languages is only in his mouth. All the vacations he speaks as good
English as any man in England, but in term times he breaks out of that
hopping one-legged pace into a racking trot of issues, bills,
replications, rejoinders, demures, querelles, subpoenas, &c., able to
fright a simple country fellow, and make him believe he conjures.
Whatsoever his complexion was before, it turns in this place to choler
or deep melancholy, so that he needs every hour to take physic to loose
his body; for that, like his estate, is very foul and corrupt, and
extremely hard bound. The taking of an execution off his stomach give
him five or six stools, and leaves his body very soluble. The
withdrawing of an action is a vomit. He is no sound man, and yet an
utter barrister, nay, a sergeant of the case, will feed heartily upon
him; he is very good picking meat for a lawyer. The barber-surgeons may,
if they will, beg him for an anatomy after he hath suffered an
execution. An excellent lecture may be made upon his body; for he is a
kind of dead carcase--creditors, lawyers, and jailors devour it:
creditors peck out his eyes with his own tears; lawyers flay off his own
skin, and lap him in parchment; and jailors are the Promethean vultures
that gnaw his very heart. He is a bond-slave to the law, and, albeit he
were a shopkeeper in London, yet he cannot with safe conscience write
himself a freeman. His religion is of five or six colours: this day he
prays that God would turn the hearts of his creditors, and to-morrow he
curseth the time that ever he saw them. His apparel is daubed commonly
with statute lace, the suit itself of durance, and the hose full of long
pains. He hath many other lasting suits which he himself is never able
to wear out, for they wear out him. The zodiac of his life is like that
of the sun, marry not half so glorious. It begins in Aries and ends in
Pisces. Both head and feet are, all the year long, in troublesome and
laborious motions, and Westminster Hall is his sphere. He lives between
the two tropics Cancer and Capricorn, and by that means is in double