have to do withal when they have nothing to do, and none are less their friends than who are most their company.  Here they vent themselves over a cup somewhat more lastingly; all their words go for jests, and all their jests for nothing.  They are nimble in the fancy of some ridiculous thing, and reasonable good in the expression.  Nothing stops a jest when it’s coming, neither friends, nor danger, but it must out howsoever, though their blood come out after, and then they emphatically rail, and are emphatically beaten, and commonly are men reasonable familiar to this.  Briefly they are such whose life is but to laugh and be laughed at; and only wits in jest and fools in earnest.

A DRUNKARD

Is one that will be a man to-morrow morning, but is now what you will make him, for he is in the power of the next man, and if a friend the better.  One that hath let go himself from the hold and stay of reason, and lies open to the mercy of all temptations.  No lust but finds him disarmed and fenceless, and with the least assault enters.  If any mischief escape him, it was not his fault, for he was laid as fair for it as he could.  Every man sees him, as Cham saw his father the first of this sin, an uncovered man, and though his garment be on, uncovered; the secretest parts of his soul lying in the nakedest manner visible:  all his passions come out now, all his vanities, and those shamefuller humours which discretion clothes.  His body becomes at last like a miry way, where the spirits are beclogged and cannot pass:  all his members are out of office, and his heels do but trip up one another.  He is a blind man with eyes, and a cripple with legs on.  All the use he has of this vessel himself, is to hold thus much; for his drinking is but a scooping in of so many quarts, which are filled out into his body, and that filled out again into the room, which is commonly as drunk as he.  Tobacco serves to air him after a washing, and is his only breath and breathing while.  He is the greatest enemy to himself, and the next to his friend, and then most in the act of his kindness, for his kindness is but trying a mastery, who shall sink down first:  and men come from him as a battle, wounded and bound up.  Nothing takes a man off more from his credit, and business, and makes him more recklessly careless what becomes of all.  Indeed he dares not enter on a serious thought, or if he do, it is such melancholy that it sends him to be drunk again.

A PRISON

Is the grave of the living,[78] where they are shut up from the world and their friends; and the worms that gnaw upon them their own thoughts and the jailor.  A house of meagre looks and ill smells, for lice, drink, and tobacco are the compound.  Plato’s court was expressed from this fancy; and the persons are much about the same parity that is there.  You may ask, as Menippus in Lucian, which is Nireus, which