Character Writings of the Seventeenth Century Part 24

If you dislike him, it is at your own peril; he is sure to put in a caveat beforehand against your understanding, and, like a malefactor in wit, is always furnished with exceptions against his judges. This puts him upon perpetual apologies, excuses, and defences, but still by way of defiance, in a kind of whiffling strain, without regard of any man that stands in the way of his pageant. Where he thinks he may do it safely, he will confidently own other men's writings; and where he fears the truth may be discovered, he will, by feeble denials and feigned insinuations, give men occasion to suppose it.

If he understands Latin or Greek he ranks himself among the learned, despises the ignorant, talks criticisms out of Scaliger, and repeats Martial's bawdy epigrams, and sets up his rest wholly upon pedantry. But if he be not so well qualified, he cries down all learning as pedantic, disclaims study, and professes to write with as great facility as if his Muse was sliding down Parna.s.sus. Whatsoever he hears well said he seizes upon by poetical license, and one way makes it his own; that is, by ill-repeating of it. This he believes to be no more theft than it is to take that which others throw away. By this means his writings are, like a tailor's cushion of mosaic work, made up of several sc.r.a.ps sewed together. He calls a slovenly, nasty description great Nature, and dull flatness strange easiness. He writes down all that comes in his head, and makes no choice, because he has nothing to do it with that is judgment. He is always repealing the old laws of comedy, and, like the Long Parliament, making ordinances in their stead, although they are perpetually thrown out of coffee-houses and come to nothing. He is like an Italian thief, that never robs but he murders, to prevent discovery; so sure is he to cry down the man from whom he purloins, that his petty larceny of wit may pa.s.s unsuspected. He is but a copier at best, and will never arrive to practise by the life; for bar him the imitation of something he has read, and he has no image in his thoughts. Observation and fancy, the matter and form of just wit, are above his philosophy. He appears so over-concerned in all men's wits as if they were but disparagements of his own, and cries down all they do as if they were encroachments upon him. He takes jests from the owners and breaks them, as justices do false weights and pots that want measure. When he meets with anything that is very good he changes it into small money, like three groats for a shilling, to serve several occasions. He disclaims study, pretends to take things in motion, and to shoot flying, which appears to be very true by his often missing of his mark. His wit is much troubled with obstructions, and he has fits as painful as those of the spleen. He fancies himself a dainty, spruce shepherd, with a flock and a fine silken shepherdess, that follow his pipe as rats did the conjurers in Germany.

As for epithets, he always avoids those that are near akin to the sense.

Such matches are unlawful, and not fit to be made by a Christian poet, and therefore all his care is to choose out such as will serve, like a wooden leg, to piece out a maimed verse that wants a foot or two; and if they will but rhyme now and then into the bargain, or run upon a letter, it is a work of supererogation.

For similitudes, he likes the hardest and most obscure best; for as ladies wear black patches to make their complexions seem fairer than they are, so when an ill.u.s.tration is more obscure than the sense that went before it, it must of necessity make it appear clearer than it did, for contraries are best set off with contraries.

He has found out a way to save the expense of much wit and sense; for he will make less than some have prodigally laid out upon five or six words serve forty or fifty lines. This is a thrifty invention, and very easy, and, if it were commonly known, would much increase the trade of wit and maintain a mult.i.tude of small poets in constant employment. He has found out a new sort of poetical Georgics, a trick of sowing wit like clover-gra.s.s on barren subjects which would yield nothing before. This is very useful for the times, wherein, some men say, there is no room left for new invention. He will take three grains of wit like the elixir, and projecting it upon the iron age, turn it immediately into gold. All the business of mankind has presently vanished; the whole world has kept holiday; there have been no men but heroes and poets, no women but nymphs and shepherdesses; trees have borne fritters, and rivers flowed plum-porridge.

