Trust in 1942. When the Grevilles purchased the property in 1906, they extensively remodelled the house with the help of Mewes and Davis, architects of the Ritz Hotel, London. There are large walled and formal gardens, an orchard and croquet lawn, as well as extensive farmland.

The property and its 1400 acre estate are open to the public, and is one of the National Trust's most visited properties. The house is also the National Trust's Southern Region head office.

The future King George VI and his bride spent part of their honeymoon at Polesden Lacey, as guests of Mrs. Greville.

The poet and playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan was a previous owner of the property from 1804.

Bookham Grove

To the south side of the High Street stands Bookham Grove Manor, built in the early 18th century, once owned by the Dawnay family. It is now converted into apartments, with coach houses built in its now 1 acre grounds. The manor's original large estate covered the surrounding roads up to Dorking Road, and Groveside, and had grounds to the front, running down to the Guildford Road. When the land was sold for development in 1947, the shops and car park were built in the grounds to the front of the house. Another surviving part of the estate is the stables, on the corner of Dorking Road.

Eastwick Park
Eastwick Park, a beautiful manor in the village, was lost in 1958. The house stood within the area of roads now known as the 'Eastwick area', and its very large private estate included Great Bookham Commons, which were saved by the village and given to the National Trust. After ceasing to be used as a private house, the manor was used by the Canadian military in World War II, and was also a school called Southey Hall, before being demolished for redevelopment. The original gates to the house stand just west of Eastwick Park Avenue on Lower Road.

Geography
To the west of the Bookhams lies the village of Effingham; further west on the road to Guildford lie the similar villages of East and West Horsley and East and West Clandon. To the north-east lie Fetcham and Leatherhead, north of which the area becomes increasingly urban heading towards central London, which is only 23 mi away. To the south-east, across the North Downs, are the village of Westhumble and the market town of Dorking.

Today
The village has a short high street at its centre, which has a butcher, a family-run fishmongers, one bakery, a greengrocer and two small supermarkets. Rayleigh House, at the top of the high street, originally built as the Victoria Temperance Hotel by Mary Chrystie, now contains an estate agents.

There are two public houses in Great Bookham: The Anchor, The Royal Oak and one in Little Bookham, Ye Olde Windsor Castle. Currently the Crown pub is closed. A loose association with the latter is that the Ranger of Windsor Great Park was often appointed from the area by King Henry VIII. The Old Barn Hall is the main community centre, regularly used for staging amateur dramatics productions and hosting parties and receptions.

There are two primary schools in the village: Eastwick Junior School in Eastwick Drive and Great Bookham School (formerly The Dawnay School) in Griffin Way. There are three infant schools in Great Bookham: Polesden Lacey Infant School in Oakfield Close, Eastwick Infant School in Eastwick Drive, and Great Bookham Infant School in Griffin Way.

Sport and leisure
Great Bookham has a Non-League football club Bookham F.C. who play at the Chrystie Recreation Ground in the Surrey Elite Intermediate Football League. The club was founded before the First World War.

Bookham Commons
Bookham Commons includes the two commons in Great Bookham and Little Bookham. Great Bookham Common was bought by local residents in 1923 to save the oak woodlands, then given to the National Trust. Little Bookham Common was given to the Trust in 1924 by Mr H. Willock-Pollen, then Banks Common in 1925 by Mr R. Calburn.

The London Natural History Society has been surveying Bookham Commons for more than fifty years, making it one of the best recorded sites for wildlife in southeast England.

The common land consist of grassland (wet, low-lying meadows), woodland, scrub and twelve ponds. The ponds are home to all three British species of newt, including the rare Great Crested Newt. The five largest ponds are man-made, formed for fish production in the 17th century.

Emergency services
Great Bookham is served by these emergency services:
 * Surrey Police (nearest police counter is at Epsom Town Hall)
 * South East Coast Ambulance Service as of 1 July 2006, is the local NHS Ambulance Services Trust. The Surrey, Sussex, and Kent Ambulance services have all merged, and have now ceased to exist.
 * Surrey Fire & Rescue Service, Actually in Fetcham, but called Leatherhead Fire Station.
 * 1 x Water tender ladder
 * 1 x Water carrier

Notable residents

 * Jane Austen, whose godfather and cousin Rev. Samuel Cooke was vicar of Great Bookham (1769-1820), is said to have spent time in Bookham whilst writing several of her novels in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Its location is consistent with the geographical details in Emma.
 * Lilian Elkington, composer and pianist, lived at Ridge House, 11 Groveside, from 1948 to 1954.
 * Louis Essen, pioneer of the atomic clock, died in Great Bookham
 * Conor Gallagher, football player, grew up in Great Bookham.
 * C. S. Lewis, author, studied privately with William T. Kirkpatrick in Great Bookham between September 1914 and April 1917.
 * Roger Waters, Pink Floyd bass player and singer was born in Great Bookham in 1943.

