His friends
are with him as his physician, sought to only in his sickness and
extremity, and to help him out of that mire he has plunged himself into;
for in the suddenness of his passions he would hear nothing, and now his
ill success has allayed him he hears too late. He is a man still swayed
with the first reports, and no man more in the power of a pick-thank
than he. He is one will fight first, and then expostulate, condemn
first, and then examine. He loses his friend in a fit of quarrelling,
and in a fit of kindness undoes himself; and then curses the occasion
drew this mischief upon him, and cries God mercy for it, and curses
again. His repentance is merely a rage against himself, and he does
something in itself to be repented again. He is a man whom fortune must
go against much to make him happy, for had he been suffered his own way,
he had been undone.
AN AFFECTED MAN
Is an extraordinary man in ordinary things. One that would go a strain
beyond himself, and is taken in it. A man that overdoes all things with
great solemnity of circumstance; and whereas with more negligence he
might pass better, makes himself with a great deal of endeavour
ridiculous. The fancy of some odd quaintnesses have put him clean beside
his nature; he cannot be that he would, and hath lost what he was. He is
one must be point-blank in every trifle, as if his credit and opinion
hung upon it; the very space of his arms in an embrace studied before
and premeditated, and the figure of his countenance of a fortnight's
contriving; he will not curse you without-book and extempore, but in
some choice way, and perhaps as some great man curses.
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