like that of making old dogs young, telling how many persons there are in a room by knocking at a door, stopping up of words in bottles, &c.  He is like his books, that contain much knowledge, but know nothing themselves.  He is but an index of things and words, that can direct where they are to be spoken with, but no farther.  He appears a great man among the ignorant, and, like a figure in arithmetic, is so much the more as it stands before ciphers that are nothing of themselves.  He calls himself an antisocordist, a name unknown to former ages, but spawned by the pedantry of the present.  He delights most in attempting things beyond his reach, and the greater distance he shoots at, the farther he is sure to be off his mark.  He shows his parts as drawers do a room at a tavern, to entertain them at the expense of their time and patience.  He inverts the moral of that fable of him that caressed his dog for fawning and leaping up upon him and beat his ass for doing the same thing, for it is all one to him whether he be applauded by an ass or a wiser creature, so he be but applauded.

AN INTELLIGENCER

Would give a penny for any statesman’s thought at any time.  He travels abroad to guess what princes are designing by seeing them at church or dinner, and will undertake to unriddle a government at first sight, and tell what plots she goes with, male or female; and discover, like a mountebank, only by seeing the public face of affairs, what private marks there are in the most secret parts of the body politic.  He is so ready at reasons of State, that he has them, like a lesson, by rote; but as charlatans make diseases fit their medicines, and not their medicines diseases, so he makes all public affairs conform to his own established reason of State, and not his reason, though the case alter ever so much, comply with them.  He thinks to obtain a great insight into State affairs by observing only the outside pretences and appearances of things, which are seldom or never true, and may be resolved several ways, all equally probable; and therefore his penetrations into these matters are like the penetrations of cold into natural bodies, without any sense of itself or the thing it works upon.  For all his discoveries in the end amount only to entries and equipages, addresses, audiences, and visits, with other such politic speculations as the rabble in the streets is wont to entertain itself withal.  Nevertheless he is very cautious not to omit his cipher, though he writes nothing but what every one does or may safely know, for otherwise it would appear to be no secret.  He endeavours to reduce all his politics into maxims, as being most easily portable for a travelling head, though, as they are for the most part of slight matters, they are but like spirits drawn out of water, insipid and good for nothing.  His letters are a kind of bills of exchange, in which he draws news and politics upon all his correspondents,