whole sentences, not assimilated sense, which he rather affects; for his want of judgment, like want of health, renders his appetite preposterous. He pumps for affected and far-set expressions, and they always prove as far from the purpose. He admires canting above sense. He is worse than one that is utterly ignorant, as a cock that sees a little fights worse than one that is stark blind. He speaks in a different dialect from other men, and much affects forced expressions, forgetting that hard words, as well as evil ones, corrupt good manners. He can do nothing, like a conjurer, out of the circle of his arts, nor in it without canting and . . . If he professes physic, he gives his patients sound, hard words for their money, as cheap as he can afford; for they cost him money, and study too, before he came by them, and he has reason to make as much of them as he can.

A HUNTER

Is an auxiliary hound that assists one nation of beasts to subdue and overrun another. He makes mortal war with the fox for committing acts of hostility against his poultry. He is very solicitous to have his dogs well descended of worshipful families, and understands their pedigree as learnedly as if he were a herald, and is as careful to match them according to their rank and qualities as High-Germans are of their own progenies. He is both cook and physician to his hounds, understands the constitutions of their bodies, and what to administer in any infirmity or disease, acute or chronic, that can befall them. Nor is he less skilful in physiognomy, and from the aspects of their faces, shape of their snouts, falling of their ears and lips, and make of their barrels will give a shrewd guess at their inclinations, parts, and abilities, and what parents they are lineally descended from; and by the tones of their voices and statures of their persons easily discover what country they are natives of. He believes no music in the world is comparable to a chorus of their voices, and that when they are well matched they will hunt their parts as true at first scent as the best singers of catches that ever opened in a

tavern; that they understand the scale as well as the best scholar that ever learned to compose by the mathematics; and that when he winds his horn to them 'tis the very same thing with a cornet in a quire; that they will run down the hare with a fugue, and a double do-sol-re-dog hunt a thorough-base to them all the while; that when they are at a loss they do but rest, and then they know by turns who are to continue a dialogue between two or three of them, of which he is commonly one himself. He takes very great pains in his way, but calls it game and sport because it is to no purpose; and he is willing to make as much of it as he can, and not be thought to bestow so much labour and pains about nothing. Let the hare take which way she will, she seldom fails to lead him at long-running to the alehouse, where he meets with an after-game of delight in making up a narrative how every dog behaved himself, which is never done without long dispute, every man inclining to favour his friend as far as he can; and if there be anything remarkable to his thinking in it, he preserves it to please himself and, as he believes, all people else with, during his natural life, and after leaves it to his heirs male entailed upon the family, with his bugle-horn and seal-ring.

AN AFFECTED MAN

Carries himself like his dish (as the proverb says), very uprightly, without spilling one drop of his humour. He is an orator and rhetorician, that delights in flowers and ornaments of his own devising to please himself and others that laugh at him. He is of a leaden, dull temper, that stands stiff, as it is bent, to all crooked lines, but never to the right. When he thinks to appear most graceful, he adorns himself most ill-favouredly, like an Indian that wears jewels in his lips and nostrils. His words and gestures are all as stiff as buckram, and he talks as if his lips were turned up as well as his beard. All his motions are regular, as if he went by clockwork, and he goes very true to the nick as he is set. He has certain favourite words and expressions, which he makes very much of, as he has reason to do, for they serve him upon all

occasions and are never out of the way when he has use of them, as they have leisure enough to do, for nobody else has any occasion for them but himself. All his affectations are forced and stolen from others; and though they become some particular persons where they grow naturally, as a flower does on its stalk, he thinks they will do so by him when they are pulled and dead. He puts words and language out of its ordinary pace and breaks it to his own fancy, which makes it go so uneasy in a shuffle, which it has not been used to. He delivers himself in a forced way, like one that sings with a feigned voice beyond his natural compass. He loves the sound of words better than the sense, and will rather venture to incur nonsense than leave out a word that he has a kindness for. If he be a statesman, the slighter and meaner his employments are the bigger he looks, as an ounce of tin swells and looks bigger than an ounce of gold; and his affectations of gravity are the most desperate of all, as the aphorism says-Madness of study and consideration are harder to be cured than those of lighter and more fantastic humour.

