A man subjected long to that soul-cramping stress, with no outlet or abatement, would have become a melancholiac.
"The Tempering"
Charles Neville Buck
I do not know, even now as I write, how it was that Sir Edmund met his end, whether he had killed himself, as I think-for he was of a melancholiac disposition, as was his father and his grandfather before him-or whether, as indeed I think possible, he was murdered by the very man who swore so many Catholic lives away, by way of giving colour to his own designs-for if a man will swear away twenty lives, what should hinder him from taking one?
"Oddsfish!"
Robert Hugh Benson
He remembered one of those men in the islands who had become a melancholiac.
"The Law of Hemlock Mountain"
Hugh Lundsford