and holy duty, it propagates wonderfully among the rabble, and he vents more in an hour from the pulpit than others by news and politics can do in a week.  Next him, writers and libellers are most pernicious, for though the contagion they disperse spreads slower and with less force than preaching, yet it lasts longer, and in time extends to more, and with less danger to the author, who is not easily discovered if he use any care to conceal himself.  And therefore, as we see stinging-flies vex and provoke cattle most immediately before storms, so multitudes of those kinds of vermin do always appear to stir up the people before the beginning of all troublesome times, and nobody knows who they are or from whence they came, but only that they were printed the present year that they may not lose the advantage of being known to be new.  Some do it only out of humour and envy, or desire to see those that are above them pulled down and others raised in their places, as if they held it a kind of freedom to change their governors, though they continue in the same condition themselves still, only they are a little better pleased with it in observing the dangers greatness is exposed to.  He delights in nothing so much as civil commotions, and, like a porpoise, always plays before a storm.  Paper and tinder are both made of the same material, rags, but he converts them both into the same again and makes his paper tinder.

THE RUDE MAN

Is an Ostro-Goth or Northern Hun, that, wheresoever he comes, invades and all the world does overrun, without distinction of age, sex, or quality.  He has no regard to anything but his own humour, and that, he expects, should pass everywhere without asking leave or being asked wherefore, as if he had a safe-conduct for his rudeness.  He rolls up himself like a hedgehog in his prickles, and is as intractable to all that come near him.  He is an ill-designed piece, built after the rustic order, and all his parts look too big for their height.  He is so ill-contrived that that which should be the top in all regular structures—­i.e., confidence—­is his foundation.  He has neither doctrine nor discipline in him, like a fanatic Church, but is guided by the very same spirit that dipped the herd of swine in the sea.  He was not bred, but reared; not brought up to hand, but suffered to run wild and take after his kind, as other people of the pasture do.  He takes that freedom in all places, as if he were not at liberty, but had broken loose and expected to be tied up again.  He does not eat, but feed, and when he drinks goes to water.  The old Romans beat the barbarous part of the world into civility, but if he had lived in those times he had been invincible to all attempts of that nature, and harder to be subdued and governed than a province.  He eats his bread, according to the curse, with the sweat of his brow, and takes as much pains at a meal as if he earned it; puffs and blows like a horse that