title: Great Bookham


text:
Robert Burton

Robert Burton (8 February 1577 – 25 January 1640) was an English author and fellow of Oxford University, known for his encyclopedic The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Born in 1577 to a comfortably well-off family of the landed gentry, Burton attended two grammar schools and matriculated at Brasenose College, Oxford in 1593, age 15. Burton's education at Oxford was unusually lengthy, possibly drawn out by an affliction of melancholy, and saw an early transfer to Christ Church. Burton received an MA and BD, and by 1607 was qualified as a tutor. As early as 1603, Burton indulged in some early literary creations at Oxford, including Latin poems, a now-lost play performed before and panned by King James I himself, and his only surviving play: an academic satire called Philosophaster. This work, though less well regarded than Burton's masterpiece, has "received more attention than most of the other surviving examples of university drama".

Sometime after obtaining his MA in 1605, Burton made some attempts to leave the university. Though he never fully succeeded, he managed to obtain the living of St Thomas the Martyr's Church, Oxford through the university, and external patronage for the benefice of Walesby and the rectorship of Seagrave. As a fellow of Oxford, he served in many minor administrative roles and as the librarian of Christ Church Library from 1624 until his death. Over time he came to accept his "sequestered" existence in the libraries of Oxford, speaking highly of his alma mater throughout the Anatomy.

Burton's most famous work and greatest achievement was The Anatomy of Melancholy. First published in 1621, it was reprinted with additions from Burton no fewer than five times. A digressive and labyrinthine work, Burton wrote as much to alleviate his own melancholy as to help others. The final edition totalled more than 500,000 words. The book is permeated by quotations from and paraphrases of many authorities, both classical and contemporary, the culmination of a lifetime of erudition.

Burton died in 1640. Within the university, his death was (probably falsely) rumoured to have been a suicide. His large personal library was divided between the Bodleian and Christ Church. The Anatomy was perused and plagiarised by many authors during his lifetime and after his death, but entered a lull in popularity through the 18th century. It was only the revelation of Laurence Sterne's plagiarism that revived interest in Burton's work into the 19th century, especially among the Romantics. The Anatomy received more academic attention in the 20th and 21st centuries. Whatever his popularity, Burton has always attracted distinguished readers, including Samuel Johnson, Benjamin Franklin, John Keats, William Osler, and Samuel Beckett.

Family and grammar school
Robert Burton was born on 8 February 1577, to Ralph Burton (1547–1619) and his wife, Dorothy (Faunt; 1560–1629), in Lindley, Leicestershire. Burton believed himself to have been conceived on 9 PM on 25 May 1576, a fact he often used in his astrological calculations. He was the second of four sons and fourth of ten children; his elder brother, William, is the only other member of the family for whom we know more than minor biographical details, as he later became a noted antiquarian and topographer. Both his parents' families were members of the landed gentry, with the Burtons from an old, if undistinguished, pedigree. Robert may have inherited his medical interest; in the Anatomy, he writes of his mother's "excellent skill in chirurgery". William states a member of their mother's family, Anthony Faunt, was said to have died from "the passion of melancholy", and speaks fondly the family's maternal relation to Arthur Faunt, a Jesuit controversialist and uncle to William and Robert.

Burton probably attended two grammar schools, the King Edward VI Grammar School, Nuneaton and Bishop Vesey's Grammar School, Sutton Coldfield. Burton wrote in the Anatomy that students "think no slavery in the world (as once I did myself) like to that of a Grammar Scholar", which some writers have taken as suggestion that he was an unhappy schoolboy. More modern biographers, such as R. L. Nochimson and Michael O'Connell, have regarded it as Burton merely presenting what was a popular sentiment, rather than hinting at any personal dislike or source of childhood melancholy.

Oxford education
In July 1593, aged 15, Burton matriculated into Brasenose College, Oxford, where his elder brother was already attending. Burton did not receive his Bachelor's until 30 June 1602, and only after he migrated to Christ Church College in 1599. For the time between his matriculation and his transfer, almost nothing is known of Burton. According to Anthony à Wood, Burton "made considerable progress in logic and philosophy" at Brasenose, though the college left an impression sufficiently weak that Burton himself made no mention of Brasenose in his corpus. Most Oxford students would have completed their education at nineteen, but by 1602, Burton was twenty-six. Some biographers, such as Michael O'Connell and J. B. Bamborough, have cited this as evidence Burton suffered some lengthy illness while a student, possibly melancholy. Record has been found of one "Robart Burton of 20 yeres", a patient of London doctor and astrologist Simon Forman, who was treated for melancholy over a period of five months in 1597. Indeed, 1596 and 1597 are the only years of Burton's maturity in which he seems to have purchased no new books.

