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 man too quick for himself; one whose actions put a leg still before
his judgement, and out-run it. Every hot fancy or passion is the signal
that sets him forward, and his reason comes still in the rear. One that
has brain enough, but not patience to digest a business, and stay the
leisure of a second thought. All deliberation is to him a kind of sloth
and freezing of action, and it shall burn him rather than take cold. He is
always resolved at first thinking, and the ground he goes upon is, _hap
what may_. Thus he enters not, but throws himself violently upon all
things, and for the most part is as violently upon all off again; and as
an obstinate "_I will_" was the preface to his undertaking, so his
conclusion is commonly "_I would I had not_;" for such men seldom do any
thing that they are not forced to take in pieces again, and are so much
farther off from doing it, as they have done already. His friends are with
him as his physician, sought to only in his sickness and extremity, and to
help him out of that mire he has plunged himself into; for in the
suddenness of his passions he would hear nothing, and now his ill success
has allayed him he hears too late. He is a man still swayed with the first
reports, and no man more in the power of a pick-thank than he. He is one
will fight first, and then expostulate, condemn first, and then examine.
He loses his friend in a fit of quarrelling, and in a fit of kindness
undoes himself; and then curses the occasion drew this mischief upon him,
and cries, God mercy! for it, and curses again. His repentance is meerly a
rage against himself, and he does something in itself to be repented
again. He is a man whom fortune must go against much to make him happy,
for had he been suffered his own way, he had been undone.
LXXI.
AN AFFECTED MAN
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