is both an apt scholar and an excellent master; for both everything he
sees informs him, and his mind, enriched with plentiful observation, can
give the best precepts. His free discourse runs back to the ages past,
and recovers events out of memory, and then preventeth time in flying
forward to future things; and comparing one with the other, can give a
verdict well near prophetical, wherein his conjectures are better than
another's judgments. His passions are so many good servants, which stand
in a diligent attendance ready to be commanded by reason, by religion;
and if at any time forgetting their duty, they be miscarried to rebel,
he can first conceal their mutiny, then suppress it. In all his just and
worthy designs he is never at a loss, but hath so projected all his
courses that a second begins where the first failed, and fetcheth
strength from that which succeeded not. There be wrongs which he will
not see, neither doth he always look that way which he meaneth, nor take
notice of his secret smarts, when they come from great ones. In good
turns he loves not to owe more than he must; in evil, to owe and not
pay. Just censures he deserves not, for he lives without the compass of
an adversary; unjust he contemneth, and had rather suffer false infamy
to die alone than lay hands upon it in an open violence. He confineth
himself in the circle of his own affairs, and lists not to thrust his
finger into a needless fire. He stands like a centre unmoved, while the
circumference of his estate is drawn above, beneath, about him. Finally,
his wit hath cost him much, and he can both keep, and value, and employ
it. He is his own lawyer, the treasury of knowledge, the oracle of
counsel; blind in no man's cause, best sighted in his own.



OF AN HONEST MAN.