re they fall a
telling some sad lamentable story out of their legend, or some
other fabulous history, and this they descant upon allegorically,
tropologically, and analogically; and so they draw to a conclusion of
their discourse, which is a more brain-sick chimera than ever Horace
could describe in his _De Arte Poetica_, when he began:--

_Humano Capitis &c_. Their praying is altogether as ridiculous as their
preaching; for imagining that in their addresses to heaven they should
set out in a low and tremulous voice, as a token of dread and reverence,
they begin therefore with such a soft whispering as if they were afraid
any one should overhear what they said; but when they are gone a little
way, they clear up their pipes by degrees, and at last bawl out so loud
as if, with Baal's priests, they were resolved to awake a sleeping god;
and then again, being told by rhetoricians that heights and falls, and a
different cadency in pronunciation, is a great advantage to the setting
off any thing that is spoken, they will sometimes as it were mutter
their words inwardly, and then of a sudden hollo them out, and be sure
at last, in such a flat, faltering tone as if their spirits were spent,
and they had run themselves out of breath. Lastly, they have read
that most systems of rhetoric treat of the art of exciting laughter;
therefore for the effecting of this they will sprinkle some jests and
puns that must pass for ingenuity, though they are only the froth and
folly of affectedness. Sometimes they will nibble at the wit of being
satyrical, though their utmost spleen is so toothless, that they suck
rather than bite, tickle rather than scratch or wound: nor do they ever
flatter more than at such times as they pretend to speak with greatest
freedom.

Finally, all their actions are so buffoonish and mimical, that any
would judge they had learned all their tricks of mountebanks and
stage-players, who in action it is true may perhaps outdo them, but
in oratory there is so little odds between both, that it is hard to
determine which seems of longest standing in the schools of eloquence.

Yet these preachers, however ridiculous, meet with such hearers, who
admire them as much as the people of Athens did Demosthenes, or the
citizens of Rome could do Cicero: among which admirers are chiefly
shopkeepers, and women, whose approbation and good opinion they only
court; because the first, if they are humoured, give them some snacks
out of