Still useful after all these years …

… Why the first self-help book is still worth reading: The Anatomy of Melancholy anatomized - The Spectator World. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

You don’t have to take my word for it. The Anatomy is widely acclaimed as a classic. Laurence Sterne stole chunks from it for The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Samuel Johnson said it was the only book that got him out of bed early just to read it. Keats adored it. Borges’s Library of Babel is prefaced with lines from it. Samuel Beckett was a fan, and Anthony Burgess thought it one of the great comic works of the world. Welcoming the paperback edition in 2001, the critic Nick Lezard called it the best book ever written and the book to end all books. More recently, the publisher John Mitchell described it as some of the greatest prose from the greatest era of English prose.