weather.  He apprehends God’s blessings only in a good year, or a fat pasture, and never praises him but on good ground.  Sunday he esteems a day to make merry in, and thinks a bag-pipe as essential to it as evening-prayer, where he walks very solemnly after service with his hands coupled behind him, and censures the dancing of his parish. [His compliment with his neighbour is a good thump on the back, and his salutation commonly some blunt curse.] He thinks nothing to be vices, but pride and ill-husbandry, from which he will gravely dissuade the youth, and has some thrifty hob-nail proverbs to clout his discourse.  He is a niggard all the week, except only market-day, where, if his corn sell well, he thinks he may be drunk with a good conscience.  His feet never stink so unbecomingly as when he trots after a lawyer in Westminster-hall, and even cleaves the ground with hard scraping in beseeching his worship to take his money.  He is sensible of no calamity but the burning a stack of corn or the overflowing of a meadow, and thinks Noah’s flood the greatest plague that ever was, not because it drowned the world, but spoiled the grass.  For death he is never troubled, and if he get in but his harvest before, let it come when it will, he cares not.

A PLAYER.

He knows the right use of the world, wherein he comes to play a part and so away.  His life is not idle, for it is all action, and no man need be more wary in his doings, for the eyes of all men are upon him.  His profession has in it a kind of contradiction, for none is more disliked, and yet none more applauded; and he has the misfortune of some scholar, too much wit makes him a fool.  He is like our painting gentlewomen, seldom in his own face, seldomer in his clothes; and he pleases, the better he counterfeits, except only when he is disguised with straw for gold lace.  He does not only personate on the stage, but sometimes in the street, for he is masked still in the habit of a gentleman.  His parts find him oaths and good words, which he keeps for his use and discourse, and makes shew with them of a fashionable companion.  He is tragical on the stage, but rampant in the tiring-house,[42] and swears oaths there which he never conned.  The waiting women spectators are over-ears in love with him, and ladies send for him to act in their chambers.  Your inns-of-court men were undone but for him, he is their chief guest and employment, and the sole business that makes them afternoon’s-men.  The poet only is his tyrant, and he is bound to make his friend’s friend drunk at his charge.  Shrove-Tuesday he fears as much as the banns, and Lent[43] is more damage to him than the butcher.  He was never so much discredited as in one act, and that was of parliament, which gives hostlers privilege before him, for which he abhors it more than a corrupt judge.  But to give him his due, one well-furnished actor has enough in him for five common gentlemen, and, if he have a good body, [for six, and] for resolution he shall challenge any Cato, for it has been his practice to die bravely.