A PUNY CLERK.

He is taken from grammar-school half coddled, and can hardly shake off
his dreams of breeching in a twelvemonth. He is a farmer's son, and his
father's utmost ambition is to make him an attorney. He doth itch
towards a poet, and greases his breeches extremely with feeding without
a napkin. He studies false dice to cheat costermongers. He eats
gingerbread at a playhouse, and is so saucy that he ventures fairly for
a broken pate at the banqueting-house, and hath it. He would never come
to have any wit but for a long vacation, for that makes him bethink him
how he shall shift another day. He prays hotly against fasting, and so
he may sup well on Friday nights, he cares not though his master be a
puritan. He practices to make the words in his declaration spread as a
sewer doth the dishes of a niggard's table; a clerk of a swooping dash
is as commendable as a Flanders horse of a large tail. Though you be
never so much delayed you must not call his master knave, that makes him
go beyond himself, and write a challenge in court hand, for it may be
his own another day These are some certain of his liberal faculties; but
in the term time his clog is a buckram bag. Lastly, which is great pity,
he never comes to his full growth, with bearing on his shoulder the
sinful burden of his master at several courts in Westminster.



A FOOTMAN.

Let him be never so well made, yet his legs are not matches, for he is
still setting the best foot forward. He will never be a staid man, for