King’s warrant overtook you within ten miles to stay your journey.  And though a man cannot say he cozens you directly, yet any hostler within ten miles, should he be brought upon his book-oath, will affirm he hath laid a bait for you.  Resolve when you first stretch yourself in the stirrups, you are put as it were upon some usurer that will never bear with you past his day.  He were good to make one that had the colic alight often, and, if example will cause him, make urine; let him only for that say, Grammercy horse.  For his sale of horses, he hath false covers for all manner of diseases, only comes short of one thing (which he despairs not utterly to bring to perfection), to make a horse go on a wooden leg and two crutches.  For powdering his ears with quicksilver, and giving him suppositories of live eels, he is expert.  All the while you are cheapening, he fears you will not bite; but he laughs in his sleeve when he hath cozened you in earnest.  Frenchmen are his best chapmen; he keeps amblers for them on purpose, and knows he can deceive them very easily.  He is so constant to his trade that, while he is awake, he tries any man he talks with, and when he is asleep he dreams very fearfully of the paving of Smithfield, for he knows it would founder his occupation.

A ROARING BOY.

His life is a mere counterfeit patent, which, nevertheless, makes many a country justice tremble.  Don Quixote’s water-mills are still Scotch bagpipes to him.  He sends challenges by word of mouth, for he protests (as he is a gentleman and a brother of the sword) he can neither write nor read.  He hath run through divers parcels of land, and great houses, beside both the counters.  If any private quarrel happen among our great courtiers, he proclaims the business—­that’s the word, the business—­as if the united force of the Romish Catholics were making up for Germany.  He cheats young gulls that are newly come to town; and when the keeper of the ordinary blames him for it he answers him in his own profession, that a woodcock must be plucked ere he be dressed.  He is a supervisor to brothels, and in them is a more unlawful reformer of vice than prentices on Shrove-Tuesday.  He loves his friend as a counsellor at law loves the velvet breeches he was first made barrister in, he will be sure to wear him threadbare ere he forsake him.  He sleeps with a tobacco-pipe in his mouth; and his first prayer in the morning is he may remember whom he fell out with over night.  Soldier he is none, for he cannot distinguish between onion-seed and gunpowder; if he have worn it in his hollow tooth for the toothache and so come to the knowledge of it, that is all.  The tenure by which he holds his means is an estate at will, and that’s borrowing.  Landlords have but four quarter-days, but he three hundred and odd.  He keeps very good company, yet is a man of no reckoning; and when he goes not drunk to bed he is very sick next morning.  He commonly dies like Anacreon, with a grape in his throat; or Hercules, with fire in his marrow.  And I have heard of some that have escaped hanging begged for anatomies, only to deter man from taking tobacco.