A MEDICINE-TAKER

Has a sickly mind and believes the infirmity is in his body, like one that draws the wrong tooth and fancies his pain in the wrong place. The less he understands the reason of physic the stronger faith he has in it, as it commonly fares in all other affairs of the world. His disease is only in his judgment, which makes him believe a doctor can fetch it out of his stomach or his belly, and fright those worms out of his guts that are bred in his brain. He believes a doctor is a kind of conjurer that can do strange things, and he is as willing to have him think so; for by that means he does not only get his money, but finds himself in some possibility by complying with that fancy to do him good for it, which he could never expect to do any other way; for, like those that have been cured by drinking their own water, his own imagination is a better medicine than any the doctor knows how to prescribe, even as the weapon-salve cures a wound by being applied to that which

made it. He is no sooner well but any story or lie of a new famous doctor or strange cure puts him into a relapse, and he falls sick of a medicine instead of a disease, and catches physic like him that fell into a looseness at the sight of a purge. He never knows when he is well or sick, but is always tampering with his health till he has spoiled it, like a foolish musician that breaks his strings with striving to put them in tune; for Nature, which is physic, understands better how to do her own work than those that take it from her at second hand. Hippocrates says, Ars longa, vita brevis, and it is the truest of all his aphorisms—

"For he that's given much to the long art

Does not prolong his life, but cut it short."

THE MISER

Is like the sea, that is said to be richer than the land, but is not able to make any use of it at all, and only keeps it from those that know how to enjoy it if they had it. The devil understood his business very well when he made choice of Judas's avarice to betray Christ, for no other vice would have undertaken it; and it is to be feared that his Vicars now on earth, by the tenderness they have to the bag, do not use Him much better than His steward did then. He gathers wealth to no purpose but to satisfy his avarice, that has no end, and afflicts himself to possess that which he is, of all men, the most incapable of ever obtaining. His treasure is in his hands in the same condition as if it were buried under ground and watched by an evil spirit. His desires are like the bottomless pit which he is destined to, for the one is as soon filled as the other. He shuts up his money in close custody, and that which has power to open all locks is not able to set itself at liberty. If he ever lets it out it is upon good bail and mainprize, to render itself prisoner again whensoever it shall be summoned. He loves wealth as an eunuch does women, whom he has no possibility of enjoying, or one that is bewitched with an impotency or taken with the falling sickness. His greedy appetite

to riches is but a kind of dog-hunger, that never digests what it devours, but still the greedier and more eager it crams itself becomes more meagre. He finds that ink and parchment preserves money better than an iron chest and parsimony, like the memories of men that lie dead and buried when they are committed to brass and marble, but revive and flourish when they are trusted to authentic writings and increase by being used. If he had lived among the Jews in the wilderness he would have been one of their chief reformers, and have worshipped anything that is cast in gold, though a sillier creature than a calf. St. John in the Revelations describes the New Jerusalem to be built all of gold and silver and precious stones, for the saints commonly take so much delight in those creatures that nothing else could prevail with them ever to come thither; and as those times are called the Golden Age in which there was no gold at all in use, so men are reputed godly and rich that make no use at all of their religion or wealth. All that he has gotten together with perpetual pains and industry is not wealth, but a collection, which he intends to keep by him more for his own diversion than any other use, and he that made ducks and drakes with his money enjoyed it every way as much. He makes no conscience of anything but parting with his money, which is no better than a separation of soul and body to him, and he believes it to be as bad as selfmurder if he should do it wilfully; for the price of the weapon with which a man is killed is always esteemed a very considerable circumstance, and next to not having the fear of God before his eyes. He loves the bowels of the earth broiled on the coals above any other cookery in the world. He is a slave condemned to the mines. He laughs at the golden mean as ridiculous, and believes there is no such thing in the world; for how can there be a mean of that of which no man ever had enough? He loves the world so well that he would willingly lose himself to save anything by it. His riches are like a dunghill, that renders the ground unprofitable that it lies upon, and is good for nothing until it be spread and scattered abroad.