A HERALD

Is the spawn or indeed but the resultancy of nobility, and to the making of him went not a generation but a genealogy.  His trade is honour, and he sells it and gives arms himself, though he be no gentleman.  His bribes are like those of a corrupt judge, for they are the prices of blood.  He seems very rich in discourse, for he tells you of whole fields of gold and silver, or, and argent, worth much in French but in English nothing.  He is a great diver in the streams or issues of gentry, and hot a by-channel or bastard escapes him; yea he does with them like some shameless quean, fathers more children on them than ever they begot.  His traffick is a kind of pedlary-ware, scutchions, and pennons, and little daggers and lions, such as children esteem and gentlemen; but his pennyworths are rampant, for you may buy three whole brawns cheaper than three boar’s heads of him painted.  He was sometimes the terrible coat of Mars, but is now for more merciful battles in the tilt-yard, where whosoever is victorious, the spoils are his.  He is an art in England but in Wales nature, where they are born with heraldry in their mouths, and each name is a pedigree.

THE COMMON SINGING-MEN IN CATHEDRAL CHURCHES

Are a bad society, and yet a company of good fellows, that roar deep in the quire, deeper in the tavern.  They are the eight parts of speech which go to the syntaxis of service, and are distinguished by their noises much like bells, for they make not a concert but a peal.  Their pastime or recreation is prayers, their exercise drinking, yet herein so religiously addicted that they serve God oftest when they are drunk.  Their humanity is a leg to the residencer, their learning a chapter, for they learn it commonly before they read it; yet the old Hebrew names are little beholden to them, for they miscall them worse than one another.  Though they never expound the scripture, they handle it much, and pollute the gospel with two things, their conversation and their thumbs.  Upon worky-days, they behave themselves at prayers as at their pots, for they swallow them down in an instant.  Their gowns are laced commonly with streamings of ale, superfluities of a cup or throat above measure.  Their skill in melody makes them the better companions abroad, and their anthems abler to sing catches.  Long lived for the most part they are not, especially the bass, they overflow their bank so oft to drown the organs.  Briefly, if they escape arresting, they die constantly in God’s service; and to take their death with more patience, they have wine and cakes at their funeral, and now they keep[73] the church a great deal better and help to fill it with their bones as before with their noise.

A SHOPKEEPER.