Characters and characteristics in literature; English literature
Is one that has some business about this building or little house of
man, whereof nature is as it were the tiler, and he the plaisterer. It
is ofter out of reparations than an old parsonage, and then he is set on
work to patch it again. He deals most with broken commodities, as a
broken head or a mangled face, and his gains are very ill got, for he
lives by the hurts of the commonwealth. He differs from a physician as a
sore does from a disease, or the sick from those that are not whole, the
one distempers you within, the other blisters you without. He complains
of the decay of valour in these days, and sighs for that slashing age of
sword and buckler; and thinks the law against duels was made merely to
wound his vocation. He had been long since undone if the charity of the
stews had not relieved him, from whom he has his tribute as duly as the
pope; or a wind-fall sometimes from a tavern, if a quart pot hit right.
The rareness of his custom makes him pitiless when it comes, and he
holds a patient longer than our [spiritual] courts a cause. He tells you
what danger you had been in if he had staid but a minute longer, and
though it be but a pricked finger, he makes of it much matter. He is a
reasonable cleanly man, considering the scabs he has to deal with, and
your finest ladies are now and then beholden to him for their best
dressings. He curses old gentlewomen and their charity that makes his
trade their alms; but his envy is never stirred so much as when
gentlemen go over to fight upon Calais sands,[54] whom he wishes drowned
ere they come there, rather than the French shall get his custom.
A CONTEMPLATIVE MAN
Is a scholar in this great university the world; and the same his book
and study. He cloisters not his meditations in the narrow darkness of a
room, but sends them abroad with his eyes, and his brain travels with
his feet. He looks upon man from a high tower, and sees him trulier at
this distance in his infirmities and poorness. He scorns to mix himself
in men's actions, as he would to act upon a stage; but sits aloft on the
scaffold a censuring spectator. [He will not lose his time by being
busy, or make so poor a use of the world as to hug and embrace it.]
Nature admits him as a partaker of her sports, and asks his approbation,
as it were, of her own works and variety. He comes not in company,
because he would not be solitary; but finds discourse enough with
himself, and his own thoughts are his excellent play-fellows. He looks
not upon a thing as a yawning stranger at novelties, but his search is
more mysterious and inward, and he spells heaven out of earth. He knits
his observations together, and makes a ladder of them all to climb to
God. He is free from vice, because he has no occasion to employ it, and
is above those ends that make man wicked. He has learnt all that can
here be taught him, and comes now to heaven to see more.
A SHE PRECISE HYPOCRITE
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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