His unchastest part is his tongue, for that commits
always what he must act seldomer; and that commits with all what he acts
with few; for he is his own worst reporter, and men believe as bad of
him, and yet do not believe him. Nothing harder to his persuasion than a
chaste man; and makes a scoffing miracle at it, if you tell him of a
maid. And from this mistrust it is that such men fear marriage, or at
least marry such as are of bodies to be trusted, to whom only they sell
that lust which they buy of others, and make their wife a revenue to
their mistress. They are men not easily reformed, because they are so
little ill-persuaded of their illness, and have such pleas from man and
nature. Besides it is a jeering and flouting vice, and apt to put jests
on the reprover. Their disease only converts them, and that only when it
kills them.
A RASH MAN
Is a man too quick for himself; one whose actions put a leg still before
his judgement, and out-run it. Every hot fancy or passion is the signal
that sets him forward, and his reason comes still in the rear. One that
has brain enough, but not patience to digest a business, and stay the
leisure of a second thought. All deliberation is to him a kind of sloth
and freezing of action, and it shall burn him rather than take cold. He
is always resolved at first thinking, and the ground he goes upon is,
_hap what may_. Thus he enters not, but throws himself violently upon
all things, and for the most part is as violently upon all off again;
and as an obstinate _"I will"_ was the preface to his undertaking, so
his conclusion is commonly _"I would I had not;"_ for such men seldom do
anything that they are not forced to take in pieces again, and are so
much farther off from doing it, as they have done already.
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