but prattle. We laugh
at his foolish sports, but his game is our earnest; and his drums,
rattles, and hobby-horses, but the emblems and mocking of man's
business. His father hath writ him as his own little story, wherein he
reads those days of his life that he cannot remember, and sighs to see
what innocence he hath out-lived. The elder he grows, he is a stair
lower from God; and, like his first father, much worse in his
breeches.[5] He is the Christian's example, and the old man's relapse;
the one imitates his pureness, and the other falls into his simplicity.
Could he put off his body with his little coat, he had got eternity
without a burden, and exchanged but one heaven for another.

A YOUNG RAW PREACHER

Is a bird not yet fledged, that hath hopped out of his nest to be
chirping on a hedge, and will be straggling abroad at what peril soever.
His backwardness in the university hath set him thus forward; for had he
not truanted there, he had not been so hasty a divine. His small
standing, and time, hath made him a proficient only in boldness, out of
which, and his table-book, he is furnished for a preacher. His
collections of study are the notes of sermons, which, taken up at St.
Mary's,[6] he utters in the country: and if he write brachigraphy,[7]
his stock is so much the better. His writing is more than his reading,
for he reads only what he gets without book. Thus accomplished he comes
down to his friends, and his first salutation is grace and peace out of
the pulpit. His prayer is conceited, and no man remembers his college
more at large,[8] The pace of his sermon is a full career, and he runs
wildly over hill and dale, till the clock stop him. The labour of it is
chiefly in his lungs; and the only thing he has made _in_[9] it himself,
is the faces. He takes on against the pope without mercy, and has a jest
still in lavender for Bellarmine: yet he preaches heresy, if it comes in
his way, though with a mind, I must needs say, very orthodox. His action
is all passion, and his speech interjections. He has an excellent
faculty in bemoaning the people, and spits with a very good grace. [His
stile is compounded of twenty several men's, only his body imitates some
one extraordinary.] He will not draw his handkercher out of his place,
nor blow his nose without discretion. His commendation is, that he never
looks upon book; and indeed he was never used to it. He preaches but
once a year, though twice on Sunday; for th