incoherent, drossy, rubbishy stuff, promiscuously thrust up together; enough to infuse dulness and barrenness in conceit into him that is so prodigal of his ears as to give the hearing; enough to make a man’s memory ache with suffering such dirty stuff cast into it.  As unwelcome to any true conceit, as sluttish morsels or wallowish potions to a nice stomach, which whiles he empties himself, it sticks in his teeth, nor can he be delivered without sweat, and sighs, and hems, and coughs enough to shake his grandam’s teeth out of her head.  He spits, and scratches, and spawls, and turns like sick men from one elbow to another, and deserves as much pity during his torture as men in fits of tertian fevers, or self-lashing penitentiaries.  In a word, rip him quite asunder, and examine every shred of him, you shall find of him to be just nothing but the subject of nothing; the object of contempt; yet such as he is you must take him, for there is no hope he should ever become better.

A GOOD WIFE

Is a man’s best movable, a scion incorporate with the stock, bringing sweet fruit; one that to her husband is more than a friend, less than trouble; an equal with him in the yoke.  Calamities and troubles she shares alike, nothing pleaseth her that doth not him.  She is relative in all, and he without her but half himself.  She is his absent hands, eyes, ears, and mouth; his present and absent all.  She frames her nature unto his howsoever; the hyacinth follows not the sun more willingly.  Stubbornness and obstinacy are herbs that grow not in her garden.  She leaves tattling to the gossips of the town, and is more seen than heard.  Her household is her charge; her care to that makes her seldom non-resident.  Her pride is but to be cleanly, and her thrift not to be prodigal.  By her discretion she hath children not wantons; a husband without her is a misery to man’s apparel:  none but she hath an aged husband, to whom she is both a staff and a chair.  To conclude, she is both wise and religious, which makes her all this.

A MELANCHOLY MAN

Is a strayer from the drove:  one that Nature made a sociable, because she made him man, and a crazed disposition hath altered.  Unpleasing to all, as all to him; straggling thoughts are his content, they make him dream waking, there’s his pleasure.  His imagination is never idle, it keeps his mind in a continual motion, as the poise the clock:  he winds up his thoughts often, and as often unwinds them; Penelope’s web thrives faster.  He’ll seldom be found without the shade of some grove, in whose bottom a river dwells.  He carries a cloud in his face, never fair weather; his outside is framed to his inside, in that he keeps a decorum, both unseemly.  Speak to him; he hears with his eyes, ears follow his mind, and that’s not at leisure.  He thinks business, but never does any; he is all contemplation,