When he entered Christ Church in 1599, Wood reports Burton was assigned as tutor John Bancroft, "for form sake, tho' he wanted not a tutor"; though Bancroft was only three years his senior, he was six or seven years ahead of Burton in his studies, and was well-connected within the church, later becoming the Bishop of Oxford. It seems some friendship developed between the two; Burton praised Bancroft's construction at Cuddesdon in the Anatomy, implying he was a frequent visitor. At Christ Church, Burton proceeded to an MA on 9 June 1605, and a BD in May 1614. Simultaneously, Burton rose through the college ranks, attaining disciplus in 1599, philosophus secundi vicenarii in 1603, and philosophus primi vicenarii in 1607, the last of which qualified him as a tutor. Sometime after he obtained his MA, Bamborough considers it likely Burton was attempting to leave the university. The college statutes required Burton to take a BD after his MA, but Burton chose not to proceed to DD.

Early writings and plays
While at Oxford, Burton indulged his literary interests alongside these academic ones. In 1603, on the accession of James I, Burton contributed a short Latin verse celebrating the event to a commemorative Oxford volume; he made similar offering of twenty-one poems upon James's royal Oxford visit in 1605. On this visit, Burton took active part in the "praeparation for the Kinges cominge", including a play he composed for the occasion. This play, since lost, has been identified with Alba, a pastoral comedy with a mythological subject matter, probably written in Latin. The play was performed before James I on 27 August 1605. According to a witness of the events, Philip Stringer, Burton's play was poorly received by James and his court. The queen consort and her ladies took offence at several "almost naked" male actors, probably portraying satyrs, and the king was so displeased by the production that the chancellors of both Oxford and Cambridge had to plead for him to stay, as otherwise he "would have gone before half the Comedy had been ended".

However Burton reacted to this royal pan, he was already at work on another play by 1606. This play, Philosophaster—which is fully extant across three manuscripts—was finished by 1615, by which time Burton was revising and correcting it. Burton speaks briefly of Philosophaster in the Anatomy, mentioning that it was performed at Christ Church on 16 February 1617, during the Shrovetide festivities. The play was acted by the students alongside three local townsmen. Burton likely took a view towards pleasing the administration in this production. The play cast the son of John King, then Dean of Christ Church, in a leading role, and departed from Alba controversial mythological themes for the less contentious ones of an academic satire.

Offices at St Thomas's, Walesby, and Seagrave
Burton initially struggled to find any patrons for promotion out of the university, but after some time, he managed to obtain an ecclesiastical office in the living of St Thomas the Martyr's Church, Oxford, located in the western suburb of Oxford. He was nominated to this by the dean and chapter of Christ Church on 29 November 1616. He was licensed to preach on 3 December 1618. Burton held this vicarage at St Thomas's, until his death; he was responsible for the building or rebuilding of the church's south porch in 1621, where his arms were placed on the gable.

In 1624, Lady Frances Cecil, dowager Countess of Exeter presented Burton to the Lincolnshire benefice of Walesby. Burton was perhaps the tutor of Frances' son, Robert Smith. Burton chose not to reside in Walesby, though he probably visited it at some point. He took little interest in the daily affairs of the parish—all the parish records were signed by his curate, Thomas Benson—but did win for it nine acres of land which had been taken by Frances's predecessor. Burton resigned from this post in 1631. In the 1632 edition of the Anatomy, appended below a mention of his Walesby appointment, Burton tersely added: "Lately resigned for some special reasons". After his resignation, Lady Frances temporarily turned over the duty to appoint Burton's successor to her friend, the first Earl of Middlesex, suggesting that Burton resigned over Middlesex's pressure to appoint his own favourite.

In 1632, shortly after this resignation from Walesby, Burton was presented to a much more valuable office by his patron, Lord Berkeley: the rectorship of Seagrave. Berkeley had been a patron of Burton since at least 1621, when Burton dedicated the Anatomy to Lord Berkeley. Their relationship may have begun even earlier, in 1619, when Berkeley matriculated from Christ Church, and perhaps entered the tutelage of Burton. In any case, on 3 September 1624, Lord Berkeley granted Burton the advowson (i.e. the right to decide the next occupant) of the wealthy living of Seagrave. This right necessitated that the holder of the advowson pick a candidate other than himself, but three days later Burton assigned three of his family members to this position, so he could procure his own future appointment. On 15 June 1632, promptly after the previous incumbent was buried, the relatives presented him to the office. Burton did not cultivate much of a reputation as a preacher while at Seagrave, choosing not to publish any of his sermons, but discharged the pastoral and charitable roles of the rectory dutifully and punctually. Burton probably visited Lindley often while at Seagrave, as the villages were only 20 miles apart. The office was the most valuable Burton ever held; in 1650, the rectory was valued at £100.

