difficulties with the feeblest means; for he commonly slights anything that is plain and easy, how useful and ingenious soever, and bends all his forces against the hardest and most improbable, though to no purpose if attained to; for neither knowing how to measure his own abilities nor the weight of what he attempts, he spends his little strength in vain and grows only weaker by it; and as men use to blind horses that draw in a mill, his ignorance of himself and his undertakings makes him believe he has advanced when he is no nearer to his end than when he set out first.  The bravery of difficulties does so dazzle his eyes that he prosecutes them with as little success as the tailor did his amours to Queen Elizabeth.  He differs from a pedant as things do from words, for he uses the same affectation in his operations and experiments as the other does in language.  He is a haberdasher of small arts and sciences, and deals in as many several operations as a baby artificer does in engines.  He will serve well enough for an index to tell what is handled in the world, but no further.  He is wonderfully delighted with rarities, and they continue still so to him though he has shown them a thousand times, for every new admirer that gapes upon them sets him a-gaping too.  Next these he loves strange natural histories; and as those that read romances, though they know them to be fictions, are as much affected as if they were true, so is he, and will make hard shift to tempt himself to believe them first to be possible, and then he’s sure to believe them to be true, forgetting that belief upon belief is false heraldry.  He keeps a catalogue of the names of all famous men in any profession, whom he often takes occasion to mention as his very good friends and old acquaintances.  Nothing is more pedantic than to seem too much concerned about wit or knowledge, to talk much of it, and appear too critical in it.  All he can possibly arrive to is but like the monkeys dancing on the rope, to make men wonder how ’tis possible for art to put nature so much out of her play.

His learning is like those letters on a coach, where, many being writ together, no one appears plain.  When the King happens to be at the university and degrees run like wine in conduits at public triumphs, he is sure to have his share; and though he be as free to choose his learning as his faculty, yet, like St. Austin’s soul, Creando infunditur, infundendo creatur.  Nero was the first emperor of his calling, though it be not much for his credit.  He is like an elephant that, though he cannot swim, yet of all creatures most delights to walk along a river’s side; and as, in law, things that appear not and things that are not are all one, so he had rather not be than not appear.  The top of his ambition is to have his picture graved in brass and published upon walls, if he has no work of his own to face with it.  His want of judgment inclines him naturally to the most extravagant undertakings,