In the vacation he goes to grass, and gets up his flesh again,
which he baits as you heard. If he were to be hanged unless he could be
saved by his book, he cannot for his heart call for a psalm of mercy. He
is a law-trap baited with parchment and wax. The fearful mice he catches
are debtors, with whom scratching attorneys, like cats, play a good
while, and then mouse them. The bally is an insatiable creditor, but
man worse.
A SERGEANT
Was once taken, when he bare office in his parish, for an honest man.
The spawn of a decayed shopkeeper begets this fry; out of that dunghill
is this serpent's egg hatched. It is a devil made sometime out of one of
the twelve companies, and does but study the part and rehearse it on
earth, to be perfect when he comes to act it in hell; that is his stage.
The hangman and he are twins; only the hangman is the elder brother, and
he dying without issue, as commonly he does, for none but a ropemaker's
widow will marry him, this then inherits. His habit is a long gown, made
at first to cover his knavery, but that growing too monstrous, he now
goes in buff; his conscience and that being both cut out of one hide,
and are of one toughness. The Counter-gate is his kennel, the whole city
his Paris gardens; the misery of a poor man, but especially a bad liver,
is the offals on which he feeds. The devil calls him his white son; he
is so like him that he is the worse for it, and he takes after his
father, for the one torments bodies as fast as the other tortures souls.
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