University life
Other than that afforded to him by the Countess of Exeter and Lord Berkeley, Burton received little preferment. Because of this, even as he received appointments outside the university, Burton remained an Oxford student for the rest of his life. Burton seems to have been, at first, unhappy with this situation; in the 1621 edition of the Anatomy, Burton wrote that his "hopes were still frustrate, and I left behind, as a Dolphin on shore, confined to my Colledge, as Diogenes to his tubbe". This exasperation seems to have been passing; by the Anatomy final edition, he had revised the passage in praise of his "monastick life [...] sequestered from those tumults & troubles of the world", unindebted for his lack of preferment. Bamborough has gone as far as to claim it is unlikely Burton ever truly wanted to leave the college he spoke so highly of as the "most flourishing College of Europe", one which "can brag with Jovius, almost, in that splendor of Vaticanish retirement, confined to the company of the distinguished". The 1602 reopening of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, which by 1620 held over 16,000 volumes, gave some truth to Burton's proud comparison of the scholarship at Oxford to that of Jovius's Vatican.

Burton did not spend all his time in this "Vaticanish retirement" as a scholar. He held various minor offices in Oxford. On three occasions–in 1615, 1617, and 1618–Burton was chosen to be the clerk of the Market, one of two MA students tasked with regulating the various goods of Oxford's markets. Now a sinecure, the office was an important institution in Burton's time. This occupation has been cited by two biographers, O'Connell and Nochimson, to suggest, contrary to the bookish image given by his Anatomy, Burton had some knowledge of the day-to-day affairs of Oxford. Perhaps more befitting his image, on 27 August 1624, Burton became the librarian of Christ Church Library. The office was a recent creation—the first librarian was appointed in 1599, and library had been founded only a half-century earlier—but a recent donation by an Otho Nicholson had ensured it was a profitable one, tripling the incumbent's wages to 10s a term. The duties, however, were sparse—limited to enforcing the loose regulations of the institution, and opening and closing it at the appropriate times—probably allowing Burton more than enough time to accumulate the erudition exhibited in the Anatomy. Burton held this position until his death. In 1635, painter Gilbert Jackson produced an oil portrait of Burton; this painting is now held at Brasenose College, with a copy at Christ Church.

Publication of the Anatomy
Whatever other activities he engaged in, composing the Anatomy was the most important pursuit and accomplishment of Burton's life. Burton, as he claims in the preface, was "as desirous to suppress my labours in this kind, as others have been to press and publish theirs", but admits that melancholy is the subject upon which he is "fatally driven", and so he was compelled to compose the work. Burton left no record of when he began his work on the Anatomy. O'Connell speculates the project grew piecemeal, with research begun in his twenties, and the work well on its way by his thirties. Burton explicitly states that the study of melancholy was a lifelong fascination of his, and regularly "deducted from the main channel of my studies". However long the work took, he had certainly concluded it by 5 December 1620, aged 43, when he signed the "Conclusion to the Reader".

The book was printed in 1621 and, despite Burton's indication in the Anatomy of troubles finding a publisher, it quickly sold well. Wood wrote that the publisher, Henry Cripps, made such a "great profit" off the book that he "got an estate by it". Burton's subject was well chosen; similar treatises by Timothie Bright and Thomas Wright had gone through several editions soon after their publication. Though Burton never divulged the extent of his profits, the size of his estate and library at death suggests they were considerable. Burton printed the Anatomy under the pseudonym of "Democritus Junior", alluding to the Greek pre-Socratic philosopher, Democritus, sometimes known as the Laughing Philosopher. The use of an established classical figure in a pseudonym was common practice in Burton's time, used to ensure the reader held no negative preconceptions about the author. Burton did not resolutely stick to this pseudonymity; the first edition betrayed it as he signed the "Conclusion to the Reader" with his real name, and though this was removed in later editions, the portrait of Burton added from the third edition onwards hardly preserved his anonymity.

Burton did not rest on his laurels after the first printing, continually editing and improving the work throughout his life. The first edition of Burton's Anatomy was, with marginalia, over 350,000 words long; by his final edition this count came to over 500,000. The additions were largest for the second and third editions; the original quarto volume had to be expanded to a folio for the second edition (1624) to accommodate the expansions. For the third edition (1628), an allegorical frontispiece was added, engraved by Christian Le Blon, with a portrait of Burton atop his moniker "Democritus Junior". After these two additions, Burton vowed: "Ne quid nimis [do not do too much]. I will not hereafter add, alter, or retract; I have done." However, once again, Burton returned to the Anatomy, producing two more editions in 1634 and 1638. Shortly before his death in 1640, Burton entrusted an annotated copy of the Anatomy to his publisher, which was published posthumously in 1651. In total, Burton made contributions to six editions. Two more reprints of the Anatomy were made before the end of the century.

