ck with him into his inner shop, and laid
out between sixty and seventy pounds, for they both bought rich suits of
clothes, and used his shop for many years after.

The short inference from this long discourse is this: That here you see,
and I could give many examples very like this, how, and in what manner,
a shopkeeper is to behave himself in the way of his business--what
impertinences, what taunts, flouts, and ridiculous things, he must bear
in his business, and must not show the least return, or the least
signal of disgust--he must have no passions, no fire in his temper--he
must be all soft and smooth: nay, if his real temper be naturally fiery
and hot, he must show none of it in his shop--he must be a perfect
complete hypocrite, if he will be a complete tradesman.[16]

It is true, natural tempers are not to be always counterfeited--the man
cannot easily be a lamb in his shop, and a lion in himself; but let it
be easy or hard, it must be done, and it is done. There are men who
have, by custom and usage, brought themselves to it, that nothing could
be meeker and milder than they, when behind the counter, and yet nothing
be more furious and raging in every other part of life--nay, the
provocations they have met with in their shops have so irritated their
rage, that they would go upstairs from their shop, and fall into
phrensies, and a kind of madness, and beat their heads against the wall,
and mischief themselves, if not prevented, till the violence of it had
gotten vent, and the passions abate and cool. Nay, I heard once of a
shopkeeper that behaved himself thus to such an extreme, that, when he
was provoked by the impertinence of the customers, beyond what his
temper could bear, he would go upstairs and beat his wife, kick his
children about like dogs, and be as furious for two or three minutes as
a man chained down in Bedlam, and when the heat was over, would sit down
and cry faster then the children he had abused; and after the fit was
over he would go down into his shop again, and be as humble, as
courteous, and as calm as any man whatever--so absolute a government of
his passions had he in the shop, and so little out of it; in the shop a
soul-less animal that can resent nothing, and in the family a madman; in
the shop meek like the lamb, but in the family outrageous like a Lybian
lion.

The sum of the matter is this: it is necessary for a tradesman to
subject himself, by all the ways possible, to his business