curious to fit himself with a handsome word of a tunable sound, but could light upon none that some poet or other had not made use of before. He was therefore forced to fall to coining, and was several months before he could light on one that pleased him perfectly. But after he had overcome that difficulty he found a greater remaining, to get a lady to own him. He accosted some of all sorts, and gave them to understand, both in prose and verse, how incomparably happy it was in his power to make his mistress, but could never convert any of them. At length he was fain to make his laundress supply that place as a proxy until his good fortune or somebody of better quality would be more kind to him, which after a while he neither hoped nor cared for; for how mean soever her condition was before, when he had once pretended to her she was sure to be a nymph and a goddess. For what greater honour can a woman be capable of than to be translated into precious stones and stars? No herald in the world can go higher. Besides, he found no man can use that freedom of hyperbole in the character of a person commonly known (as great ladies are) which we can in describing one so obscure and unknown that nobody can disprove him. For he that writes but one sonnet upon any of the public persons shall be sure to have his reader at every third word cry out, "What an ass is this to call Spanish paper and ceruse lilies and roses, or claps influences; to say the Graces are her waiting-women, when they are known to be no better than her bawds; that day breaks from her eyes when she looks asquint; or that her breath perfumes the Arabian winds when she puffs tobacco!"

It is no mean art to improve a language, and find out words that are not only removed from common use, but rich in consonants, the nerves and sinews of speech; to raise a soft and feeble language like ours to the pitch of High-Dutch, as he did that writ

"Arts rattling foreskins shrilling bagpipes quell."

This is not only the most elegant but most politic way of writing that a poet can use, for I know no defence like it to

preserve a poem from the torture of those that lisp and stammer. He that wants teeth may as well venture upon a piece of tough horny brawn as such a line, for he will look like an ass eating thistles.

He never begins a work without an invocation of his Muse; for it is not fit that she should appear in public to show her skill before she is entreated, as gentlewomen do not use to sing until they are applied to and often desired.

I shall not need to say anything of the excellence of poetry, since it has been already performed by many excellent persons, among whom some have lately undertaken to prove that the civil government cannot possibly subsist without it, which, for my part, I believe to be true in a poetical sense, and more probable to be received of it than those strange feats of building walls and making trees dance which antiquity ascribes to verse. And though philosophers are of a contrary opinion and will not allow poets fit to live in a commonwealth, their partiality is plainer than their reasons, for they have no other way to pretend to this prerogative themselves, as they do, but by removing poets whom they know to have a fairer title; and this they do so unjustly that Plato, who first banished poets his republic, forgot that that very commonwealth was poetical. I shall say nothing to them, but only desire the world to consider how happily it is like to be governed by those that are at so perpetual a civil war among themselves, that if we should submit ourselves to their own resolution of this question, and be content to allow them only fit to rule if they could but conclude it so themselves, they would never agree upon it. Meanwhile there is no less certainty and agreement in poetry than the mathematics, for they all submit to the same rules without dispute or controversy. But whosoever shall please to look into the records of antiquity shall find their title so unquestioned that the greatest princes in the whole world have been glad to derive their pedigrees, and their power too, from poets. Alexander the Great had no wiser a way to secure that Empire to himself by right which he had gotten by force than by declaring himself the son of Jupiter; and who was Jupiter

but the son of a poet? So Cæsar and all Rome was transported with joy when a poet made Jupiter his colleague in the Empire; and when Jupiter governed, what did the poets that governed Jupiter ?

