melancholy tailors

....returning to the topic of the physiognomy of students ( Blog- May 12 2008) : think of this as a further contribution to a literature of assistants (Walser,Kafka etc); this is a literature in which jobs (rarely professions) are described in a certain way; personal characteristics are replaced by a single, obsessive act; students press papers to their face, assistants stand around like 'waiters'. These job holders or seekers are melancholic. There is no point checking in the empirical world whether these physiognomies hold true. Charles Lamb wrote a piece on Tailors; they are melancholic, he says. This doesn't call for a survey of tailors. For Lamb the investigation into tailor-melancholy follows Robert Burton; perhaps clothes are the first outward sign of the fall of the human race; or is it because tailors are excessively fond of cabbage. Burton has a sort of method: first identify general features of tailors (melancholy) then move onto to other authorities on the subject, symptoms and causes. For example, fondness of cabbages is a symptom of melancholy.  Blog-July 12 2007 refers to an approach to understanding certain questions from a parabolic aspect; Burton's method offers such an approach.