Death
Burton drew up his will on 15 August 1639. Five months later, aged 62 and on 25 January 1640, he was dead. The will divided his inherited estates up amongst his elder brother, William, and William's heirs. Outside of his family, his largest bequests went, unsurprisingly, to the Bodleian and Christ Church libraries, with gifts of £100 each, and Burton's large library split between the institutions. He also laid out several smaller monetary donations: those to his servants; the servants at Christ Church; the poor in Seagrave, Nuneaton, and Higham; the library at Brasenose; and various friends and colleagues, including John Bancroft. Burton was buried in the north aisle of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, on 27 January. William erected a monument to Robert Burton in the cathedral: a coloured effigy of Robert, flanked by an astrological representation of his nativity and geometric instruments, with a short Latin epitaph below, said to have been composed by Burton.

Writing near the close of the 17th century, John Aubrey records a rumour circulated among Oxford students, asserting that Burton took his own life. The students, according to the testimony of Wood, embellished the story to the point that Burton was supposed to have "sent up his soul to heaven thro' a slip about his neck" in order that the date of his death would fit his exact astrological calculations. This rumour is dubious, and has been largely rejected by biographers as far back as Wood. Angus Gowland, in his 2006 study of Burton, is among the few who take the allegation seriously, though he admits it is "no more than a melancholy rumour". The story about the astrological calculation was told of astrologers before Burton, Burton rejected the endorsements of suicide by classical authors in the Anatomy, and if the rumours were taken to have had any substance at the time of his death, Burton would not have been buried in the cathedral. Gowland counters this evidence, citing the charity shown by Burton in the Anatomy for those tempted by suicide, and conjecturing a conspiracy of the "notoriously close-knit College" to keep Burton's suicide secret.

The Anatomy of Melancholy
Though Burton wrote elsewhere, Bamborough regards Burton's one truly great work as The Anatomy of Melancholy. Ostensibly a three-part treatise on depression and its treatment, the book consists of quotations from, paraphrases of and commentary on numerous authors, from many fields of learning, and ranging from classical times to his contemporaries, in a "tangled web of opinion and authority". According to Wood, Burton was apparently famed at Oxford employing this prose style in his speech, effortlessly recalling passages as he spoke. The Anatomy is digressive and confusing in its structure; Burton himself apologetically admitted to "bring[ing] forth this confused lump", excusing himself over a shortage of time. Over the five editions, he did little to amend this confusion, preferring to append more to the labyrinthine text. The book is the fruit of a lifetime's worth of learning, though Burton makes a point throughout the Anatomy to claim that erudition is ultimately pointless, and that it is perhaps better to remain ignorant. Nonetheless, he was of the opinion that if one had knowledge, one better display it. And he was not able to resist his impulse "to have an Oare in every mans Boat", that is, to know something of every topic.

Burton wrote The Anatomy of Melancholy largely to write himself out of being a lifelong sufferer from depression. As he described his condition in the preface "Democritus Junior to the Reader", "a kind of imposthume in my head, which I was very desirous to be unladen of and could imagine no fitter evacuation than this ... I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy. There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness, no better cure than business". In his view, melancholy was "a disease so frequent ... in our miserable times, as few there are that feele not the smart of it", and he said he compiled his book "to prescribe means how to prevent and cure so universall a malady, an Epidemicall disease, that so often, so much crucifies the body and mind". For Burton, "melancholy" describes a range of mental abnormalities, from obsession to delusion to what we would now call clinical depression. Burton at once gives a multitude of remedies for melancholy, and warns they are all ultimately useless, in characteristic self-contradiction.

Philosophaster
Philosophaster is a play, satirising on the 17th-century university, composed in Latin during Burton's time as an Oxford student. The plot of Philosophaster follows the university of Osuna in Andalusia, recently founded by one Desiderius, Duke of Osuna, in hope of attracting scholars. However, the university actually attracts a crowd of philosophasters—pseudo-philosophers, Jesuits, and prostitutes—who con the Duke and townspeople into believing their disguises, capitalising on their naivete in a series of farcical scenes. Amidst this chaos, two true philosophers, Polumathes and Philobiblos (their names literally meaning "Much-Learned" and "Lover of Books") appear and unmask the philosophasters. The resultant controversy among the townspeople nearly causes the Duke to close the university, but he is persuaded otherwise by Polumathes. In the comic climax, the fraudsters are branded and exiled, two characters marry, and the play concludes with a "hymn in praise of philosophy [...] to the tune of Bonny Nell".

