The gull is a young man whose father, a citizen or a squire, just dead, leaves him “ten or twelve thousand pounds in ready money, besides some hundreds a-year.”  Scouts are sent out, and lie in ambush for him; they discover what “apothecarie’s shop he resorts to every morning, or in what tobacco-shop in Fleet-street he takes a pipe of smoke in the afternoon;” the usual resorts of the loungers of that day.  Some sharp wit of the Ordinarie, a pleasant fellow, whom Robert Greene calls the “taker-up,” one of universal conversation, lures the heir of seven hundred a-year to “The Ordinarie.”  A gull sets the whole aviary in spirits; and Decker well describes the flutter of joy and expectation:  “The leaders maintained themselves brave; the forlorn-hope, that drooped before, doth now gallantly come on; the eagle feathers his nest; the wood-pecker picks up the crumbs; the gull-groper grows fat with good feeding; and the gull himself, at whom every one has a pull, hath in the end scarce feathers to keep his back warm.”

During the gull’s progress through Primero and Gleek,[76] he wants for no admirable advice and solemn warnings from two excellent friends; the gull-groper, and at length, the impostor.  The gull-groper, who knows, “to half an acre,” all his means, takes the gull when out of luck to a side-window, and in a whisper talks of “dice being made of women’s bones, which would cozen any man:”  but he pours his gold on the board; and a bond is rapturously signed for the next quarter-day.  But the gull-groper, by a variety of expedients, avoids having the bond duly discharged; he contrives to get a judgment, and a serjeant with his mace procures the forfeiture of the bond; the treble value.  But the “impostor” has none of the milkiness of the “gull-groper”—­he looks for no favour under heaven from any man; he is bluff with all the Ordinarie; he spits at random; jingles his spurs into any man’s cloak; and his “humour” is, to be a devil of a dare-all.  All fear him as the tyrant they must obey.  The tender gull trembles, and admires this roysterer’s valour.  At length the devil he feared becomes his champion; and the poor gull, proud of his intimacy, hides himself under this eagle’s wings.

The impostor sits close by his elbow, takes a partnership in his game, furnishes the stakes when out of luck, and in truth does not care how fast the gull loses; for a twirl of his mustachio, a tip of his nose, or a wink of his eye, drives all the losses of the gull into the profits of the grand confederacy at the Ordinarie.  And when the impostor has fought the gull’s quarrels many a time, at last he kicks up the table; and the gull sinks himself into the class of the forlorn-hope; he lives at the mercy of his late friends the gull-groper and the impostor, who send him out to lure some tender bird in feather.