Characters and characteristics in literature; English literature
Is a man's best movable, a scion incorporate with the stock, bringing
sweet fruit; one that to her husband is more than a friend, less than
trouble; an equal with him in the yoke. Calamities and troubles she
shares alike, nothing pleaseth her that doth not him. She is relative in
all, and he without her but half himself. She is his absent hands, eyes,
ears, and mouth; his present and absent all. She frames her nature unto
his howsoever; the hyacinth follows not the sun more willingly.
Stubbornness and obstinacy are herbs that grow not in her garden. She
leaves tattling to the gossips of the town, and is more seen than heard.
Her household is her charge; her care to that makes her seldom
non-resident. Her pride is but to be cleanly, and her thrift not to be
prodigal. By her discretion she hath children not wantons; a husband
without her is a misery to man's apparel: none but she hath an aged
husband, to whom she is both a staff and a chair. To conclude, she is
both wise and religious, which makes her all this.
A MELANCHOLY MAN
Is a strayer from the drove: one that Nature made a sociable, because
she made him man, and a crazed disposition hath altered. Unpleasing to
all, as all to him; straggling thoughts are his content, they make him
dream waking, there's his pleasure. His imagination is never idle, it
keeps his mind in a continual motion, as the poise the clock: he winds
up his thoughts often, and as often unwinds them; Penelope's web thrives
faster. He'll seldom be found without the shade of some grove, in whose
bottom a river dwells. He carries a cloud in his face, never fair
weather; his outside is framed to his inside, in that he keeps a
decorum, both unseemly. Speak to him; he hears with his eyes, ears
follow his mind, and that's not at leisure. He thinks business, but
never does any; he is all contemplation, no action. He hews and fashions
his thoughts, as if he meant them to some purpose, but they prove
unprofitable, as a piece of wrought timber to no use. His spirits and
the sun are enemies: the sun bright and warm, his humour black and cold;
variety of foolish apparitions people his head, they suffer him not to
breathe according to the necessities of nature, which makes him sup up a
draught of as much air at once as would serve at thrice. He denies
nature her due in sleep, and nothing pleaseth him long, but that which
pleaseth his own fantasies; they are the consuming evils, and evil
consumptions that consume him alive. Lastly, he is a man only in show;
but comes short of the better part, a whole reasonable soul, which is
man's chief pre-eminence and sole mark from creatures sensible.
A SAILOR
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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