A PRISONER

Is one that hath been a monied man, and is still a very close fellow; whosoever is of his acquaintance, let them make much of him, for they shall find him as fast a friend as any in England:  he is a sure man, and you know where to find him.  The corruption of a bankrupt is commonly the generation of this creature.  He dwells on the back side of the world, or in the suburbs of society, and lives in a tenement which he is sure none will go about to take over his head.  To a man that walks abroad, he is one of the antipodes, that goes on the top of the world, and this under it.  At his first coming in, he is a piece of new coin, all sharking old prisoners lie sucking at his purse.  An old man and he are much alike, neither of them both go far.  They are still angry and peevish, and they sleep little.  He was born at the fall of Babel, the confusion of languages is only in his mouth.  All the vacations he speaks as good English as any man in England, but in term times he breaks out of that hopping one-legged pace into a racking trot of issues, bills, replications, rejoinders, demures, querelles, subpoenas, &c., able to fright a simple country fellow, and make him believe he conjures.  Whatsoever his complexion was before, it turns in this place to choler or deep melancholy, so that he needs every hour to take physic to loose his body; for that, like his estate, is very foul and corrupt, and extremely hard bound.  The taking of an execution off his stomach give him five or six stools, and leaves his body very soluble.  The withdrawing of an action is a vomit.  He is no sound man, and yet an utter barrister, nay, a sergeant of the case, will feed heartily upon him; he is very good picking meat for a lawyer.  The barber-surgeons may, if they will, beg him for an anatomy after he hath suffered an execution.  An excellent lecture may be made upon his body; for he is a kind of dead carcase—­creditors, lawyers, and jailors devour it:  creditors peck out his eyes with his own tears; lawyers flay off his own skin, and lap him in parchment; and jailors are the Promethean vultures that gnaw his very heart.  He is a bond-slave to the law, and, albeit he were a shopkeeper in London, yet he cannot with safe conscience write himself a freeman.  His religion is of five or six colours:  this day he prays that God would turn the hearts of his creditors, and to-morrow he curseth the time that ever he saw them.  His apparel is daubed commonly with statute lace, the suit itself of durance, and the hose full of long pains.  He hath many other lasting suits which he himself is never able to wear out, for they wear out him.  The zodiac of his life is like that of the sun, marry not half so glorious.  It begins in Aries and ends in Pisces.  Both head and feet are, all the year long, in troublesome and laborious motions, and Westminster Hall is his sphere.  He lives between the two tropics Cancer and Capricorn, and by that means is