He is
tricked out in all the accoutrements of learning, and at the first
encounter none passes better. He is oftener in his study than at his
book, and you cannot pleasure him better than to deprehend him: yet he
hears you not till the third knock, and then comes out very angry as
interrupted. You find him in his _slippers_[71] and a pen in his ear, in
which formality he was asleep. His table is spread wide with some
classick folio, which is as constant to it as the carpet, and hath laid
open in the same page this half year. His candle is always a longer
sitter up than himself, and the _boast_[72] of his window at midnight.
He walks much alone in the posture of meditation, and has a book still
before his face in the fields. His pocket is seldom without a Greek
testament or Hebrew Bible, which he opens only in the church, and that
when some stander-by looks over. He has sentences for company, some
scatterings of Seneca and Tacitus, which are good upon all occasions. If
he reads any thing in the morning, it comes up all at dinner; and as
long as that lasts, the discourse is his. He is a great plagiary of
tavern wit, and comes to sermons only that he may talk of Austin. His
parcels are the mere scrapings from company, yet he complains at parting
what time he has lost. He is wondrously capricious to seem a judgment,
and listens with a sour attention to what he understands not. He talks
much of Scaliger, and Casaubon, and the Jesuits, and prefers some
unheard of Dutch name before them all.
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