y are on the sudden; they show
presently like grain that, scattered on the top the ground, shoots up,
but takes no root; has a yellow blade, but the ear empty. They are
wits of good promise at first, but there is an _ingenistitium_; they
stand still at sixteen, they get no higher. You have others that labor
only to ostentation; and are ever more busy about the colors and
surface of a work than in the matter and foundation, for that is hid,
the other is seen.

Others that in composition are nothing but what is rough and broken.
_Quae per salebras, altaque saxa cadunt._ And if it would come gently,
they trouble it of purpose. They would not have it run without rubs,
as if that style were more strong and manly that struck the ear with a
kind of unevenness. These men err not by chance, but knowingly and
willingly; they are like men that affect a fashion by themselves; have
some singularity in a ruff, cloak, or hatband; or their beards
specially cut to provoke beholders, and set a mark upon themselves.
They would be reprehended while they are looked on. And this vice, one
that is authority with the rest, loving, delivers over to them to be
imitated; so that ofttimes the faults which he fell into, the others
seek for. This is the danger, when vice becomes a precedent.

Others there are that have no composition at all; but a kind of tuning
and riming fall in what they write. It runs and slides, and only makes
a sound. Women's poets they are called, as you have women's tailors.

"They write a verse as smooth, as soft as cream,
In which there is no torrent, nor scarce stream."

You may sound these wits and find the depth of them with your middle
finger. They are cream-bowl, or but puddle-deep.

Some that turn over all books, and are equally searching in all
papers; that write out of what they presently find or meet, without
choice. By which means it happens that what they have discredited and
impugned in one week, they have before or after extolled the same in
another. Such are all the essayists, even their master Montaigne.
These, in all they write, confess still what books they have read
last, and therein their own folly so much that they bring it to the
stake raw and undigested; not that the place did need it neither, but
that they thought themselves furnished and would vent it....

It cannot but come to pass that these men who commonly seek to do more
than enough may sometimes happen on something that is good a