Will call each knave a good-fac’d gentleman,
Give honour unto tinkers for good ale,
Prefer a cobbler ’fore the black prince far,
If he bestow but blacking on their shoes: 
And as it is the spittle-houses’ guise
Over their gate to write their founders’ names,
Or on the outside of their walls at least,
In hope by their example others mov’d
Will be more bountiful and liberal;
So in the forefront of their chronicles,
Or peroratione operis,
They learning’s benefactors reckon up,
Who built this college, who gave that free school,
What king or queen advanced scholars most,
And in their times what writers flourished. 
Rich men and magistrates, whilst yet they live,
They flatter palpably, in hope of gain. 
Smooth-tongued orators, the fourth in place—­
Lawyers our commonwealth entitles them—­
Mere swash-bucklers and ruffianly mates,
That will for twelvepence make a doughty fray,
Set men for straws together by the ears. 
Sky-measuring mathematicians,
Gold-breathing alchemists also we have,
Both which are subtle-witted humourists,
That get their meals by telling miracles,
Which they have seen in travelling the skies. 
Vain boasters, liars, makeshifts, they are all;
Men that, removed from their ink-horn terms,[113]
Bring forth no action worthy of their bread. 
What should I speak of pale physicians,
Who as Fismenus non nasatus was
(Upon a wager that his friends had laid)
Hir’d to live in a privy a whole year,
So are they hir’d for lucre and for gain,
All their whole life to smell on excrements.

WILL SUM.  Very true, for I have heard it for a proverb many a time and oft, Hinc os faetidum; Fah! he stinks like a physician.

WIN.  Innumerable monstrous practices
Hath loitering contemplation brought forth more,
Which were too long particular to recite: 
Suffice they all conduce unto this end,
To banish labour, nourish slothfulness,
Pamper up lust, devise new-fangled sins. 
Nay, I will justify, there is no vice
Which learning and vile knowledge brought not in,
Or in whose praise some learned have not wrote. 
The art of murder Machiavel hath penn’d;[114]
Whoredom hath Ovid to uphold her throne,
And Aretine of late in Italy,
Whose Cortigiana teacheth[115] bawds their trade. 
Gluttony Epicurus doth defend,
And books of the art of cookery confirm,
Of which Platina hath not writ the least. 
Drunkenness of his good behaviour
Hath testimonial from where he was born;
That pleasant work De Arte Bibendi,
A drunken Dutchman spew’d out few years since.[116]
Nor wanteth sloth, although sloth’s plague be want,
His paper pillars for to lean upon.[117]
The praise of nothing pleads his worthiness.[118]
Folly Erasmus sets a flourish on: 
For baldness a bald ass I have forgot
Patch’d up a pamphletary periwig.[119]