all their words go for jests, and all their
jests for nothing. They are nimble in the fancy of some ridiculous thing,
and reasonable good in the expression. Nothing stops a jest when it's
coming, neither friends, nor danger, but it must out howsoever, though
their blood come out after, and then they emphatically rail, and are
emphatically beaten, and commonly are men reasonable familiar to this.
Briefly they are such whose life is but to laugh and be laughed at; and
only wits in jest and fools in earnest.

LVII.

A DRUNKARD

Is one that will be a man to-morrow morning, but is now what you will make
him, for he is in the power of the next man, and if a friend the better.
One that hath let go himself from the hold and stay of reason, and lies
open to the mercy of all temptations. No lust but finds him disarmed and
fenceless, and with the least assault enters. If any mischief escape him,
it was not his fault, for he was laid as fair for it as he could. Every
man sees him, as Cham saw his father the first of this sin, an uncovered
man, and though his garment be on, uncovered; the secretest parts of his
soul lying in the nakedest manner visible: all his passions come out now,
all his vanities, and those shamefuller humours which discretion clothes.
His body becomes at last like a miry way, where the spirits are beclogged
and cannot pass: all his members are out of office, and his heels do but
trip up one another. He is a blind man with eyes, and a cripple with legs
on. All the use he has of this vessel himself, is to hold thus much; for
his drinking is but a scooping in of so many quarts, which are filled out
into his body, and that filled out again into the room, which is commonly
as drunk as he. Tobacco serves to air him after a washing, and is his only
breath and breathing while. He is the greatest enemy to himself, and the
next to his friend, and then most in the act of his kindness, for his
kindness is but trying a mastery, who shall sink down first: and men come
from him as a battle, wounded and bound up. Nothing takes a man off more
from his credit, and business, and makes him more retchlesly[79] careless
what becomes of all. Indeed he dares not enter on a serious thought, or if
he do, it is such melancholy that it sends him to be drunk again.

FOOTNOTES:

[79] Rechlesse, _negligent_. Saxon, rectlerre. Chaucer uses it also as an
adjective:

"I may not in this cas be _reccheles_."

_Clerkes Tale_, v