Читать книгу Character Writings of the Seventeenth Century - Various - Страница 30

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Is the cinnamon tree, whose bark is more worth than his body. He hath read the book of good manners, and by this time each of his limbs may read it. He alloweth of no judge but the eye: painting, bolstering, and bombasting are his orators. By these also he proves his industry, for he hath purchased legs, hair, beauty, and straightness, more than nature left him. He unlocks maidenheads with his language, and speaks Euphues, not so gracefully as heartily. His discourse makes not his behaviour; but he buys it at court, as countrymen their clothes in Birchin Lane. He is somewhat like the salamander, and lives in the flame of love, which pains he expresseth comically. And nothing grieves him so much as the want of a poet to make an issue in his love. Yet he sighs sweetly and speaks lamentably, for his breath is perfumed and his words are wind. He is best in season at Christmas, for the boar's head and reveller come together. His hopes are laden in his quality; and, lest fiddlers should take him unprovided, he wears pumps in his pocket; and, lest he should take fiddlers unprovided, he whistles his own galliard. He is a calendar of ten years, and marriage rusts him. Afterwards he maintains himself an implement of household, by carving and ushering. For all this, he is judicial only in tailors and barbers; but his opinion is ever ready, and ever idle. If you will know more of his acts, the broker's shop is the witness of his valour, where lies wounded, dead rent, and out of fashion, many a spruce suit, overthrown by his fantasticness.