BURTON, ROBERT, known to the learned by the name of Democritus junior, was a younger brother of the William Burton who wrote the Antiquities of Leicestershire, and born of an ancient family at Lindley, in that county, upon the 8th of February 1576. He was educated in grammatical learning in the free school of Sutton Colefield, in Warwickshire; in the year 1593 he was sent to Brazenose College in Oxford; and in 1599 he was elected student of Christ-church. In 1616 he had conferred upon him by the dean and canons of Christ-church, the vicarage of St Thomas, in the west suburb of Oxford, to the parishioners of which it is said that he always gave the sacrament in wafers; and this, with the rectory of Segrave in Leicestershire, given him some time afterwards by George Lord Berkeley, he held to the day of his death, which happened in January 1639. He was a man of general learning, a distinguished philosopher, an exact mathematician, and, what constitutes the peculiarity of his character, a very curious calculator of natiivities. He was extremely studious, and of a melancholy turn; yet an agreeable companion, and very humorous. The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Democritus junior, as he calls himself, shows that these different qualities were strangely mixed together in his composition. This book was printed first in quarto, afterwards in folio, in 1624, 1632, 1638, and 1652, to the great emolument of the bookseller, who, as Mr Wood tells us, got an estate
by it. Some circumstances attending his death occasioned strange suspicions. He died in his chamber at or very near the time which, it seems, he had some years before predicted from the calculation of his nativity; and this exactness made it whispered about that, for the glory of astrology, and rather than that his calculation should fail, he became a felo de se. This, however, was generally discredited. He was buried with due solemnity in the cathedral of Christ-church, and had a fair monument erected to his memory. He left behind him a very choice collection of books, many of which he bequeathed to the Bodleian Library, and a hundred pounds to Christ-church, the interest of which was to be laid out yearly in books for their library.