lady’s, who, by looking on the picture of a Moor that hung in her chamber, conceived a child of the same complexion; for all his conceptions are produced by the pictures of other men’s imaginations, and by their features betray whose bastards they are.  His Muse is not inspired, but infected with another man’s fancy; and he catches his wit, like the itch, of somebody else that had it before, and when he writes he does but scratch himself.  His head is, like his hat, fashioned upon a block and wrought in a shape of another man’s invention.  He melts down his wit and casts it in a mould; and as metals melted and cast are not so firm and solid as those that are wrought with the hammer, so those compositions that are founded and run in other men’s moulds are always more brittle and loose than those that are forged in a man’s own brain.  He binds himself apprentice to a trade which he has no stock to set up with, if he should serve out his time and live to be made free.  He runs a-whoring after another man’s inventions, for he has none of his own to tempt him to an incontinent thought, and begets a kind of mongrel breed that never comes to good.

A SOT

Has found out a way to renew not only his youth, but his childhood, by being stewed, like old Aeson, in liquor; much better than the virtuoso’s way of making old dogs young again, for he is a child again at second hand, never the worse for the wearing, but as purely fresh, simple, and weak as he was at first.  He has stupefied his senses by living in a moist climate, according to the poet, Boeotum in crasso jurares aere natum.  He measures his time by glasses of wine, as the ancients did by water-glasses; and as Hermes Trismegistus is said to have kept the first account of hours by the pissing of a beast dedicated to Serapis, he revives that custom in his own practice, and observes it punctually in passing his time.  He is like a statue placed in a moist air; all the lineaments of humanity are mouldered away, and there is nothing left of him but a rude lump of the shape of a man, and no one part entire.  He has drowned himself in a butt of wine, as the Duke of Clarence was served by his brother.  He has washed down his soul and pissed it out, and lives now only by the spirit of wine or brandy, or by an extract drawn off his stomach.  He has swallowed his humanity and drunk himself into a beast, as if he had pledged Madam Circe and done her right.  He is drowned in a glass like a fly, beyond the cure of crumbs of bread or the sunbeams.  He is like a springtide; when he is drunk to his high-water-mark he swells and looks big, runs against the stream, and overflows everything that stands in his way; but when the drink within him is at an ebb, he shrinks within his banks and falls so low and shallow that cattle may pass over him.  He governs all his actions by the drink within him, as a Quaker does by the light within him; has a different humour for every nick his drink rises to, like the degrees of the weather-glass; and proceeds from ribaldry and bawdry to politics, religion, and quarrelling, until it is at the top, and then it is the dog-days with him; from whence he falls down again until his liquor is at the bottom, and then he lies quiet and is frozen up.