lies
leaning on his elbows, or is employed to make squibs and crackers to
grace the play. His audience are oftentimes judicious, but his chief
admirers are commonly young wanton chambermaids, who are so taken with
his posture and gay clothes, they never come to be their own women
after. He exasperates men's enormities in public view, and tells them
their faults on the stage, not as being sorry for them, but rather
wishes still he might find more occasions to work on. He is the general
corrupter of spirits yet untainted, inducing them by gradation to much
lascivious depravity. He is a perspicuity of vanity in variety, and
suggests youth to perpetrate such vices as otherwise they had haply
ne'er heard of. He is (for the most part) a notable hypocrite, seeming
what he is not, and is indeed what he seems not. And if he lose one of
his fellow strolls, in the summer he turns king of the gipsies; if not,
some great man's protection is a sufficient warrant for his
peregrination, and a means to procure him the town-hall, where he may
long exercise his qualities with clown-claps of great admiration, in a
tone suitable to the large ears of his illiterate auditory. He is one
seldom takes care for old age, because ill diet and disorder, together
with a consumption or some worse disease taken up in his full career,
have only chalked out his catastrophe but to a colon; and he scarcely
survives to his natural period of days.

* * * * *

_In_ 1631 _"Whimzies, or, A new Cast of Characters" inscribed to Sir
Alexander Radcliffe by one who signed his dedication Clitus
Alexandrinus, gave twenty-four Characters, of which this of the maker of
a Courant or news sheet is one:--_

A CORRANTO-COINER

Is a state newsmonger; and his own genius is his intelligencer. His mint
goes weekly, and he coins money by it. Howsoever, the more intelligent
merchants do jeer him, the vulgar do admire him, holding his novels
oracular; and these are usually sent for tokens or intermissive
courtesies betwixt city and country. He holds most constantly one form
or method of discourse. He retains some military words of art, which he
shoots at random; no matter where they hit they cannot wound any. He
ever leaves some passages doubtful, as if they were some more intimate
secrecies of state, closing his sentence abruptly with--_hereafter you
shall hear more._ Which words, I conceive, he only useth as baits, to
make