Goes to law as men do to bad houses, to spend his money and satisfy his concupiscence of wrangling. He is a constant customer to the old reverend gentlewoman Law, and believes her to be very honest, though she picks his pockets and puts a thousand tricks and gulleries upon him. He has a strange kindness for an action of the case, but a most passionate loyalty for the King's writ. A well-drawn bill and answer will draw him all the world over, and a breviate as far as the Line. He enters the lists at Westminster like an old tiller, runs his course in law, and breaks an oath or two instead of a lance; and if he can but unhorse the defendant and get the sentence of the judges on his side, he marches off in triumph. He prefers a cry of lawyers at the Bar before any pack of the best-mouthed dogs in all the North. He has commonly once a term a trial of skill with some other professor of the noble science of contention at the several weapons of bill and answer, forgery, perjury, subornation, champarty, affidavit, common barretry, maintenance, &c., and though he come off with the worst, he does not greatlv care so he can but have another bout for it. He fights with bags of money as they did heretofore with sand-bags, and he that has the heaviest has the advantage and knocks down the other, right or wrong and he suffers the penalties of the law for having no more money to show in the case. He is a client by his order and votary of the long robe, and though he were sure the devil invented it to hide his cloven feet, he has the greater reverence for it; for, as evil manners produce good laws, the worse the inventor was the better the thing may be. He keeps as many Knights of the Post to swear for him, as the King does poor knights at Windsor to pray for him. When he is defendant and like to be worsted in a suit, he puts in a cross bill and becomes plaintiff; for the plainant is eldest hand, and has not only that advantage, but is understood to be the better friend to the Court, and is considered for it accordingly.
A HUMOURIST
Is a peculiar fantastic that has a wonderful natural affection to some particular kind of folly, to which he applies himself and in time becomes eminent. 'Tis commonly some outlying whimsy of Bedlam, that, being tame and unhurtful, is suffered to go at liberty. The more serious he is the more ridiculous he becomes, and at the same time pleases himself in earnest and others in jest. He knows no mean, for that is inconsistent with all humour, which is never found but in some extreme or other. Whatsoever he takes to he is very full of, and believes every man else to be so too, as if his own taste were the same in every man's palate. If he be a virtuoso, he applies himself with so much earnestness to what he undertakes that he puts his reason out of joint and strains his judgment; and there is hardly anything in the world so slight or serious that some one or other has not squandered away his brains and time and fortune upon to no other purpose but to be ridiculous. He is exempted from a dark room and a doctor, because there is no danger in his frenzy; otherwise he has as good a title to fresh straw as another. Humour is but a crookedness of the mind, a disproportioned swelling of the brain, that draws the nourishment from the other parts to stuff an ugly and deformed crup-shoulder. If it have the luck to meet with many of its own temper, instead of being ridiculous it becomes a church, and from jest grows to earnest.
A LEADER OF A FACTION
Sets the psalm, and all his party sing after him. He is like a figure in arithmetic; the more ciphers he stands before the more his value amounts to. He is a great haranguer, talks himself into authority, and, like a parrot, climbs with his beak. He appears brave in the head of his party, but braver in his own; for vainglory leads him, as he does them, and both, many times out of the King's highway, over hedges and ditches, to find out by-ways and shorter cuts, which generally prove the farthest about, but never the nearest home again. He is so passionate a lover of the Liberty of the People that his fondness turns to jealousy. He interprets every trifle in the worst sense, to the prejudice of her honesty, and is so full of caprices and scruples that, if he had his will, he would have her shut up and never suffered to go abroad again, if not made away, for her incontinence. All his politics are speculative and for the most part impracticable, full of curious niceties, that tend only to prevent future imaginary inconveniences with greater real and present. He is very superstitious of having the formalities and punctilios of law held sacred, that, while they are performing, those that would destroy the very being of it may have time to do their business or escape. He bends all his forces against those that are above him, and, like a free-born English mastiff, plays always at the head. He gathers his party as fanatics do a church, and admits all his admirers how weak and slight soever; for he believes it is argument of wisdom enough in them to admire, or, as he has it, to understand him. When he has led his faction into any inconvenience they all run into his mouth, as young snakes do into the old ones, and he defends them with his oratory as well as he is able; for all his confidence depends upon his tongue more than his brain or heart, and if that fail the others surrender immediately; for though David says it is a two-edged sword, a wooden dagger is a better weapon to fight with. His judgment is like a nice balance that will turn with the twentieth part of a grain, but a little using renders it false, and it is not so good for use as one that will not stir without a greater weight.