We read that Virgil used to make fifty or sixty verses in a morning, and afterwards reduce them to ten. This was an unthrifty vanity, and argues him as well ignorant in the husbandry of his own poetry as Seneca says he was in that of a farm; for, in plain English, it was no better than bringing a n.o.ble to nine-pence. And as such courses brought the prodigal son to eat with hogs, so they did him to feed with horses, which were not much better company, and may teach us to avoid doing the like. For certainly it is more n.o.ble to take four or five grains of sense, and, like a gold-beater, hammer them into so many leaves as will fill a whole book, than to write nothing but epitomes, which many wise men believe will be the bane and calamity of learning. When he writes he commonly steers the sense of his lines by the rhyme that is at the end of them, as butchers do calves by the tail. For when he has made one line, which is easy enough, and has found out some st.u.r.dy hard word that will but rhyme, he will hammer the sense upon it, like a piece of hot iron upon an anvil, into what form he pleases.

There is no art in the world so rich in terms as poetry; a whole dictionary is scarce able to contain them, for there is hardly a pond, a sheep-walk, or a gravel-pit in all Greece but the ancient name of it is become a term of art in poetry. By this means small poets have such a stock of able hard words lying by them, as dryads, hamadryads, Aonides, fauni, nymphae, sylvani, &c., that signify nothing at all, and such a world of pedantic terms of the same kind, as may serve to furnish all the new inventions and thorough reformations that can happen between this and Plato's great year.

When he writes he never proposes any scope or purpose to himself, but gives his genius all freedom; for as he that rides abroad for his pleasure can hardly be out of his way, so he that writes for his pleasure can seldom be beside his subject. It is an ungrateful thing to a n.o.ble wit to be confined to anything. To what purpose did the ancients feign Pegasus to have wings if he must be confined to the road and stages like a pack-horse, or be forced to be obedient to hedges and ditches? Therefore he has no respect to decorum and propriety of circ.u.mstance, for the regard of persons, times, and places is a restraint too servile to be imposed upon poetical license, like him that made Plato confess Juvenal to be a philosopher, or Persius, that calls the Athenians Quirites.

For metaphors, he uses to choose the hardest and most far-set that he can light upon. These are the jewels of eloquence, and therefore the harder they are the more precious they must be.

He'll take a scant piece of coa.r.s.e sense and stretch it on the tenterhooks of half-a-score rhymes, until it crack that you may see through it and it rattle like a drumhead. When you see his verses hanged up in tobacco-shops, you may say, in defiance of the proverb, "that the weakest does not always go to the wall;" for 'tis well known the lines are strong enough, and in that sense may justly take the wall of any that have been written in our language. He seldom makes a conscience of his rhymes, but will often take the liberty to make "preach" rhyme with "cheat," "vote" with "rogue," and "committee-man" with "hang."

He'll make one word of as many joints as the tin-pudding that a juggler pulls out of his throat and chops in again. What think you of _glud-fum-flam-hasta-minantes?_ Some of the old Latin poets bragged that their verses were tougher than bra.s.s and harder than marble; what would they have done if they had seen these? Verily they would have had more reason to wish themselves an hundred throats than they then had to p.r.o.nounce them.

There are some that drive a trade in writing in praise of other writers (like rooks, that bet on gamesters' hands), not at all to celebrate the learned author's merits, as they would show but their own wits, of which he is but the subject. The lechery of this vanity has sp.a.w.ned more writers than the civil law. For those whose modesty must not endure to hear their own praises spoken may yet publish of themselves the most notorious vapours imaginable. For if the privilege of love be allowed--_Dicere quiz puduit, scribere jussit amor_--why should it not be so in self-love too? For if it be wisdom to conceal our imperfections, what is it to discover our virtues? It is not likely that Nature gave men great parts upon such terms as the fairies used to give money, to pinch and leave them if they speak of it. They say--Praise is but the shadow of virtue, and sure that virtue is very foolish that is afraid of its own shadow.

When he writes anagrams he uses to lay the outsides of his verses even (like a bricklayer) by a line of rhyme and acrostic, and fill the middle with rubbish. In this he imitates Ben Jonson, but in nothing else.

