He is sworn to advise
no further than his skill and cunning will enable him, and the less he
has of either the sooner he despatches his business, and despatch is no
mean virtue in a statesman.
A DUKE OF BUCKS
Is one that has studied the whole body of vice. His parts are
disproportionate to the whole, and, like a monster, he has more of some
and less of others than he should have. He has pulled down all that
fabric that Nature raised in him, and built himself up again after a
model of his own. He has dammed up all those lights that Nature made
into the noblest prospects of the world, and opened other little blind
loopholes backward by turning day into night and night into day. His
appetite to his pleasures is diseased and crazy, like the pica in a
woman that longs to eat that which was never made for food, or a girl in
the green sickness that eats chalk and mortar. Perpetual surfeits of
pleasure have filled his mind with bad and vicious humours (as well as
his body with a nursery of diseases), which makes him affect new and
extravagant ways as being sick and tired with the old. Continual wine,
women, and music put false values upon things which by custom become
habitual, and debauch his understanding so that he retains no right
notion nor sense of things; and as the same dose of the same physic has
no operation on those that are much used to it, so his pleasures require
a larger proportion of excess and variety to render him sensible of
them. He rises, eats, and goes to bed by the Julian account, long after
all others that go by the new style, and keeps the same hours with owls
and the antipodes.
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