A DEBAUCHED MAN
Saves the devil a labour and leads himself into temptation, being loth to lose his good favour in giving him any trouble where he can do the business himself without his assistance, which he very prudently reserves for matters of greater concernment. He governs himself in an arbitrary way, and is absolute, without being confined to anything but his own will and pleasure, which he makes his law. His life is all recreation, and his diversions nothing but turning from one vice, that he is weary of, to entertain himself with another that is fresh. He lives above the state of his body as well as his fortune, and runs out of his health and money as if he had made a match and betted on the race, or bid the devil take the hindmost. He is an amphibious animal, that lives in two elements, wet and dry, and never comes out of the first but, like a sea-calf, to sleep on the shore. His language is very suitable to his conversation, and he talks as loosely as he lives. Ribaldry and profanation are his doctrine and use, and what he professes publicly he practises very carefully in his life and conversation; not like those clergymen that, to save the souls of other men, condemn themselves out of their own mouths. His whole life is nothing but a perpetual lordship of misrule and a constant ramble day and night as long as it lasts, which is not according to the course of nature, but its own course; for he cuts off the latter end of it, like a pruned vine, that it may bear the more wine although it be the shorter. As for that which is left, he is as lavish of it as he is of everything else; for he sleeps all day and sits up all night, that he may not see how it passes, until, like one that travels in a litter and sleeps, he is at his journey's end before he is aware; for he is spirited away by his vices and clapped under hatches, where he never knows whither he is going until he is at the end of his voyage.
THE SEDITIOUS MAN
Is a civil mutineer, and as all mutinies for the most part are for pay, if it were not for that he would never trouble himself with it. His business is to kindle and blow up discontents against the Government, that, when they are inflamed, he may have the fairer opportunity to rob and plunder, while those that are concerned are employed in quenching it. He endeavours to raise tumults and, if he can, civil war--a remedy which no man that means well to his country can endure to think on though the disease were never so desperate. He is a State mountebank, whose business is to persuade the people that they are not well in health, that he may get their money to make them worse. If he be a preacher, he has the advantage of all others of his tribe, for he has a way to vent sedition by wholesale; and as the foulest purposes have most need of the fairest pretences, so when sedition is masked under the veil of piety, religion, conscience, and holy duty, it propagates wonderfully among the rabble, and he vents more in an hour from the pulpit than others by news and politics can do in a week. Next him, writers and libellers are most pernicious, for though the contagion they disperse spreads slower and with less force than preaching, yet it lasts longer, and in time extends to more, and with less danger to the author, who is not easily discovered if he use any care to conceal himself. And therefore, as we see stinging-flies vex and provoke cattle most immediately before storms, so multitudes of those kinds of vermin do always appear to stir up the people before the beginning of all troublesome times, and nobody knows who they are or from whence they came, but only that they were printed the present year that they may not lose the advantage of being known to be new. Some do it only out of humour and envy, or desire to see those that are above them pulled down and others raised in their places, as if they held it a kind of freedom to change their governors, though they continue in the same condition themselves still, only they are a little better pleased with it in observing the dangers greatness is exposed to. He delights in nothing so much as civil commotions, and, like a porpoise, always plays before a storm. Paper and tinder are both made of the same material, rags, but he converts them both into the same again and makes his paper tinder.