There was one that lined a hatcase with a paper of Benlowes' poetry; Prynne bought it by chance and put a new demi-castor into it. The first time he wore it he felt only a singing in his head, which within two days turned to a vertigo. He was let blood in the ear by one of the State physicians, and recovered; but before he went abroad he wrote a poem of rocks and seas, in a style so proper and natural that it was hard to determine which was ruggeder.

There is no feat of activity nor gambol of wit that ever was performed by man, from him that vaults on Pegasus to him that tumbles through the hoop of an anagram, but Benlowes has got the mastery in it, whether it be high-rope wit or low-rope wit. He has all sorts of echoes, rebuses, chronograms, &c., besides carwitchets, clenches, and quibbles. As for altars and pyramids in poetry, he has outdone all men that way; for he has made a gridiron and a frying-pan in verse, that, beside the likeness in shape, the very tone and sound of the words did perfectly represent the noise that is made by those utensils, such as the old poet called _sartago loquendi_. When he was a captain he made all the furniture of his horse, from the bit to the crupper, in beaten poetry, every verse being fitted to the proportion of the thing, with a moral allusion of the sense to the thing; as the bridle of moderation, the saddle of content, and the crupper of constancy; so that the same thing was both epigram and emblem, even as a mule is both horse and a.s.s.

Some critics are of opinion that poets ought to apply themselves to the imitation of Nature, and make a conscience of digressing from her; but he is none of these. The ancient magicians could charm down the moon and force rivers back to their springs by the power of poetry only, and the moderns will undertake to turn the inside of the earth outward (like a juggler's pocket) and shake the chaos out of it, make Nature show tricks like an ape, and the stars run on errands; but still it is by dint of poetry. And if poets can do such n.o.ble feats, they were unwise to descend to mean and vulgar. For where the rarest and most common things are of a price (as they are all one to poets), it argues disease in judgment not to choose the most curious. Hence some infer that the account they give of things deserves no regard, because they never receive anything as they find it into their compositions, unless it agree both with the measure of their own fancies and the measure of their lines, which can very seldom happen. And therefore, when they give a character of any thing or person, it does commonly bear no more proportion to the subject than the fishes and ships in a map do to the scale. But let such know that poets as well as kings ought rather to consider what is fit for them to give than others to receive; that they are fain to have regard to the exchange of language, and write high or low according as that runs. For in this age, when the smallest poet seldom goes below more the most, it were a shame for a greater and more n.o.ble poet not to outthrow that cut a bar.

There was a tobacco-man that wrapped Spanish tobacco in a paper of verses which Benlowes had written against the Pope, which, by a natural antipathy that his wit has to anything that's Catholic, spoiled the tobacco, for it presently turned mundungus. This author will take an English word, and, like the Frenchman that swallowed water and spit it out wine, with a little heaving and straining would turn it immediately into Latin, as _plunderat ilie domos, mille hocopokiana_, and a thousand such.

There was a young pract.i.tioner in poetry that found there was no good to be done without a mistress; for he that writes of love before he hath tried it doth but travel by the map, and he that makes love without a dame does like a gamester that plays for nothing. He thought it convenient, therefore, first to furnish himself with a name for his mistress beforehand, that he might not be to seek when his merit or good fortune should bestow her upon him; for every poet is his mistress's G.o.dfather, and gives her a new name, like a nun that takes orders. He was very 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 G.o.ddess. 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 n.o.body 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 a.s.s 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 h.o.r.n.y brawn as such a line, for he will look like an a.s.s 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 t.i.tle; 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 t.i.tle 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 Caesar 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 mult.i.tudes 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-Ga.s.sendo-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 beard-wearers, 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 s.m.u.tched 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 gla.s.s, 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 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 G.o.ds, and called them sylvans, fauns, and dryads. He makes the infirmity of his temper pa.s.s for revelations, as Mahomet did by his falling sickness, and inspires himself with the wind of his own hypochondrias. He laments, like Herac.l.i.tus, 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

Is a native of all countries and an alien at home. He flies from 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d, 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 like a sieve, that lets the finer flour pa.s.s and retains only the bran of things, for his whole return of wisdom proves to be but affectation, a perishable commodity, which he will never be able to put off. He believes all men's wits are at a stand that stay at home, and only those advanced that travel, as if change of pasture did make great politicians as well as fat calves. He pities the little knowledge of truth which those have that have not seen the world abroad, forgetting that at the same time he tells us how little credit is to be given to his own relations and those of others that speak and write of their travels. He has worn his own language to rags, and patched it up with sc.r.a.ps and ends of foreign. This serves him for wit; for when he meets with any of his foreign acquaintances, all they smatter pa.s.ses for wit, and they applaud one another accordingly.

