burn him rather than take cold.  He is always resolved at first thinking, and the ground he goes upon is, hap what may.  Thus he enters not, but throws himself violently upon all things, and for the most part is as violently upon all off again; and as an obstinate "I will" was the preface to his undertaking, so his conclusion is commonly "I would I had not;" for such men seldom do anything that they are not forced to take in pieces again, and are so much farther off from doing it, as they have done already.  His friends are with him as his physician, sought to only in his sickness and extremity, and to help him out of that mire he has plunged himself into; for in the suddenness of his passions he would hear nothing, and now his ill success has allayed him he hears too late.  He is a man still swayed with the first reports, and no man more in the power of a pick-thank than he.  He is one will fight first, and then expostulate, condemn first, and then examine.  He loses his friend in a fit of quarrelling, and in a fit of kindness undoes himself; and then curses the occasion drew this mischief upon him, and cries God mercy for it, and curses again.  His repentance is merely a rage against himself, and he does something in itself to be repented again.  He is a man whom fortune must go against much to make him happy, for had he been suffered his own way, he had been undone.

AN AFFECTED MAN

Is an extraordinary man in ordinary things.  One that would go a strain beyond himself, and is taken in it.  A man that overdoes all things with great solemnity of circumstance; and whereas with more negligence he might pass better, makes himself with a great deal of endeavour ridiculous.  The fancy of some odd quaintnesses have put him clean beside his nature; he cannot be that he would, and hath lost what he was.  He is one must be point-blank in every trifle, as if his credit and opinion hung upon it; the very space of his arms in an embrace studied before and premeditated, and the figure of his countenance of a fortnight’s contriving; he will not curse you without-book and extempore, but in some choice way, and perhaps as some great man curses.  Every action of his cries,—­“Do ye mark me?” and men do mark him how absurd he is:  for affectation is the most betraying humour, and nothing that puzzles a man less to find out than this.  All the actions of his life are like so many things bodged in without any natural cadence or connection at all.  You shall track him all through like a school-boy’s theme, one piece from one author and this from another, and join all in this general, that they are none of his own.  You shall observe his mouth not made for that tone, nor his face for that simper; and it is his luck that his finest things most misbecome him.  If he affect the gentleman as the humour most commonly lies that way, not the least punctilio of a fine man, but he