Читать книгу Character Writings of the Seventeenth Century - Various - Страница 52

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He is distinguished from a scholar by a pair of silk stockings and a beaver hat, which makes him condemn a scholar as much as a scholar doth a schoolmaster. By that he hath heard one mooting and seen two plays, he thinks as basely of the university as a young sophister doth of the grammar-school. He talks of the university with that state as if he were her chancellor; finds fault with alterations and the fall of discipline with an "It was not so when I was a student," although that was within this half year. He will talk ends of Latin, though it be false, with as great confidence as ever Cicero could pronounce an oration, though his best authors for it be taverns and ordinaries. He is as far behind a courtier in his fashion as a scholar is behind him, and the best grace in his behaviour is to forget his acquaintance.

He laughs at every man whose band fits not well, or that hath not a fair shoe-tie, and he is ashamed to be seen in any man's company that wears not his clothes well. His very essence he placeth in his outside, and his chiefest prayer is, that his revenues may hold out for taffety cloaks in the summer and velvet in the winter. To his acquaintance he offers two quarts of wine for one he gives. You shall never see him melancholy but when he wants a new suit or fears a sergeant, at which times he only betakes himself to Ploydon. By that he hath read Littleton, he can call Solon, Lycurgus, and Justinian fools, and dares compare his law to a lord chief-justice's.