An excellent lecture may be made upon his body; for he is a
kind of dead carcase--creditors, lawyers, and jailors devour it:
creditors peck out his eyes with his own tears; lawyers flay off his own
skin, and lap him in parchment; and jailors are the Promethean vultures
that gnaw his very heart. He is a bond-slave to the law, and, albeit he
were a shopkeeper in London, yet he cannot with safe conscience write
himself a freeman. His religion is of five or six colours: this day he
prays that God would turn the hearts of his creditors, and to-morrow he
curseth the time that ever he saw them. His apparel is daubed commonly
with statute lace, the suit itself of durance, and the hose full of long
pains. He hath many other lasting suits which he himself is never able
to wear out, for they wear out him. The zodiac of his life is like that
of the sun, marry not half so glorious. It begins in Aries and ends in
Pisces. Both head and feet are, all the year long, in troublesome and
laborious motions, and Westminster Hall is his sphere. He lives between
the two tropics Cancer and Capricorn, and by that means is in double
danger of crabbed creditors for his purse, and horns for his head, if
his wife's heels be light. If he be a gentleman, he alters his arms so
soon as he comes in. Few here carry fields or argent, but whatsoever
they bear before, here they give only sables. Whiles he lies by it, he
is travelling over the Alps, and the hearts of his creditors are the
snows that lie unmelted in the middle of summer.
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