doth express their natures.  By these letters God calls the stars by their names; and by this alphabet Adam assigned to every creature a name peculiar to its nature.  Now there are, besides these characters in our faces, certain mystical figures in our hands, which I dare not call mere dashes, strokes a la volee, or at random, because delineated by a pencil that never works in vain; and hereof I take more particular notice, because I carry that in mine own hand which I could never read of or discover in another.  Aristotle, I confess, in his acute and singular book of physiognomy, hath made no mention of chiromancy; yet I believe the Egyptians, who were nearer addicted to those abstruse and mystical sciences, had a knowledge therein, to which those vagabond and counterfeit Egyptians did after pretend, and perhaps retained a few corrupted principles which sometimes might verify their prognostics.

It is the common wonder of all men, how, among so many millions of faces, there should be none alike.  Now, contrary, I wonder as much how there should be any:  he that shall consider how many thousand several words have been carelessly and without study composed out of twenty-four letters; withal, how many hundred lines there are to be drawn in the fabric of one man, shall easily find that this variety is necessary; and it will be very hard that they shall so concur as to make one portrait like another.  Let a painter carelessly limn out a million of faces, and you shall find them all different; yea, let him have his copy before him, yet after all his art there will remain a sensible distinction; for the pattern or example of everything is the perfectest in that kind, whereof we still come short, though we transcend or go beyond it, because herein it is wide, and agrees not in all points unto its copy.  Nor doth the similitude of creatures disparage the variety of nature, nor any way confound the works of God.  For even in things alike there is diversity; and those that do seem to accord do manifestly disagree.  And thus is man like God; for in the same things that we resemble him we are utterly different from him.  There was never anything so like another as in all points to concur; there will ever some reserved difference slip in, to prevent the identity, without which two several things would not be alike, but the same, which is impossible.

Naturally amorous of all that is beautiful, I can look a whole day with delight upon a handsome picture, though it be but of an horse.  It is my temper, and I like it the better, to affect all harmony; and sure there is music even in the beauty, and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument:  for there is music wherever there is harmony, order, or, proportion:  and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres; for those well-ordered motions and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the ear, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony.