He is an excellent founder, and will melt down a leaden fool and cast
him into what form he pleases. He is like a pike in a pond, that lives
by rapine, and will sometimes venture on one of his own kind, and devour
a knave as big as himself. He will swallow a fool a great deal bigger
than himself, and, if he can but get his head within his jaws, will
carry the rest of him hanging out at his mouth, until by degrees he has
digested him all. He has a hundred tricks to slip his neck out of the
pillory without leaving his ears behind. As for the gallows, he never
ventures to show his tricks upon the high-rope for fear of breaking his
neck. He seldom commits any villainy but in a legal way, and makes the
law bear him out in that for which it hangs others. He always robs under
the wizard of law, and picks pockets with tricks in equity. By his means
the law makes more knaves than it hangs, and, like the Inns-of-Court,
protects offenders against itself. He gets within the law and disarms
it. His hardest labour is to wriggle himself into trust, which if he can
but compass his business is done, for fraud and treachery follow as
easily as a thread does a needle. He grows rich by the ruin of his
neighbours, like grass in the streets in a great sickness. He shelters
himself under the covert of the law, like a thief in a hemp-plot, and
makes that secure him which was intended for his destruction.
APPENDIX.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
_Wrote "The Character of the Happy Warrior" in 1806.
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