His Muse is not inspired, but infected with
another man's fancy; and he catches his wit, like the itch, of somebody
else that had it before, and when he writes he does but scratch himself.
His head is, like his hat, fashioned upon a block and wrought in a shape
of another man's invention. He melts down his wit and casts it in a
mould; and as metals melted and cast are not so firm and solid as those
that are wrought with the hammer, so those compositions that are founded
and run in other men's moulds are always more brittle and loose than
those that are forged in a man's own brain. He binds himself apprentice
to a trade which he has no stock to set up with, if he should serve out
his time and live to be made free. He runs a-whoring after another man's
inventions, for he has none of his own to tempt him to an incontinent
thought, and begets a kind of mongrel breed that never comes to good.
A SOT
Has found out a way to renew not only his youth, but his childhood, by
being stewed, like old Aeson, in liquor; much better than the virtuoso's
way of making old dogs young again, for he is a child again at second
hand, never the worse for the wearing, but as purely fresh, simple, and
weak as he was at first. He has stupefied his senses by living in a
moist climate, according to the poet, _Boeotum in crasso jurares aere
natum_. He measures his time by glasses of wine, as the ancients did by
water-glasses; and as Hermes Trismegistus is said to have kept the first
account of hours by the pissing of a beast dedicated to Serapis, he
revives that custom in his own practice, and observes it punctually in
passing his time.
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