As Connie McQuillen has put it, the distinguishing quality Philosophaster is the "patchwork of borrowings" with which it was written. Stylistically, Philosophaster is declared on the title page to be a Comoedia Nova (or New Comedy) a satirical genre Kathryn Murphy describes as "in the tradition of Plautus and Terence." Burton borrowed many elements from these Roman comedies: the tendency of characters to burst into song; the character of the clever slave; the love between a high-born man and low-born girl, who is later revealed to be of noble birth. Burton also borrows episodes from contemporary academic satires—dealing with the perennial feuds between town and gown, the distinction between "true" and "false" scholars, the ridicule of pedants—and characters from humanist satirists, chiefly Erasmus and Giovanni Pontano. The play's depiction of alchemy bears some passing resemblance to Ben Jonson's play The Alchemist, but Burton takes strains to point out in the introduction to a manuscript that his play was written before the first staging of Jonson's play, in 1610.

In interpreting the Philosophaster, many authors have understood it solely in relation to the Anatomy, as an academic satire on the excesses of university life, especially that of Oxford. Angus Gowland, describing the University of Osuna as a "thinly disguised Oxford", asserts that "the purpose of the play was to ridicule contemporary scholarship and provoke reform", in anticipation of the Anatomy satirical themes. As O'Connell put it more succinctly, the play's "main satiric thrust, that pseudolearned charlatans find a ready haven in a university, is meant to find its general target in Oxford". This much is obvious in certain characters—such as Theanus, an elderly college administrator who has forgotten all his scholarship, but still earns an exorbitant salary tutoring the sons of the gentry—whom the audience were expected to be familiar with within academia. However, critic Kathryn Murphy has pointed out that Philosophaster contains a significant, and often underappreciated, undercurrent of anti-Catholicism. Burton's philosophasters are joined by the representatives of Roman Catholicism, including scholastics and Jesuits, in their mockery of philosophy and the university. Murphy has suggested these themes reflect the pervading cultural influence of the Gunpowder Plot in Burton's lifetime, which took place a year before the play was set.

Character
Burton has often been portrayed as something of a recluse, especially by those authors influenced by the Romantic view of Burton. Early 20th-century critic Floyd Dell imagined Burton "hedged within his cloister, his heart yearn[ing] after the romance of adventure". Later biographers have been keen to dispel this image, and emphasise that Burton had a life outside of his books. He was no doubt an active part in the non-academic daily life of Oxford, through his university-appointed roles in its church and market life, and Bamborough adds that in his day he "was known as a mathematician and as both an astrologer and an astronomer, and even had some reputation as a surveyor". Wood also notes that Burton's unsurpassed skill at including "verses from the poets or sentences from classical authors" in his everyday speech, "then all the fashion in the university", allowed him some popularity. However, Burton's "most significant occupations during his life were reading and writing", and his large library is evidence enough of this prodigious bookishness.

Burton's melancholy is the most widely acknowledged feature of his life and character. Wood reported that "he was by many accounted a severe student, a devourer of authors, a melancholy and humorous [i.e., moody] person", yet his peers found his company "very merry". He wrote the Anatomy in part to relieve this melancholy, but this enterprise was not wholly successful. Bishop Kennett, writing somewhat later in the 18th century, recorded that Burton could flit between "interval[s] of vapours", in which he was lively and social, and periods of isolation in his college chambers where his peers worried he was suicidal. Kennett hands down that later in his life Burton could arouse himself from these periods of depression only by "going down to the Bridge-foot in Oxford, and hearing the barge-men scold and storm and swear at one another, at which he would set his hands to his sides, and laugh most profusely."

Religious views
Gowland has suggested the Burton family had some Catholic sympathies, because of their close relation to Jesuit Arthur Faunt. Faunt's godson and Burton's brother, William, spoke admiringly of Faunt as "a man of great learning, gravity and wisdome"; William was a vigorous supporter of Laudian reforms in his home county, siding with High Church Anglicanism, which was sometimes seen as Catholic-sympathising and at St Thomas's, Burton was apparently one of the last few 17th-century Church of England priests to use unleavened wafers in the Communion, an outmoded Laudian practice. However, as an Oxford scholar, Burton could have taken a personal dislike to Archbishop Laud; as the Chancellor there from 1630 to 1641, Laud was in perpetual squabbles with its body of scholars, which would not endear him to Burton.

Burton was an apparent supporter of James I's anti-Catholic measures, listed among those at Christ Church who took his Oath of Allegiance. The anti-Catholic portions of Philosophaster were revised shortly after James released the Oath, possibly to satirise the ensuing Catholic backlash. As Adam Kitzes put it, Burton "makes no bones about his allegiance to the king and the Church of England". Burton also claimed part of his reasoning in not proceeding to a DD (Doctor of Divinity) was his reluctance to participate in the endless argument surrounding religion, for which he "saw no such great neede".

