PLAYER
Is a volume of various conceits or epitome of time, who by his representation and appearance makes things long past seem present. He is much like the counters in arithmetic, and may stand one while for a king, another while a beggar, many times as a mute or cipher. Sometimes he represents that which in his life he scarce practises--to be an honest man. To the point, he oft personates a rover, and therein conies nearest to himself. If his action prefigure passion, he raves, rages, and protests much by his painted heavens, and seems in the height of this fit ready to pull Jove out of the garret where perchance he lies leaning on his elbows, or is employed to make squibs and crackers to grace the play. His audience are oftentimes judicious, but his chief admirers are commonly young wanton chambermaids, who are so taken with his posture and gay clothes, they never come to be their own women after. He exasperates men's enormities in public view, and tells them their faults on the stage, not as being sorry for them, but rather wishes still he might find more occasions to work on. He is the general corrupter of spirits yet untainted, inducing them by gradation to much lascivious depravity. He is a perspicuity of vanity in variety, and suggests youth to perpetrate such vices as otherwise they had haply ne'er heard of. He is (for the most part) a notable hypocrite, seeming what he is not, and is indeed what he seems not. And if he lose one of his fellow strolls, in the summer he turns king of the gipsies; if not, some great man's protection is a sufficient warrant for his peregrination, and a means to procure him the town-hall, where he may long exercise his qualities with clown-claps of great admiration, in a tone suitable to the large ears of his illiterate auditory. He is one seldom takes care for old age, because ill diet and disorder, together with a consumption or some worse disease taken up in his full career, have only chalked out his catastrophe but to a colon; and he scarcely survives to his natural period of days.
In 1631 "Whimzies, or, A new Cast of Characters" inscribed to Sir Alexander Radcliffe by one who signed his dedication Clitus Alexandrinus, gave twenty-four Characters, of which this of the maker of a Courant or news sheet is one:--