of him but threads.  To the one he comes like Tamburlain, with his black and bloody flag; but to the other his white one hangs out, and, upon the parley, rather than fail, he takes ten groats in the pound for his ransom, and so lets him march away with bag and baggage.  From the beginning of Hilary to the end of Michaelmas his purse is full of quicksilver, and that sets him running from sunrise to sunset up Fleet Street, and so to the Chancery, from thence to Westminster, then back to one court, after that to another.  Then to an attorney, then to a councillor, and in every of these places he melts some of his fat (his money).  In the vacation he goes to grass, and gets up his flesh again, which he baits as you heard.  If he were to be hanged unless he could be saved by his book, he cannot for his heart call for a psalm of mercy.  He is a law-trap baited with parchment and wax.  The fearful mice he catches are debtors, with whom scratching attorneys, like cats, play a good while, and then mouse them.  The bally is an insatiable creditor, but man worse.

A SERGEANT

Was once taken, when he bare office in his parish, for an honest man.  The spawn of a decayed shopkeeper begets this fry; out of that dunghill is this serpent’s egg hatched.  It is a devil made sometime out of one of the twelve companies, and does but study the part and rehearse it on earth, to be perfect when he comes to act it in hell; that is his stage.  The hangman and he are twins; only the hangman is the elder brother, and he dying without issue, as commonly he does, for none but a ropemaker’s widow will marry him, this then inherits.  His habit is a long gown, made at first to cover his knavery, but that growing too monstrous, he now goes in buff; his conscience and that being both cut out of one hide, and are of one toughness.  The Counter-gate is his kennel, the whole city his Paris gardens; the misery of a poor man, but especially a bad liver, is the offals on which he feeds.  The devil calls him his white son; he is so like him that he is the worse for it, and he takes after his father, for the one torments bodies as fast as the other tortures souls.  Money is the crust he leaps at; cry, “a duck! a duck!” and he plunges not so eagerly as at this.  The dog’s chaps water to fetch nothing else; he hath his name for the same quality.  For sergeant is quasi See argent, look you, rogue, here is money.  He goes muffled like a thief, and carries still the marks of one; for he steals upon man cowardly, plucks him by the throat, makes him stand, and fleeces him.  In this they differ, the thief is more valiant and more honest.  His walks in term times are up Fleet Street, at the end of the term up Holborn, and so to Tyburn; the gallows are his purlieus, in which the hangman and he are quarter rangers—­the one turns off, and the other cuts down.  All the vacation he lies imbogued behind the lattice of some blind drunken, bawdy ale-house,