Library
According to Bamborough, "to describe Burton as 'bookish' can only be called ridiculous understatement". Burton owned 1738 books in total, tenfold the library of a typical Oxford don, though not as vast as those of some other contemporary humanist scholars. He accumulated the collection over a forty-six year period, from 1594 to 1640. The profits from the Anatomy probably funded most of the library, larger than his modest academic and ecclesiastical income would have been able to cover. The majority of the library's contents was in Latin, but the number of English volumes was untypically large. Burton seems to have been uncomfortable reading outside these two primary languages; he owned only a handful of titles in Italian, German, Spanish, and Hebrew, and none in Greek, the last despite his humanist reputation and the recurring Grecian references in the Anatomy. Again despite this reputation, the majority of Burton's library was contemporary. He owned hundreds of cheap pamphlets, satires, and popular plays: all works which had been excluded from the recently founded Bodleian Library, perhaps why Burton felt the need to purchase them. Though religious works composed the largest category in his library (about one quarter), the remaining three quarters were made up by an eclectic collection of literary, historical, medical, and geographical volumes, testifying to Burton's broad scholarship. Burton was an avid annotator of books, with marginal notes in around one-fifth of his books, from the tangential to the bluntly hostile.

Burton's library was divided between the Bodleian and Christ Church libraries after his death. In the early 20th century, Oxford Regius Professor of Medicine William Osler, an enthusiast for Burton, found Burton's bequests "scattered indiscriminately" throughout the two libraries, and, from 1907 to 1908, set about having them gathered together in one collection, rediscovering over a thousand of Burton's volumes. In Christ Church Library, Osler set up an elaborate display of these books surrounding a copy of the Brasenose Portrait of Burton. Osler delivered an address on the contents of Burton's library the following year. In 1964, Christ Church Library disassembled Osler's Burton collection, moving the books to the Archiva Superiora on the second floor. This collection comprises 1530 of the 1738 books and two manuscripts owned by Burton. The remaining 210 were distributed to either various acquaintances of Burton; gifted or traded to other libraries or bookshops; or by selling duplicates, some of which are unrecorded. Of the 140 books yet to be located, it is thought that around half of these are extant. Christ Church Library has referred to Burton's library as "one of the most important surviving English private libraries from the period before the Civil War".

Reputation and legacy
Burton's Anatomy was an extremely popular work in Burton's lifetime, and throughout the 17th century, going through eight editions from 1621 to 1676. As early as 1662, Thomas Fuller was awed that "any book of philology in our land hath in so short a time passed so many editions". Its readers interpreted and employed it to varied, personal ends. Wood wrote that the Anatomy, as "a Book so full of variety of reading", prompted hack authors to borrow shamelessly from the work. Some authors, "who have lost their time and are put to a push for invention" poached his numerous classical quotations. In the 18th century, George Steevens retrospectively noted it as "a book once the favourite of the learned and witty, and a source of surreptitious learning". Certainly, scholars copied and emulated the Anatomy to their own ends: William Vaughan repurposed Burton's critique of court patronage towards an anti-Catholic end in The Golden Fleece (1626); Nathanael Carpenter imitated Burton's intimate articulation of his own melancholy and defence of scholarship for his Geography delineated forth (1625); and Richard Whitlock, in his Zootomia (1654), plagiarised Burton's defence of scholarship wholesale in defending the university from contemporary Puritan attacks. For the dramatists such as John Ford, Burton's treatise "was virtually an authoritative psychiatric textbook", used as a reference work for their depictions of melancholy. Richard Holdsworth, when Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge (1637–43), recommended it as a comprehensive digest to "serve for [the] delight and ornament" of young gentlemen, bestowing that learning expected of a gentleman rather than that of a serious scholar. The earliest biography of Burton appeared in 1662, as part of Fuller's Worthies of England; this was followed by Anthony à Wood in his 1692 volume of Athenae Oxonienses.

Into the 18th century, Burton experienced something of a lull in popularity. The Anatomy did still obtain a few distinguished readers in this period. Samuel Johnson, himself a melancholic, was an avid reader of Burton; Boswell's Life of Johnson reports that Johnson remarked the Anatomy was "the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise". Though no American edition was published until 1836, Burton's work procured a few prominent readers in early America. One such reader was American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, who marvelled to a friend "that, in the last Century, a Folio, Burton on Melancholy, went through six Editions in about twenty years. We have, I believe, more Readers now, but not such huge Books." Burton's influence during this period was chiefly as reservoir of quotes and anecdotes for less sophisticated authors to borrow from. One such borrower was Laurence Sterne, who shamelessly incorporated passages of Burton throughout his Tristram Shandy (1759), an act of plagiarism which was not revealed for nearly thirty years, until the publication of John Ferriar's Illustrations of Sterne (1798).

