AN INSOLENT MAN

Is a fellow newly great and newly proud; one that hath put himself into another face upon his preferment, for his own was not bred to it; one whom fortune hath shot up to some office or authority, and he shoots up his neck to his fortune, and will not bate you an inch of either.  His very countenance and gesture bespeak how much he is, and if you understand him not, he tells you, and concludes every period with his place, which you must and shall know.  He is one that looks on all men as if he were angry, but especially on those of his acquaintance, whom he beats off with a surlier distance, as men apt to mistake him, because they have known him:  and for this cause he knows not you ’till you have told him your name, which he thinks he has heard, but forgot, and with much ado seems to recover.  If you have any thing to use him in, you are his vassal for that time, and must give him the patience of any injury, which he does only to shew what he may do.  He snaps you up bitterly, because he will be offended, and tells you, you are saucy and troublesome, and sometimes takes your money in this language.  His very courtesies are intolerable, they are done with such an arrogance and imputation; and he is the only man you may hate after a good turn, and not be ungrateful; and men reckon it among their calamities to be beholden unto him.  No vice draws with it a more general hostility, and makes men readier to search into his faults, and of them, his beginning; and no tale so unlikely but is willingly heard of him and believed.  And commonly such men are of no merit at all, but make out in pride what they want in worth, and fence themselves with a stately kind of behaviour from that contempt which would pursue them.  They are men whose preferment does us a great deal of wrong, and when they are down, we may laugh at them without breach of good-nature.

ACQUAINTANCE

Is the first draught of a friend, whom we must lay down oft thus, as the foul copy, before we can write him perfect and true:  for from hence, as from a probation, men take a degree in our respect, till at last they wholly possess us:  for acquaintance is the hoard, and friendship the pair chosen out of it; by which at last we begin to impropriate and inclose to ourselves what before lay in common with others.  And commonly where it grows not up to this, it falls as low as may be; and no poorer relation than old acquaintance, of whom we only ask how they do for fashion’s sake, and care not.  The ordinary use of acquaintance is but somewhat a more boldness of society, a sharing of talk, news, drink, mirth together; but sorrow is the right of a friend, as a thing nearer our heart, and to be delivered with it.  Nothing easier than to create acquaintance, the mere being in company once does it; whereas friendship, like children, is engendered by a more inward mixture