to a nice
stomach, which whiles he empties himself, it sticks in his teeth, nor
can he be delivered without sweat, and sighs, and hems, and coughs
enough to shake his grandam's teeth out of her head. He spits, and
scratches, and spawls, and turns like sick men from one elbow to
another, and deserves as much pity during his torture as men in fits of
tertian fevers, or self-lashing penitentiaries. In a word, rip him quite
asunder, and examine every shred of him, you shall find of him to be
just nothing but the subject of nothing; the object of contempt; yet
such as he is you must take him, for there is no hope he should ever
become better.

A GOOD WIFE

Is a man's best movable, a scion incorporate with the stock, bringing
sweet fruit; one that to her husband is more than a friend, less than
trouble; an equal with him in the yoke. Calamities and troubles she
shares alike, nothing pleaseth her that doth not him. She is relative in
all, and he without her but half himself. She is his absent hands, eyes,
ears, and mouth; his present and absent all. She frames her nature unto
his howsoever; the hyacinth follows not the sun more willingly.
Stubbornness and obstinacy are herbs that grow not in her garden. She
leaves tattling to the gossips of the town, and is more seen than heard.
Her household is her charge; her care to that makes her seldom
non-resident. Her pride is but to be cleanly, and her thrift not to be
prodigal. By her discretion she hath children not wantons; a husband
without her is a misery to man's apparel: none but she hath an aged
husband, to whom she is both a staff and a chair. To conclude, she is
both wise and religious, which makes her all this.

A MELANCHOLY MAN

Is a strayer from the drove: one that Nature made a sociable, because
she made him man, and a crazed disposition hath altered. Unpleasing to
all, as all to him; straggling thoughts are his content, they make him
dream waking, there's his pleasure. His imagination is never idle, it
keeps his mind in a continual motion, as the poise the clock: he winds
up his thoughts often, and as often unwinds them; Penelope's web thrives
faster. He'll seldom be found without the shade of some grove, in whose
bottom a river dwells. He carries a cloud in his face, never fair
weather; his outside is framed to his inside, in that he keeps a
decorum, both unseemly. Speak to him; he hears with his eyes, ears
follow his mind, and that's not at leisure. He th