After Ferriar made this influence known, Burton and his work experienced a revival of interest. A new edition, the first in over a century, was published in 1800; more than forty were published throughout the 19th century. The Romantics, especially Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, admired the work as an erudite curiosity. Lamb illustrated Burton in his "Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading" (1833) as "that fantastic great old man", creating the image of Burton as an eccentric and erudite academic which has since stuck, for whatever truth it possessed. The Anatomy was among John Keats's favourite books, and was used as a major source for the plot of his poem "Lamia" (1820). Burton's prose style wasn't universally appreciated, appearing pedantic and pretentious to some 19th-century critics. The Victorian poet and literary critic T. E. Brown disparaged the Anatomy as "the sweepings of the medieval dustbin" or some "enormous labyrinthine joke".

Into the early 20th century, this romantic view transitioned into the more academic study of Burton's masterpiece. William Osler—widely regarded as the father of modern medicine—was a lifelong devotee of Burton and described the Anatomy as "the greatest medical treatise written by a layman". According to one scholar, "the revival of critical interest in The Anatomy of Melancholy owes not a little to Osler's direct influence". Following Osler's influence, Burtonian studies were primarily bibliographical in the early 20th century, with the exception of an influential essay by critic Morris Croll on the "Senecan style" in Burton's late Renaissance prose. By the middle of the 20th century, psychoanalytic critics of the Anatomy emerged, regarding Burton's masterpiece as a work of psychological autobiography. In The Psychiatry of Robert Burton (1944), for instance, critic Bergen Evans and psychiatrist George Mohr combed the Anatomy for references to mothers in an attempt to reconstruct Burton's own relationship with his mother. This psychoanalytic tendency has been criticised by more modern biographers of Burton, especially by R. L. Nochimson, who dedicated an article to amending the "amazing carelessness" with which Burton's literary and real personae have been confused. Stanley Fish's 1972 monograph Self-Consuming Artifacts inaugurated the postmodern interpretation of Burton's Anatomy, which alternatingly saw it as a satirical indictment of humanistic encyclopedism, or a desperate suppression of Burton's anxiety over the immensity of his subject matter. However, in total, Burton's Anatomy only accrued a small handful of monographs in the second half of the 20th century. The most detailed study of this period was a French monograph by Jean Robert Simon, a fact which, according to one scholar, "speaks volumes about the marginalization of the Anatomy in Anglophone early modern studies [of that period]."

Burton earned a new generation of enthusiasts in the 20th and 21st centuries. As journalist Nick Lezard observed in 2000, though not often reprinted, "Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy survives among the cognoscenti". Samuel Beckett drew influence from Burton's Anatomy, both in the misogynistic depiction of women in his early fiction, and the Latin quotations (via Burton) found throughout in his work. The eminent literary critic Northrop Frye was an admirer of the Anatomy; he characterized it as "an enormous survey of human life" which "ranks with Chaucer and Dickens, except the characters are books rather than people". Psychiatrist and historian of ideas Jacques Barzun held up Burton as "the first systematic psychiatrist", praising him for the collection of "widely scattered case histories" of melancholia for his Anatomy, and treating the mentally ill with a "tender sympathy" uncharacteristic of subsequent psychiatrists. American writer Alexander Theroux has named Burton as one of his influences, and sometimes imitates his style. English novelist Philip Pullman praised the work in a 2005 article for The Telegraph as a "glorious and intoxicating and endlessly refreshing reward for reading". For Pullman, it is "one of the indispensable books; for my money, it is the best of all." Australian singer/songwriter Nick Cave listed Burton's Anatomy as one of his favourite books.

Though Burton's legacy lies almost exclusively in his authorship of the Anatomy, his Philosophaster has increasingly been examined alongside it. As Murphy observed, Philosophaster "has received more attention than most of the other surviving examples of university drama." Since its first, mid-19th-century publication in Latin, it has been published three more times, twice with original translations into English. In 1930, it was even performed at the University of California. The play has received a mixed reception from modern scholars. Literary critic Martin Spevack dismissed it as "an obvious and elementary string of transparent sketches". O'Connell has, however, described it as "perhaps the most appealing of Burton's Latin works", he notes that the "liveliness in its representation of university life" redeems the "weak plotting and flat characterization." The 19th-century critic of Elizabethan drama Arthur Henry Bullen wrote of it that the philosophasters "are portrayed with considerable humour and skill, and the lyrical portions of the play are written with a light hand". Bamborough summed it up as "not without genuine merit, particularly in the satirical portraits of pretenders to learning."

title: Robert Burton