e
his sports and those vices that are fit for great men. Every vanity of his
has his officer, and is a serious employment for his servants. He talks
loud, and baudily, and scurvily as a part of state, and they hear him
with reverence. All good qualities are below him, and especially learning,
except some parcels of the chronicle and the writing of his name, which he
learns to write not to be read. He is meerly of his servants' faction, and
their instrument for their friends and enemies, and is always least
thanked for his own courtesies. They that fool him most do most with him,
and he little thinks how many laugh at him bare-head. No man is kept in
ignorance more of himself and men, for he hears nought but flattery; and
what is fit to be spoken, truth with so much preface that it loses itself.
Thus he lives till his tomb be made ready, and is then a grave statue to
posterity.

FOOTNOTES:

[96] The person who exhibits Westminster abbey.

LXXVI.

A POOR MAN

Is the most impotent man, though neither blind nor lame, as wanting the
more necessary limbs of life, without which limbs are a burden. A man
unfenced and unsheltered from the gusts of the world, which blow all in
upon him, like an unroofed house; and the bitterest thing he suffers is
his neighbours. All men put on to him a kind of churlisher fashion, and
even more plausible natures are churlish to him, as who are nothing
advantaged by his opinion. Whom men fall out with before-hand to prevent
friendship, and his friends too to prevent engagements, or if they own him
'tis in private and a by-room, and on condition not to know them before
company. All vice put together is not half so scandalous, nor sets off our
acquaintance farther; and even those that are not friends for ends do not
love any dearness with such men. The least courtesies are upbraided to
him, and himself thanked for none, but his best services suspected as
handsome sharking and tricks to get money. And we shall observe it in
knaves themselves, that your beggarliest knaves are the greatest, or
thought so at least, for those that have wit to thrive by it have art not
to seem so. Now a poor man has not vizard enough to mask his vices, nor
ornament enough to set forth his virtues, but both are naked and
unhandsome; and though no man is necessitated to more ill, yet no man's
ill is less excused, but it is thought a kind of impudence in him to be
vicious, and a presumption above his fortune. H