Is one that has some business about this building or little house of man, whereof nature is as it were the tiler, and he the plaisterer.  It is ofter out of reparations than an old parsonage, and then he is set on work to patch it again.  He deals most with broken commodities, as a broken head or a mangled face, and his gains are very ill got, for he lives by the hurts of the commonwealth.  He differs from a physician as a sore does from a disease, or the sick from those that are not whole, the one distempers you within, the other blisters you without.  He complains of the decay of valour in these days, and sighs for that slashing age of sword and buckler; and thinks the law against duels was made merely to wound his vocation.  He had been long since undone if the charity of the stews had not relieved him, from whom he has his tribute as duly as the pope; or a wind-fall sometimes from a tavern, if a quart pot hit right.  The rareness of his custom makes him pitiless when it comes, and he holds a patient longer than our [spiritual] courts a cause.  He tells you what danger you had been in if he had staid but a minute longer, and though it be but a pricked finger, he makes of it much matter.  He is a reasonable cleanly man, considering the scabs he has to deal with, and your finest ladies are now and then beholden to him for their best dressings.  He curses old gentlewomen and their charity that makes his trade their alms; but his envy is never stirred so much as when gentlemen go over to fight upon Calais sands,[54] whom he wishes drowned ere they come there, rather than the French shall get his custom.

A CONTEMPLATIVE MAN

Is a scholar in this great university the world; and the same his book and study.  He cloisters not his meditations in the narrow darkness of a room, but sends them abroad with his eyes, and his brain travels with his feet.  He looks upon man from a high tower, and sees him trulier at this distance in his infirmities and poorness.  He scorns to mix himself in men’s actions, as he would to act upon a stage; but sits aloft on the scaffold a censuring spectator. [He will not lose his time by being busy, or make so poor a use of the world as to hug and embrace it.] Nature admits him as a partaker of her sports, and asks his approbation, as it were, of her own works and variety.  He comes not in company, because he would not be solitary; but finds discourse enough with himself, and his own thoughts are his excellent play-fellows.  He looks not upon a thing as a yawning stranger at novelties, but his search is more mysterious and inward, and he spells heaven out of earth.  He knits his observations together, and makes a ladder of them all to climb to God.  He is free from vice, because he has no occasion to employ it, and is above those ends that make man wicked.  He has learnt all that can here be taught him, and comes now to heaven to see more.

A SHE PRECISE HYPOCRITE