of his own canting inclination.  He finds it easier to write in rhyme than prose, for the world being over-charged with romances, he finds his plots, passions, and repartees ready made to his hand, and if he can but turn them into rhyme the thievery is disguised, and they pass for his own wit and invention without question, like a stolen cloak made into a coat or dyed into another colour.  Besides this, he makes no conscience of stealing anything that lights in his way, and borrows the advice of so many to correct, enlarge, and amend what he has ill-favouredly patched together, that it becomes like a thing drawn by counsel, and none of his own performance, or the son of a whore that has no one certain father.  He has very great reason to prefer verse before prose in his compositions; for rhyme is like lace, that serves excellently well to hide the piecing and coarseness of a bad stuff, contributes mightily to the bulk, and makes the less serve by the many impertinences it commonly requires to make way for it, for very few are endowed with abilities to bring it in on its own account.  This he finds to be good husbandry and a kind of necessary thrift, for they that have but a little ought to make as much of it as they can.  His prologue, which is commonly none of his own, is always better than his play, like a piece of cloth that’s fine in the beginning and coarse afterwards; though it has but one topic, and that’s the same that is used by malefactors, when they are to be tried, to except against as many of the jury as they can.

A MOUNTEBANK

Is an epidemic physician, a doctor-errant, that keeps himself up by being, like a top, in motion, for if he should settle he would fall to nothing immediately.  He is a pedlar of medicines, a petty chapman of cures, and tinker empirical to the body of man.  He strolls about to markets and fairs, where he mounts on the top of his shop, that is his bank, and publishes his medicines as universal as himself; for everything is for all diseases, as himself is of all places—­that is to say, of none.  His business is to show tricks and impudence.  As for the cure of diseases, it concerns those that have them, not him, further than to get their money.  His pudding is his setter that lodges the rabble for him, and then slips him, who opens with a deep mouth, and has an ill day if he does not run down some.  He baits his patient’s body with his medicines, as a rat-catcher does a room, and either poisons the disease or him.  As soon as he has got all the money and spent all the credit the rabble could spare him, he then removes to fresh quarters where he is less known and better trusted.  If but one in twenty of his medicines hit by chance, when nature works the cure, it saves the credit of all the rest, that either do no good or hurt; for whosoever recovers in his hands, he does the work under God; but if he die, God does it under him:  his time was come, and there’s an end.  A velvet jerkin