He is the State's cormorant, one that
fishes for the public but feeds himself; the misery is he fishes without
the cormorant's property, a rope to strengthen the gullet and to make
him disgorge. A sequestrator! He is the devil's nut-hook, the sign with
him is always in the clutches. There are more monsters retain to him
than to all the limbs in anatomy. It is strange physicians do not apply
him to the soles of the feet in a desperate fever, he draws far beyond
pigeons. I hope some mountebank will slice him and make the experiment.
He is a tooth-drawer once removed; here is the difference, one applauds
the grinder the other the grist. Never till now could I verify the
poet's description, that the ravenous harpy had a human visage. Death
himself cannot quit scores with him; like the demoniac in the gospel, he
lives among tombs, nor is all the holy water shed by widows and orphans
a sufficient exorcism to dispossess him. Thus the cat sucks your breath
and the fiend your blood; nor can the brotherhood of witchfinders, so
sagely instituted with all their terror, wean the familiars.
But once more to single out my embossed committee-man; his fate (for I
know you would fain see an end of him) is either a whipping audit, when
he is wrung in the withers by a committee of examinations, and so the
sponge weeps out the moisture which he had soaked before; or else he
meets his passing peal in the clamorous mutiny of a gut-foundered
garrison, for the hedge-sparrow will be feeding the cuckoo till he
mistake his commons and bites off her head.
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