Methinks the Turk should licence diurnals because he prohibits learning and books.  A library of diurnals is a wardrobe of frippery; ’tis a just idea of a Limbo of the infants.  I saw one once that could write with his toes, by the same token I could have wished he had worn his copies for socks; ’tis he without doubt from whom the diurnals derive their pedigree, and they have a birthright accordingly, being shuffled out at the bed’s feet of history.  To what infinite numbers an historian would multiply should he crumble into elves of this profession?  To supply this smallness they are fain to join forces, so they are not singly but as the custom is in a croaking committee.  They tug at the pen like slaves at the oar, a whole bank together; they write in the posture that the Swedes gave fire in, over one another’s heads.  It is said there is more of them go to a suit of clothes than to a Britannicus; in this polygamy the clothes breed and cannot determine whose issue is lawfully begotten.

And here I think it were not amiss to take a particular how he is accoutred, and so do by him as he in his Siquis for the wall-eyed mare, or the crop flea-bitten, give you the marks of the beast.  I begin with his head, which is ever in clouts, as if the nightcap should make affidavit that the brain was pregnant.  To what purpose doth the Pia Mater lie in so dully in her white formalities; sure she hath had hard labour, for the brows have squeezed for it, as you may perceive by his buttered bon-grace that film of a demicastor; ’tis so thin and unctuous that the sunbeams mistake it for a vapour, and are like to cap him; so it is right heliotrope, it creaks in the shine and flaps in the shade; whatever it be I wish it were able to call in his ears.  There’s no proportion between that head and appurtenances; those of all lungs are no more fit for that small noddle of the circumcision than brass bosses for a Geneva Bible.  In what a puzzling neutrality is the poor soul that moves betwixt two such ponderous biases?  His collar is edged with a piece of peeping linen, by which he means a band; ’tis the forlorn of his shirt crawling out of his neck; indeed it were time that his shirt were jogging, for it has served an apprenticeship, and (as apprentices use) it hath learned its trade too, to which effect ’tis marching to the papermill, and the next week sets up for itself in the shape of a pamphlet.  His gloves are the shavings of his hands, for he casts his skin like a cancelled parchment.  The itch represents the broken seals.  His boots are the legacies of two black jacks, and till he pawned the silver that the jacks were tipped with it was a pretty mode of boot-hose-tops.  For the rest of his habit he is a perfect seaman, a kind of tarpaulin, he being hanged about with his coarse composition, those pole-davie papers.