Sunday he esteems a day to make
merry in, and thinks a bag-pipe as essential to it as evening-prayer,
where he walks very solemnly after service with his hands coupled behind
him, and censures the dancing of his parish. [His compliment with his
neighbour is a good thump on the back, and his salutation commonly some
blunt curse.] He thinks nothing to be vices, but pride and
ill-husbandry, from which he will gravely dissuade the youth, and has
some thrifty hob-nail proverbs to clout his discourse. He is a niggard
all the week, except only market-day, where, if his corn sell well, he
thinks he may be drunk with a good conscience. His feet never stink so
unbecomingly as when he trots after a lawyer in Westminster-hall, and
even cleaves the ground with hard scraping in beseeching his worship to
take his money. He is sensible of no calamity but the burning a stack of
corn or the overflowing of a meadow, and thinks Noah's flood the
greatest plague that ever was, not because it drowned the world, but
spoiled the grass. For death he is never troubled, and if he get in but
his harvest before, let it come when it will, he cares not.
A PLAYER.
He knows the right use of the world, wherein he comes to play a part and
so away. His life is not idle, for it is all action, and no man need be
more wary in his doings, for the eyes of all men are upon him. His
profession has in it a kind of contradiction, for none is more disliked,
and yet none more applauded; and he has the misfortune of some scholar,
too much wit makes him a fool.
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