He believes this raggedness of his discourse a great demonstration of the improvement of his knowledge, as Inns-of-Court men intimate their proficiency in the law by the tatters of their gowns. All the wit he brought home with him is like foreign coin, of a baser alloy than our own, and so will not pa.s.s here without great loss. All n.o.ble creatures that are famous in any one country degenerate by being transplanted, and those of mean value only improve. If it hold with men, he falls among the number of the latter, and his improvements are little to his credit.

All he can say for himself is, his mind was sick of a consumption, and change of air has cured him; for all his other improvements have only been to eat in ... and talk with those he did not understand, to hold intelligence with all _Gazettes_, and from the sight of statesmen in the street unriddle the intrigues of all their Councils, to make a wondrous progress into knowledge by riding with a messenger, and advance in politics by mounting of a mule, run through all sorts of learning in a waggon, and sound all depths of arts in a felucca, ride post into the secrets of all states, and grow acquainted with their close designs in inns and hostelries; for certainly there is great virtue in highways and hedges to make an able man, and a good prospect cannot but let him see far into things.

A CURIOUS MAN

Values things not by their use or worth, but scarcity. He is very tender and scrupulous of his humour, as fanatics are of their consciences, and both for the most part in trifles. He cares not how unuseful anything be, so it be but unuseful and rare. He collects all the curiosities he can light upon in art or nature, not to inform his own judgment, but to catch the admiration of others, which he believes he has a right to because the rarities are his own. That which other men neglect he believes they oversee, and stores up trifles as rare discoveries, at least of his own wit and sagacity. He admires subtleties above all things, because the more subtle they are the nearer they are to nothing, and values no art but that which is spun so thin that it is of no use at all. He had rather have an iron chain hung about the neck of a flea than an alderman's of gold, and Homer's Iliads in a nutsh.e.l.l than Alexander's cabinet. He had rather have the twelve apostles on a cherry-stone than those on St. Peter's portico, and would willingly sell Christ again for that numerical piece of coin that Judas took for Him. His perpetual dotage upon curiosities at length renders him one of them, and he shows himself as none of the meanest of his rarities. He so much affects singularity that, rather than follow the fashion that is used by the rest of the world, he will wear dissenting clothes with odd fantastic devices to distinguish himself from others, like marks set upon cattle.

He cares not what pains he throws away upon the meanest trifle so it be but strange, while some pity and others laugh at his ill-employed industry. He is one of those that valued Epictetus's lamp above the excellent book he wrote by it. If he be a book-man, he spends all his time and study upon things that are never to be known. The philosopher's stone and universal medicine cannot possibly miss him, though he is sure to do them. He is wonderfully taken with abstruse knowledge, and had rather handle truth with a pair of tongs wrapped up in mysteries and hieroglyphics than touch it with his hands or see it plainly demonstrated to his senses.

