much as when
gentlemen go over to fight upon Calais sands,[54] whom he wishes drowned
ere they come there, rather than the French shall get his custom.

A CONTEMPLATIVE MAN

Is a scholar in this great university the world; and the same his book
and study. He cloisters not his meditations in the narrow darkness of a
room, but sends them abroad with his eyes, and his brain travels with
his feet. He looks upon man from a high tower, and sees him trulier at
this distance in his infirmities and poorness. He scorns to mix himself
in men's actions, as he would to act upon a stage; but sits aloft on the
scaffold a censuring spectator. [He will not lose his time by being
busy, or make so poor a use of the world as to hug and embrace it.]
Nature admits him as a partaker of her sports, and asks his approbation,
as it were, of her own works and variety. He comes not in company,
because he would not be solitary; but finds discourse enough with
himself, and his own thoughts are his excellent play-fellows. He looks
not upon a thing as a yawning stranger at novelties, but his search is
more mysterious and inward, and he spells heaven out of earth. He knits
his observations together, and makes a ladder of them all to climb to
God. He is free from vice, because he has no occasion to employ it, and
is above those ends that make man wicked. He has learnt all that can
here be taught him, and comes now to heaven to see more.

A SHE PRECISE HYPOCRITE

Is one in whom good women suffer, and have their truth misinterpreted by
her folly. She is one, she knows not what herself if you ask her, but
she is indeed one that has taken a toy at the fashion of religion, and
is enamoured of the new fangle. She is a nonconformist in a close
stomacher and ruff of Geneva print, [55] and her purity consists much in
her linen. She has heard of the rag of Rome, and thinks it a very
sluttish religion, and rails at the whore of Babylon for a very naughty
woman. She has left her virginity as a relick of popery, and marries in
her tribe without a ring. Her devotion at the church is much in the
turning up of her eye; and turning down the leaf in her book, when she
hears named chapter and verse. When she comes home, she commends the
sermon for the Scripture, and two hours. She loves preaching better than
praying, and of preachers, lecturers; and thinks the week day's exercise
far more edifying than the Sunday's. Her oftest gossipings are
sabbath-day's jou