being incapable of the first, does his endeavour to make as much
of the last as he can, and shows himself as excellent in his kind as it
is in his power to do.

A KNAVE

Is like a tooth-drawer, that maintains his own teeth in constant eating
by pulling out those of other men. He is an ill moral philosopher, of
villainous principles, and as bad practice. His tenets are to hold what
he can get, right or wrong. His tongue and his heart are always at
variance, and fall out like rogues in the street, to pick somebody's
pocket. They never agree but, like Herod and Pilate, to do mischief. His
conscience never stands in his light when the devil holds a candle to
him, for he has stretched it so thin that it is transparent. He is an
engineer of treachery, fraud, and perfidiousness, and knows how to
manage matters of great weight with very little force by the advantage
of his trepanning screws. He is very skilful in all the mechanics of
cheat, the mathematical magic of imposture, and will outdo the
expectation of the most credulous to their own admiration and undoing.
He is an excellent founder, and will melt down a leaden fool and cast
him into what form he pleases. He is like a pike in a pond, that lives
by rapine, and will sometimes venture on one of his own kind, and devour
a knave as big as himself. He will swallow a fool a great deal bigger
than himself, and, if he can but get his head within his jaws, will
carry the rest of him hanging out at his mouth, until by degrees he has
digested him all. He has a hundred tricks to slip his neck out of the
pillory without leaving his ears behind. As for the gallows, he never
ventures to show his tricks upon the high-rope for fear of breaking his
neck. He seldom commits any villainy but in a legal way, and makes the
law bear him out in that for which it hangs others. He always robs under
the wizard of law, and picks pockets with tricks in equity. By his means
the law makes more knaves than it hangs, and, like the Inns-of-Court,
protects offenders against itself. He gets within the law and disarms
it. His hardest labour is to wriggle himself into trust, which if he can
but compass his business is done, for fraud and treachery follow as
easily as a thread does a needle. He grows rich by the ruin of his
neighbours, like grass in the streets in a great sickness. He shelters
himself under the covert of the law, like a thief in a hemp-plot, and
makes that secure him which was intended f