A HERALD

Calls himself a king because he has power and authority to hang, draw, and quarter arms. For a.s.suming a jurisdiction over the distributive justice of t.i.tles of honour, as far as words extend, he gives himself as great a lat.i.tude that way as other magistrates use to do where they have authority and would enlarge it as far as they can. 'Tis true he can make no lords nor knights of himself, but as many squires and gentlemen as he pleases, and adopt them into what family they have a mind. His dominions abound with all sorts of cattle, fish, and fowl, and all manner of manufactures, besides whole fields of gold and silver, which he magnificently bestows upon his followers or sells as cheap as lands in Jamaica. The language they use is barbarous, as being but a dialect of pedlar's French or the Egyptian, though of a loftier sound, and in the propriety affecting brevity, as the other does verbosity. His business is like that of all the schools, to make plain things hard with perplexed methods and insignificant terms, and then appear learned in making them plain again. He professes arms not for use, but ornament only, and yet makes the basest things in the world, as dogs' t.u.r.ds and women's spindles, weapons of good and worshipful bearings. He is wiser than the fellow that sold his a.s.s, but kept the shadow for his own use; for he sells only the shadow (that is, the picture) and keeps the a.s.s himself. He makes pedigrees as apothecaries do medicines when they put in one ingredient for another that they have not by them; by this means he often makes incestuous matches, and causes the son to many the mother. His chief province is at funerals, where he commands in chief, marshals the _trist.i.tiae irritamenta_, and, like a gentleman-sower to the worms, serves up the feast with all punctual formality. He will join as many shields together as would make a Roman _testudo_ or Macedonian phalanx, to fortify the n.o.bility of a new-made lord that will pay for the impressing of them and allow him coat and conduct money. He is a kind of a necromancer, and can raise the dead out of their graves to make them marry and beget those they never heard of in their lifetime.

His coat is, like the King of Spain's dominions, all skirts, and hangs as loose about him; and his neck is the waist, like the picture of n.o.body with his breeches fastened to his collar. He will sell the head or a single joint of a beast or fowl as dear as the whole body, like a pig's head in Bartholomew Fair, and after put off the rest to his customers at the same rate. His arms, being utterly out of use in war since guns came up, have been translated to dishes and cups, as the ancients used their precious stones, according to the poet, _Gemmas ad pocula transfert a gladiis, &c._; and since are like to decay every day more and more, for since he gave citizens coats-of-arms, gentlemen have made bold to take their letters of mark by way of reprisal. The hangman has a receipt to mar all his work in a moment, for by nailing the wrong end of a scutcheon upwards upon a gibbet all the honour and gentility extinguishes of itself, like a candle that's held with the flame downwards. Other arms are made for the spilling of blood, but his only purify and cleanse it like scurvy-gra.s.s; for a small dose taken by his prescription will refine that which is as base and gross as bull's blood (which the Athenians used to poison withal) to any degree of purity.

A VIRTUOSO

Is a well-willer to the mathematics; he pursues knowledge rather out of humour than ingenuity, and endeavours rather to seem than to be. He has nothing of nature but an inclination, which he strives to improve with industry; but as no art can make a fountain run higher than its own head, so nothing can raise him above the elevation of his own pole. He seldom converses but with men of his own tendency, and wheresoever he comes treats with all men as such; for as country gentlemen use to talk of their dogs to those that hate hunting because they love it themselves, so will he of his arts and sciences to those that neither know nor care to know anything of them. His industry were admirable if it did not attempt the greatest difficulties with the feeblest means; for he commonly slights anything that is plain and easy, how useful and ingenious soever, and bends all his forces against the hardest and most improbable, though to no purpose if attained to; for neither knowing how to measure his own abilities nor the weight of what he attempts, he spends his little strength in vain and grows only weaker by it; and as men use to blind horses that draw in a mill, his ignorance of himself and his undertakings makes him believe he has advanced when he is no nearer to his end than when he set out first. The bravery of difficulties does so dazzle his eyes that he prosecutes them with as little success as the tailor did his amours to Queen Elizabeth. He differs from a pedant as things do from words, for he uses the same affectation in his operations and experiments as the other does in language. He is a haberdasher of small arts and sciences, and deals in as many several operations as a baby artificer does in engines. He will serve well enough for an index to tell what is handled in the world, but no further. He is wonderfully delighted with rarities, and they continue still so to him though he has shown them a thousand times, for every new admirer that gapes upon them sets him a-gaping too. Next these he loves strange natural histories; and as those that read romances, though they know them to be fictions, are as much affected as if they were true, so is he, and will make hard shift to tempt himself to believe them first to be possible, and then he's sure to believe them to be true, forgetting that belief upon belief is false heraldry. He keeps a catalogue of the names of all famous men in any profession, whom he often takes occasion to mention as his very good friends and old acquaintances. Nothing is more pedantic than to seem too much concerned about wit or knowledge, to talk much of it, and appear too critical in it. All he can possibly arrive to is but like the monkeys dancing on the rope, to make men wonder how 'tis possible for art to put nature so much out of her play.

