Читать книгу Character Writings of the Seventeenth Century - Various - Страница 90

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Was once taken, when he bare office in his parish, for an honest man. The spawn of a decayed shopkeeper begets this fry; out of that dunghill is this serpent's egg hatched. It is a devil made sometime out of one of the twelve companies, and does but study the part and rehearse it on earth, to be perfect when he comes to act it in hell; that is his stage. The hangman and he are twins; only the hangman is the elder brother, and he dying without issue, as commonly he does, for none but a ropemaker's widow will marry him, this then inherits. His habit is a long gown, made at first to cover his knavery, but that growing too monstrous, he now goes in buff; his conscience and that being both cut out of one hide, and are of one toughness. The Counter-gate is his kennel, the whole city his Paris gardens; the misery of a poor man, but especially a bad liver, is the offals on which he feeds. The devil calls him his white son; he is so like him that he is the worse for it, and he takes after his father, for the one torments bodies as fast as the other tortures souls. Money is the crust he leaps at; cry, "a duck! a duck!" and he plunges not so eagerly as at this. The dog's chaps water to fetch nothing else; he hath his name for the same quality. For sergeant is quasi See argent, look you, rogue, here is money. He goes muffled like a thief, and carries still the marks of one; for he steals upon man cowardly, plucks him by the throat, makes him stand, and fleeces him. In this they differ, the thief is more valiant and more honest. His walks in term times are up Fleet Street, at the end of the term up Holborn, and so to Tyburn; the gallows are his purlieus, in which the hangman and he are quarter rangers--the one turns off, and the other cuts down. All the vacation he lies imbogued behind the lattice of some blind drunken, bawdy ale-house, and if he spy his prey, out he leaps like a freebooter, and rifles, or like a ban-dog worries. No officer to the city keeps his oath so uprightly; he never is forsworn, for he swears to be true varlet to the city, and he continues so to his dying day. Mace, which is so comfortable to the stomach in all kind of meats, turns in his hand to mortal poison. This raven pecks not out men's eyes as others do; all his spite is at their shoulders, and you were better to have the nightmare ride you than this incubus. When any of the furies of hell die, this Cacodeemon hath the reversion of his place. The city is (by the custom) to feed him with good meat, as they send dead horses to their hounds, only to keep them both in good heart, for not only those curs at the doghouse, but these within the walls, are to serve in their paces in their several huntings. He is a citizen's birdlime, and where he holds he hangs.