THE RUDE MAN
Is an Ostro-Goth or Northern Hun, that, wheresoever he comes, invades and all the world does overrun, without distinction of age, sex, or quality. He has no regard to anything but his own humour, and that, he expects, should pass everywhere without asking leave or being asked wherefore, as if he had a safe-conduct for his rudeness. He rolls up himself like a hedgehog in his prickles, and is as intractable to all that come near him. He is an ill-designed piece, built after the rustic order, and all his parts look too big for their height. He is so ill-contrived that that which should be the top in all regular structures--i.e., confidence--is his foundation. He has neither doctrine nor discipline in him, like a fanatic Church, but is guided by the very same spirit that dipped the herd of swine in the sea. He was not bred, but reared; not brought up to hand, but suffered to run wild and take after his kind, as other people of the pasture do. He takes that freedom in all places, as if he were not at liberty, but had broken loose and expected to be tied up again. He does not eat, but feed, and when he drinks goes to water. The old Romans beat the barbarous part of the world into civility, but if he had lived in those times he had been invincible to all attempts of that nature, and harder to be subdued and governed than a province. He eats his bread, according to the curse, with the sweat of his brow, and takes as much pains at a meal as if he earned it; puffs and blows like a horse that eats provender, and crams his throat like a screwed gun with a bullet bigger than the bore. His tongue runs perpetually over everything that comes in its way, without regard of what, where, or to whom, and nothing but a greater rudeness than his own can stand before it; and he uses it to as slovenly purposes as a dog does that licks his sores and the dirt off his feet. He is the best instance of the truth of Pythagoras's doctrine, for his soul passed through all sorts of brute beasts before it came to him, and still retains something of the nature of every one.