I am content to lose some of my crowns,
That I may, walking in my gallery,
See ’em go pinioned along by my door.”
He gives a lurid account of his past life:
“Being young, I studied physic, and began
To practise first upon the Italian;
There I enriched the priests with burials,
And always kept the sextons’ arms in ure
With digging graves and ringing dead men’s knells.”
After a career of treachery as a military engineer, he became a usurer: