Seats himself as spectator and critic on the great theatre of the world, and gives sentence on the plots, language, and action of whatsoever he sees represented, according to his own fancy.  He will pretend to know what is done behind the scene, but so seldom is in the right that he discovers nothing more than his own mistakes.  When his profession was in credit in the world, and money was to be gotten by it, it divided itself into multitudes of sects, that maintained themselves and their opinions by fierce and hot contests with one another; but since the trade decayed and would not turn to account, they all fell of themselves, and now the world is so unconcerned in their controversies, that three Reformado sects joined in one, like Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana, will not serve to maintain one pedant.  He makes his hypotheses himself, as a tailor does a doublet without measure; no matter whether they fit Nature, he can make Nature fit them, and, whether they are too straight or wide, pinch or stuff out the body accordingly.  He judges of the works of Nature just as the rabble do of State affairs; they see things done, and every man according to his capacity guesses at the reasons of them, but knowing nothing of the arcana or secret movements of either, they seldom or never are in the right.  Howsoever, they please themselves and some others with their fancies, and the farther they are off truth, the more confident they are they are near it, as those that are out of their way believe the farther they have gone they are the nearer their journey’s end, when they are farthest of all from it.  He is confident of immaterial substances, and his reasons are very pertinent; that is, substantial as he thinks, and immaterial as others do.  Heretofore his beard was the badge of his profession, and the length of that in all his polemics was ever accounted the length of his weapon; but when the trade fell, that fell too.  In Lucius’s time they were commonly called beard-wearers, for all the strength of their wits lay in their beards, as Samson’s did in his locks; but since the world began to see the vanity of that hare-brained cheat, they left it off to save their credit.

A MELANCHOLY MAN

Is one that keeps the worst company in the world; that is, his own; and though he be always falling out and quarrelling with himself, yet he has not power to endure any other conversation.  His head is haunted, like a house, with evil spirits and apparitions, that terrify and fright him out of himself, till he stands empty and forsaken.  His sleeps and his wakings are so much the same that he knows not how to distinguish them, and many times when he dreams he believes he is broad awake and sees visions.  The fumes and vapours that rise from his spleen and hypochondrias have so smutched and sullied his brain (like a room that smokes) that his understanding is blear-eyed and has no right perception of anything.