You may see what it is to
hang together. Look upon them severally, and you cannot but fumble for
some threads of charity. But oh, they are termagants in conjunction!
like fiddlers who are rogues when they go single, and joined in consort,
gentlemen musicianers. I care not much if I untwist my committee-man,
and so give him the receipt of this grand Catholicon.
Take a state martyr, one that for his good behaviour hath paid the
excise of his ears, so suffered captivity by the land-piracy of
ship-money; next a primitive freeholder, one that hates the king because
he is a gentleman transgressing the Magna Charta of delving Adam. Add to
these a mortified bankrupt that helps out his false weights with some
scruples of conscience, and with his peremptory scales can doom his
prince with a _mene tekel_. These with a new blue-stockinged justice,
lately made of a good basket-hilted yeoman, with a short-handed clerk
tacked to the rear of him to carry the knapsack of his understanding,
together with two or three equivocal sirs whose religion, like their
gentility, is the extract of their acres; being therefore spiritual
because they are earthly; not forgetting the man of the law, whose
corruption gives the Hogan to the sincere Juncto. These are the simples
of this precious compound; a kind of Dutch hotch-potch, the Hogan Mogan
committee-man.
The Committee-man hath a sideman, or rather a setter, hight a
Sequestrator, of whom you may say, as of the great Sultan's horse, where
he treads the grass grows no more.
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