Incredible and impossible things

Some of these melancholic persons... troubled with this disease imagine many strange, incredible and impossible things. Some that they are monarchs and princes, and that all other men are their subjects: Some that they are brute beasts: Some that they be urinals or earthen pots, greatly fearing to be broken: Some that every one that meets them will convey them to the gallows; and yet in the end hang themselves. One thought that Atlas whom the poets fain to hold up heaven with his shoulders, would be weary, and let the sky fall upon him: ...One (person) that had killed his father, was notably detected; by imagining that a swallow upbraided him therewith: So as he himself thereby revealed the murder. But the most notablest example hereof is one that was in great perplexity imagining that his nose was as big as a house..."

A fasinating manuscript in the British Museum (Sloane, 160: fol. 39)
Image by Antoine D'Agata