applaud him the more you abash him, and he recovers not his face a month after.  One that is easy to like any thing of another man’s, and thinks all he knows not of him better than that he knows.  He excuses that to you, which another would impute; and if you pardon him, is satisfied.  One that stands in no opinion because it is his own, but suspects it rather, because it is his own, and is confuted and thanks you.  He sees nothing more willingly than his errors, and it is his error sometimes to be too soon persuaded.  He is content to be auditor where he only can speak, and content to go away and think himself instructed.  No man is so weak that he is ashamed to learn of, and is less ashamed to confess it; and he finds many times even in the dust, what others overlook and lose.  Every man’s presence is a kind of bridle to him, to stop the roving of his tongue and passions:  and even impudent men look for this reverence from him, and distaste that in him which they suffer in themselves, as one in whom vice is ill-favoured and shews more scurvily than another.  An unclean jest shall shame him more than a bastard another man, and he that got it shall censure him among the rest.  He is coward to nothing more than an ill tongue, and whosoever dare lie on him hath power over him; and if you take him by his look, he is guilty.  The main ambition of his life is not to be discredited; and for other things, his desires are more limited than his fortunes, which he thinks preferment though never so mean, and that he is to do something to deserve this.  He is too tender to venture on great places, and would not hurt a dignity to help himself:  If he do, it was the violence of his friends constrained him, how hardly soever he obtain it he was harder persuaded to seek it.

A MERE EMPTY WIT

Is like one that spends on the stock without any revenues coming in, and will shortly be no wit at all; for learning is the fuel to the fire of wit, which, if it wants this feeding, eats out itself.  A good conceit or two bates of such a man, and makes a sensible weakening in him; and his brain recovers it not a year after.  The rest of him are bubbles and flashes, darted out on a sudden, which, if you take them while they are warm, may be laughed at; if they are cool, are nothing.  He speaks best on the present apprehension, for meditation stupefies him, and the more he is in travail, the less he brings forth.  His things come off then, as in a nauseateing stomach, where there is nothing to cast up, strains and convulsions, and some astonishing bombast, which men only, till they understand, are scared with.  A verse or some such work he may sometimes get up to, but seldom above the stature of an epigram, and that with some relief out of Martial, which is the ordinary companion of his pocket, and he reads him as he were inspired.  Such men are commonly the trifling things of the world, good to make merry the company, and whom only men