the same method in all their proceedings?  Howsoever, he is as ably qualified to govern as that sort of opinion that is said to govern all the world, and is perpetually false and foolish; and if his opinions are always so, they have the fairer title to their pretensions.  He is sworn to advise no further than his skill and cunning will enable him, and the less he has of either the sooner he despatches his business, and despatch is no mean virtue in a statesman.

A DUKE OF BUCKS

Is one that has studied the whole body of vice.  His parts are disproportionate to the whole, and, like a monster, he has more of some and less of others than he should have.  He has pulled down all that fabric that Nature raised in him, and built himself up again after a model of his own.  He has dammed up all those lights that Nature made into the noblest prospects of the world, and opened other little blind loopholes backward by turning day into night and night into day.  His appetite to his pleasures is diseased and crazy, like the pica in a woman that longs to eat that which was never made for food, or a girl in the green sickness that eats chalk and mortar.  Perpetual surfeits of pleasure have filled his mind with bad and vicious humours (as well as his body with a nursery of diseases), which makes him affect new and extravagant ways as being sick and tired with the old.  Continual wine, women, and music put false values upon things which by custom become habitual, and debauch his understanding so that he retains no right notion nor sense of things; and as the same dose of the same physic has no operation on those that are much used to it, so his pleasures require a larger proportion of excess and variety to render him sensible of them.  He rises, eats, and goes to bed by the Julian account, long after all others that go by the new style, and keeps the same hours with owls and the antipodes.  He is a great observer of the Tartars’ customs, and never eats till the great Cham, having dined, makes proclamation that all the world may go to dinner.  He does not dwell in his house, but haunts it like an evil spirit that walks all night to disturb the family, and never appears by day.  He lives perpetually benighted, runs out of his life, and loses his time, as men do their ways, in the dark; and as blind men are led by their dogs, so is he governed by some mean servant or other that relates to his pleasures.  He is as inconstant as the moon which he lives under; and although he does nothing but advise with his pillow all day, he is as great a stranger to himself as he is to the rest of the world.  His mind entertains all things very freely that come and go, but, like guests and strangers, they are not welcome if they stay long.  This lays him open to all cheats, quacks, and impostors, who apply to every particular humour while it lasts, and afterwards vanish.  Thus, with St. Paul, though in a different sense, he dies daily, and only lives in the night.  He deforms Nature while he intends to adorn her, like Indians that hang jewels in their lips and noses.  His ears are perpetually drilled with a fiddlestick.  He endures pleasures with less patience than other men do their pains.