He gets into the Prince’s favour by wounding it.  He is a true person of honour, for he does but act it at the best; a lord made only to justify all the lords of May-poles, morrice-dances, and misrule; a thing that does not live, but lie in state before he’s dead, such as the heralds dight at funerals.  His Prince gives him honour out of his own stock, and estate out of his revenue, and lessens himself in both:—­

   “He is like fern, that vile unuseful weed,
   That springs equivocally, without seed.”

He was not made for honour, nor it for him, which makes it sit so unfavouredly upon him.  The fore-part of himself and the hinder-part of his coach publish his distinction; as French lords, that have haute justice—­that is, may hang and draw—­distinguish their qualities by the pillars of their gallows.  He got his honour easily, by chance, without the hard, laborious way of merit, which makes him so prodigally lavish of it.  He brings down the price of honour, as the value of anything falls in mean hands.  He looks upon all men in the state of knighthood and plain gentility as most deplorable, and wonders how he could endure himself when he was but of that rank.  The greatest part of his honour consists in his well-sounding title, which he therefore makes choice of, though he has none to the place, but only a patent to go by the name of it.  This appears at the end of his coach in the shape of a coronet, which his footmen set their bums against, to the great disparagement of the wooden representative.  The people take him for a general grievance, a kind of public pressure or innovation, and would willingly give a subsidy to be redressed of him.  He is a strict observer of men’s addresses to him, and takes a mathematical account whether they stoop and bow in just proportion to the weight of his greatness and allow full measure to their legs and cringes accordingly.  He never uses courtship but in his own defence, that others may use the same to him, and, like a true Christian, does as he would be done unto.  He is intimate with no man but his pimp and his surgeon, with whom he keeps no state, but communicates all the states of his body.  He is raised, like the market or a tax, to the grievance and curse of the people.  He that knew the inventory of him would wonder what slight ingredients go to the making up of a great person; howsoever, he is turned up trump, and so commands better cards than himself while the game lasts.  He has much of honour according to the original sense of it, which among the ancients, Gellius says, signified injury.  His prosperity was greater than his brain could bear, and he is drunk with it; and if he should take a nap as long as Epimenides or the Seven Sleepers he would never be sober again.  He took his degree and went forth lord by mandamus, without performing exercises of merit.  His honour’s but an immunity from worth, and his nobility a dispensation for doing things ignoble.  He expects that men’s