they serve him upon all occasions and are never out of the way when he has use of them, as they have leisure enough to do, for nobody else has any occasion for them but himself.  All his affectations are forced and stolen from others; and though they become some particular persons where they grow naturally, as a flower does on its stalk, he thinks they will do so by him when they are pulled and dead.  He puts words and language out of its ordinary pace and breaks it to his own fancy, which makes it go so uneasy in a shuffle, which it has not been used to.  He delivers himself in a forced way, like one that sings with a feigned voice beyond his natural compass.  He loves the sound of words better than the sense, and will rather venture to incur nonsense than leave out a word that he has a kindness for.  If he be a statesman, the slighter and meaner his employments are the bigger he looks, as an ounce of tin swells and looks bigger than an ounce of gold; and his affectations of gravity are the most desperate of all, as the aphorism says—­Madness of study and consideration are harder to be cured than those of lighter and more fantastic humour.

A MEDICINE-TAKER

Has a sickly mind and believes the infirmity is in his body, like one that draws the wrong tooth and fancies his pain in the wrong place.  The less he understands the reason of physic the stronger faith he has in it, as it commonly fares in all other affairs of the world.  His disease is only in his judgment, which makes him believe a doctor can fetch it out of his stomach or his belly, and fright those worms out of his guts that are bred in his brain.  He believes a doctor is a kind of conjurer that can do strange things, and he is as willing to have him think so; for by that means he does not only get his money, but finds himself in some possibility by complying with that fancy to do him good for it, which he could never expect to do any other way; for, like those that have been cured by drinking their own water, his own imagination is a better medicine than any the doctor knows how to prescribe, even as the weapon-salve cures a wound by being applied to that which made it.  He is no sooner well but any story or lie of a new famous doctor or strange cure puts him into a relapse, and he falls sick of a medicine instead of a disease, and catches physic like him that fell into a looseness at the sight of a purge.  He never knows when he is well or sick, but is always tampering with his health till he has spoiled it, like a foolish musician that breaks his strings with striving to put them in tune; for Nature, which is physic, understands better how to do her own work than those that take it from her at second hand.  Hippocrates says, Ars longa, vita brevis, and it is the truest of all his aphorisms—­

   “For he that’s given much to the long art
   Does not prolong his life, but cut it short.”

THE MISER