Microcosmography: or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and CharactersEarle, John
General
Microcosmography: or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters
Earle, John
Character sketches
Is a fellow newly great and newly proud; one that hath put himself into
another face upon his preferment, for his own was not bred to it. One whom
fortune hath shot up to some office or authority, and he shoots up his
neck to his fortune, and will not bate you an inch of either. His very
countenance and gesture bespeak how much he is, and if you understand him
not, he tells you, and concludes every period with his place, which you
must and shall know. He is one that looks on all men as if he were angry,
but especially on those of his acquaintance, whom he beats off with a
surlier distance, as men apt to mistake him, because they have known him;
and for this cause he knows not you 'till you have told him your name,
which he thinks he has heard, but forgot, and with much ado seems to
recover. If you have any thing to use him in, you are his vassal for that
time, and must give him the patience of any injury, which he does only to
shew what he may do. He snaps you up bitterly, because he will be
offended, and tells you, you are sawcy and troublesome, and sometimes
takes your money in this language. His very courtesies are intolerable,
they are done with such an arrogance and imputation; and he is the only
man you may hate after a good turn, and not be ungrateful; and men reckon
it among their calamities to be beholden unto him. No vice draws with it a
more general hostility, and makes men readier to search into his faults,
and of them, his beginning; and no tale so unlikely but is willingly heard
of him and believed. And commonly such men are of no merit at all, but
make out in pride what they want in worth, and fence themselves with a
stately kind of behaviour from that contempt which would pursue them. They
are men whose preferment does us a great deal of wrong, and when they are
down, we may laugh at them without breach of good-nature.
LXI.
ACQUAINTANCE
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