His learning is like those letters on a coach, where, many being writ together, no one appears plain. When the King happens to be at the university and degrees run like wine in conduits at public triumphs, he is sure to have his share; and though he be as free to choose his learning as his faculty, yet, like St. Austin's soul, _Creando infunditur, infundendo creatur_. Nero was the first emperor of his calling, though it be not much for his credit. He is like an elephant that, though he cannot swim, yet of all creatures most delights to walk along a river's side; and as, in law, things that appear not and things that are not are all one, so he had rather not be than not appear. The top of his ambition is to have his picture graved in bra.s.s and published upon walls, if he has no work of his own to face with it. His want of judgment inclines him naturally to the most extravagant undertakings, like that of making old dogs young, telling how many persons there are in a room by knocking at a door, stopping up of words in bottles, &c. He is like his books, that contain much knowledge, but know nothing themselves. He is but an index of things and words, that can direct where they are to be spoken with, but no farther. He appears a great man among the ignorant, and, like a figure in arithmetic, is so much the more as it stands before ciphers that are nothing of themselves. He calls himself an antisocordist, a name unknown to former ages, but sp.a.w.ned by the pedantry of the present. He delights most in attempting things beyond his reach, and the greater distance he shoots at, the farther he is sure to be off his mark. He shows his parts as drawers do a room at a tavern, to entertain them at the expense of their time and patience. He inverts the moral of that fable of him that caressed his dog for fawning and leaping up upon him and beat his a.s.s for doing the same thing, for it is all one to him whether he be applauded by an a.s.s or a wiser creature, so he be but applauded.

AN INTELLIGENCER

Would give a penny for any statesman's thought at any time. He travels abroad to guess what princes are designing by seeing them at church or dinner, and will undertake to unriddle a government at first sight, and tell what plots she goes with, male or female; and discover, like a mountebank, only by seeing the public face of affairs, what private marks there are in the most secret parts of the body politic. He is so ready at reasons of State, that he has them, like a lesson, by rote; but as charlatans make diseases fit their medicines, and not their medicines diseases, so he makes all public affairs conform to his own established reason of State, and not his reason, though the case alter ever so much, comply with them. He thinks to obtain a great insight into State affairs by observing only the outside pretences and appearances of things, which are seldom or never true, and may be resolved several ways, all equally probable; and therefore his penetrations into these matters are like the penetrations of cold into natural bodies, without any sense of itself or the thing it works upon. For all his discoveries in the end amount only to entries and equipages, addresses, audiences, and visits, with other such politic speculations as the rabble in the streets is wont to entertain itself withal. Nevertheless he is very cautious not to omit his cipher, though he writes nothing but what every one does or may safely know, for otherwise it would appear to be no secret. He endeavours to reduce all his politics into maxims, as being most easily portable for a travelling head, though, as they are for the most part of slight matters, they are but like spirits drawn out of water, insipid and good for nothing. His letters are a kind of bills of exchange, in which he draws news and politics upon all his correspondents, who place it to account, and draw it back again upon him; and though it be false, neither cheats the other, for it pa.s.ses between both for good and sufficient pay. If he drives an inland trade, he is factor to certain remote country virtuosos, who, finding themselves unsatisfied with the brevity of the _Gazette_, desire to have exceedings of news besides their ordinary commons. To furnish those, he frequents clubs and coffee-houses, the markets of news, where he engrosses all he can light upon; and if that do not prove sufficient, he is forced to add a lie or two of his own making, which does him double service; for it does not only supply his occasions for the present, but furnishes him with matter to fill up gaps in the next letter with retracting what he wrote before, and in the meantime has served for as good news as the best; and when the novelty is over it is no matter what becomes of it, for he is better paid for it than if it were true.