A PHILOSOPHER

Seats himself as spectator and critic on the great theatre of the world, and gives sentence on the plots, language, and action of whatsoever he sees represented, according to his own fancy. He will pretend to know what is done behind the scene, but so seldom is in the right that he discovers nothing more than his own mistakes. When his profession was in credit in the world, and money was to be gotten by it, it divided itself into multitudes of sects, that maintained themselves and their opinions by fierce and hot contests with one another; but since the trade decayed and would not turn to account, they all fell of themselves, and now the world is so unconcerned in their controversies, that three Reformado sects joined in one, like Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana, will not serve to maintain one pedant. He makes his hypotheses himself, as a tailor does a doublet without measure; no matter whether they fit Nature, he can make Nature fit them, and, whether they are too straight or wide, pinch or stuff out the body accordingly. He judges of the works of Nature just as the rabble do of State affairs; they see things done, and every man according to his capacity guesses at the reasons of them, but knowing nothing of the arcana or secret movements of either, they seldom or never are in the right. Howsoever, they please themselves and some others with their fancies, and the farther they are off truth, the more confident they are they are near it, as those that are out of their way believe the farther they have gone they are the nearer their journey's end, when they are farthest of all from it. He is confident of immaterial substances, and his reasons are very pertinent; that is, substantial as he thinks, and immaterial as others do. Heretofore his beard was the badge of his profession, and the length of that in all his polemics was ever accounted the length of his weapon; but when the trade fell,

that fell too. In Lucius's time they were commonly called beardwearers, for all the strength of their wits lay in their beards, as Samson's did in his locks; but since the world began to see the vanity of that hare-brained cheat, they left it off to save their credit.

A MELANCHOLY MAN

Is one that keeps the worst company in the world; that is, his own; and though he be always falling out and quarrelling with himself, yet he has not power to endure any other conversation. His head is haunted, like a house, with evil spirits and apparitions, that terrify and fright him out of himself, till he stands empty and forsaken. His sleeps and his wakings are so much the same that he knows not how to distinguish them, and many times when he dreams he believes he is broad awake and sees visions. The fumes and vapours that rise from his spleen and hypochondrias have so smutched and sullied his brain (like a room that smokes) that his understanding is blear-eyed and has no right perception of anything. His soul lives in his body, like a mole in the earth that labours in the dark, and casts up doubts and scruples of his own imaginations, to make that rugged and uneasy that was plain and open before. His brain is so cracked that he fancies himself to be glass, and is afraid that everything he comes near should break him in pieces. Whatsoever makes an impression in his imagination works itself in like a screw, and the more he turns and winds it the deeper it sticks, till it is never to be got out again. The temper of his brain, being earthy, cold, and dry, is apt to breed worms, that sink so deep into it no medicine in art or nature is able to reach them. He leads his life as one leads a dog in a slip that will not follow, but is dragged along until he is almost hanged, as he has it often under consideration to treat himself in convenient time and place, if he can but catch himself alone. After a long and mortal feud between his inward and his outward man, they at length agree to meet without seconds and decide the quarrel, in which the one drops and the other slinks out of the way and makes his

Y

!

escape into some foreign world, from whence it is never after heard of. He converses with nothing so much as his own imagination, which, being apt to misrepresent things to him, makes him believe that it is something else than it is, and that he holds intelligence with spirits that reveal whatsoever he fancies to him, as the ancient rude people that first heard their own voices repeated by echoes in the woods concluded it must proceed from some invisible inhabitants of those solitary places, which they after believed to be gods, and called them sylvans, fauns, and dryads. He makes the infirmity of his temper pass for revelations, as Mahomet did by his falling sickness, and inspires himself with the wind of his own hypochondrias. He laments, like Heraclitus, the maudlin philosopher, at other men's mirth, and takes pleasure in nothing but his own unsober sadness. His mind is full of thoughts, but they are all empty, like a nest of boxes. He sleeps little, but dreams much, and soundest when he is waking. He sees visions farther off than a second-sighted man in Scotland, and dreams upon a hard point with admirable judgment. He is just so much worse than a madman as he is below him in degree of frenzy, for among madmen the most mad govern all the rest, and receive a natural obedience from their inferiors.

A TRAVELLER

He flies from

Is a native of all countries and an alien at home. the place where he was hatched, like a wild goose, and prefers all others before it. He has no quarrel to it but because he was born in it, and, like a bastard, he is ashamed of his mother, because she is of him. He is a merchant that makes voyages into foreign nations to drive a trade in wisdom and politics, and it is not for his credit to have it thought he has made an ill return, which must be if he should allow of any of the growth of his own country. This makes him quack and blow up himself with admiration of foreign parts and a generous contempt of home, that all men may admire at least the means he has had of improvement and deplore their own defects. His observations are