His
other studies are his sports and those vices that are fit for great men.
Every vanity of his has his officer, and is a serious employment for his
servants. He talks loud, and uncleanly, and scurvily as a part of state,
and they hear him with reverence. All good qualities are below him, and
especially learning, except some parcels of the chronicle and the
writing of his name, which he learns to write not to be read. He is
merely of his servants' faction, and their instrument for their friends
and enemies, and is always least thanked for his own courtesies. They
that fool him most do most with him, and he little thinks how many laugh
at him bare-head. No man is kept in ignorance more of himself and men,
for he hears naught but flattery; and what is fit to be spoken, truth,
with so much preface that it loses itself. Thus he lives till his tomb
be made ready, and is then a grave statue to posterity.
A POOR MAN
Is the most impotent man, though neither blind nor lame, as wanting the
more necessary limbs of life, without which limbs are a burden. A man
unfenced and unsheltered from the gusts of the world, which blow all in
upon him, like an unroofed house; and the bitterest thing he suffers is
his neighbours. All men put on to him a kind of churlisher fashion, and
even more plausible natures are churlish to him, as who are nothing
advantaged by his opinion. Men fall out with him before-hand to prevent
friendship, and his friends too to prevent engagements, or if they own
him 'tis in private and a by-room, and on condition not to know them
before company.
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