his necessity.] His hardest labour is his tongue, as if he were loath to use so deceitful an organ; and he is best company with it when he can but prattle.  We laugh at his foolish sports, but his game is our earnest; and his drums, rattles, and hobby-horses, but the emblems and mocking of man’s business.  His father hath writ him as his own little story, wherein he reads those days of his life that he cannot remember, and sighs to see what innocence he hath out-lived.  The elder he grows, he is a stair lower from God; and, like his first father, much worse in his breeches.[5] He is the Christian’s example, and the old man’s relapse; the one imitates his pureness, and the other falls into his simplicity.  Could he put off his body with his little coat, he had got eternity without a burden, and exchanged but one heaven for another.

A YOUNG RAW PREACHER

Is a bird not yet fledged, that hath hopped out of his nest to be chirping on a hedge, and will be straggling abroad at what peril soever.  His backwardness in the university hath set him thus forward; for had he not truanted there, he had not been so hasty a divine.  His small standing, and time, hath made him a proficient only in boldness, out of which, and his table-book, he is furnished for a preacher.  His collections of study are the notes of sermons, which, taken up at St. Mary’s,[6] he utters in the country:  and if he write brachigraphy,[7] his stock is so much the better.  His writing is more than his reading, for he reads only what he gets without book.  Thus accomplished he comes down to his friends, and his first salutation is grace and peace out of the pulpit.  His prayer is conceited, and no man remembers his college more at large,[8] The pace of his sermon is a full career, and he runs wildly over hill and dale, till the clock stop him.  The labour of it is chiefly in his lungs; and the only thing he has made in[9] it himself, is the faces.  He takes on against the pope without mercy, and has a jest still in lavender for Bellarmine:  yet he preaches heresy, if it comes in his way, though with a mind, I must needs say, very orthodox.  His action is all passion, and his speech interjections.  He has an excellent faculty in bemoaning the people, and spits with a very good grace. [His stile is compounded of twenty several men’s, only his body imitates some one extraordinary.] He will not draw his handkercher out of his place, nor blow his nose without discretion.  His commendation is, that he never looks upon book; and indeed he was never used to it.  He preaches but once a year, though twice on Sunday; for the stuff is still the same, only the dressing a little altered:  he has more tricks with a sermon, than a tailor with an old cloak, to turn it, and piece it, and at last quite disguise it with a new preface.  If he have waded farther in his profession, and would show reading of his own, his authors are postils, and his school-divinity