His life is
upright, for he is always looking upward, yet dares believe nothing
above _primum mobile_, for 'tis out of the reach of his Jacob's staff.
His charity extends no further than to mountebanks and sow-gelders, to
whom he bequeaths the seasons of the year to kill or torture by. The
verses of his book have a worse pace than ever had Rochester hackney;
for his prose, 'tis dappled with ink-horn terms, and may serve for an
almanac; but for his judging at the uncertainty of weather, any old
shepherd shall make a dunce of him. He would be thought the devil's
intelligencer for stolen goods, if ever he steal out of that quality. As
a fly turns to a maggot, so the corruption of the cunning man is the
generation of an empiric; his works fly forth in small volumes, yet not
all, for many ride post to chandlers and tobacco shops in folio. To be
brief, he falls three degrees short of his promises, yet is he the key
to unlock terms and law days, a dumb mercury to point out highways, and
a bailiff of all marts and fairs in England. The rest of him you shall
know next year, for what he will be then he himself knows not.
A HYPOCRITE
Is a gilded pill, composed of two virtuous ingredients, natural
dishonesty and artificial dissimulation. Simple fruit, plant, or drug he
is none, but a deformed mixture bred betwixt evil nature and false art
by a monstrous generation, and may well be put into the reckoning of
those creatures that God never made. In Church or commonwealth (for in
both these this mongrel weed will shoot) it is hard to say whether he be
physic or a disease, for he is both in divers respects.
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