labouring
to take off this suspicion from himself; for the opinion of valour is a
good protection to those that dare not use it. No man is valianter than he
is in civil company, and where he thinks no danger may come on it, and is
the readiest man to fall upon a drawer and those that must not strike
again: wonderful exceptious and cholerick where he sees men are loth to
give him occasion, and you cannot pacify him better than by quarrelling
with him. The hotter you grow, the more temperate man is he; he protests
he always honoured you, and the more you rail upon him, the more he
honours you, and you threaten him at last into a very honest quiet man.
The sight of a sword wounds him more sensibly than the stroke, for before
that come he is dead already. Every man is his master that dare beat him,
and every man dares that knows him. And he that dare do this is the only
man can do much with him; for his friend he cares not for, as a man that
carries no such terror as his enemy, which for this cause only is more
potent with him of the two: and men fall out with him of purpose to get
courtesies from him, and be bribed again to a reconcilement. A man in whom
no secret can be bound up, for the apprehension of each danger loosens
him, and makes him bewray both the room and it. He is a christian meerly
for fear of hell-fire; and if any religion could fright him more, would be
of that.

LXXIV.

A SORDID RICH MAN

Is a beggar of a fair estate, of whose wealth we may say as of other men's
unthriftiness, that it has brought him to this: when he had nothing he
lived in another kind of fashion. He is a man whom men hate in his own
behalf for using himself thus, and yet, being upon himself, it is but
justice, for he deserves it. Every accession of a fresh heap bates him so
much of his allowance, and brings him a degree nearer starving. His body
had been long since desperate, but for the reparation of other men's
tables, where he hoards meats in his belly for a month, to maintain him in
hunger so long. His clothes were never young in our memory; you might make
long epochas from them, and put them into the almanack with the dear
year[94] and the great frost,[95] and he is known by them longer than his
face. He is one never gave alms in his life, and yet is as charitable to
his neighbour as himself. He will redeem a penny with his reputation, and
lose all his friends to boot; and his reason is, he will not be undone. He
never p