himself violently upon all
things, and for the most part is as violently upon all off again; and as
an obstinate "_I will_" was the preface to his undertaking, so his
conclusion is commonly "_I would I had not_;" for such men seldom do any
thing that they are not forced to take in pieces again, and are so much
farther off from doing it, as they have done already. His friends are with
him as his physician, sought to only in his sickness and extremity, and to
help him out of that mire he has plunged himself into; for in the
suddenness of his passions he would hear nothing, and now his ill success
has allayed him he hears too late. He is a man still swayed with the first
reports, and no man more in the power of a pick-thank than he. He is one
will fight first, and then expostulate, condemn first, and then examine.
He loses his friend in a fit of quarrelling, and in a fit of kindness
undoes himself; and then curses the occasion drew this mischief upon him,
and cries, God mercy! for it, and curses again. His repentance is meerly a
rage against himself, and he does something in itself to be repented
again. He is a man whom fortune must go against much to make him happy,
for had he been suffered his own way, he had been undone.

LXXI.

AN AFFECTED MAN

Is an extraordinary man in ordinary things. One that would go a strain
beyond himself, and is taken in it. A man that overdoes all things with
great solemnity of circumstance; and whereas with more negligence he might
pass better, makes himself with a great deal of endeavour ridiculous. The
fancy of some odd quaintnesses have put him clean beside his nature; he
cannot be that he would, and hath lost what he was. He is one must be
point-blank in every trifle, as if his credit and opinion hung upon it;
the very space of his arms in an embrace studied before and premeditated,
and the figure of his countenance of a fortnight's contriving; he will not
curse you without-book and extempore, but in some choice way, and perhaps
as some great man curses. Every action of his cries,--"_Do ye mark me?_"
and men do mark him how absurd he is: for affectation is the most
betraying humour, and nothing that puzzles a man less to find out than
this. All the actions of his life are like so many things bodged in
without any natural cadence or connection at all. You shall track him all
through like a schoolboy's theme, one piece from one author and this from
another, and join all in this g