AN IMITATOR
Is a counterfeit stone, and the larger and fairer he appears the more apt he is to be discovered; whilst small ones, that pretend to no great value, pass unsuspected. He is made like a man in arras-hangings, after some great master's design, though far short of the original. He is like a spectrum or walking spirit, that assumes the shape of some particular person and appears in the likeness of something that he is not because he has no shape of his own to put on. He has a kind of monkey and baboon wit, that takes after some man's way whom he endeavours to imitate, but does it worse than those things that are naturally his own; for he does not learn, but take his pattern out, as a girl does her sampler. His whole life is nothing but a kind of education, and he is always learning to be something that he is not nor ever will be. For Nature is free, and will not be forced out of her way, nor compelled to do anything against her own will and inclination. He is but a retainer to wit and a follower of his master, whose badge he wears everywhere, and therefore his way is called servile imitation. His fancy is like the innocent lady's, who, by looking on the picture of a Moor that hung in her chamber, conceived a child of the same complexion; for all his conceptions are produced by the pictures of other men's imaginations, and by their features betray whose bastards they are. 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.