hese; men in the same level with mechanics, though their
fortunes do somewhat gild their infirmities, and their purses compound
for their follies.

I must give no alms to satisfy the hunger of my brother, but to fulfill
and accomplish the will and command of my God: I draw not my purse for
his sake that demands it, but His that enjoined it; I believe no man
upon the rhetoric of his miseries, nor to content mine own commiserating
disposition; for this is still but moral charity, and an act that oweth
more to passion than reason. He that relieves another upon the bare
suggestion and bowels of pity doth not this so much for his sake as for
his own; for by compassion we make others' misery our own, and so, by
relieving them, we relieve ourselves also. It is as erroneous a conceit
to redress other men's misfortunes upon the common considerations of
merciful natures, that it may be one day our own case; for this is a
sinister and politic kind of charity, whereby we seem to bespeak the
pities of men in the like occasions. And truly I have observed that
those professed eleemosynaries, though in a crowd or multitude, do yet
direct and place their petitions on a few and selected persons: there is
surely a physiognomy which those experienced and master mendicants
observe, whereby they instantly discover a merciful aspect, and will
single out a face wherein they spy the signatures and marks of mercy.
For there are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry in
them the motto of our souls, wherein he that cannot read ABC may read
our natures. I hold moreover that there is a phytognomy, or physiognomy,
not only of men, but of plants and vegetables; and in every one of them
some outward figures which hang as signs or bushes of their inward
forms. The finger of God hath left an inscription upon all his works,
not graphical or composed of letters, but of their several forms,
constitutions, parts and operations, which, aptly joined together, do
make one word that 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