For the present, what is it?  “It began” (saith [3637]Agrippa) “with strong impiety, with tyranny, oppression,” &c. and so it is maintained:  wealth began it (no matter how got), wealth continueth and increaseth it.  Those Roman knights were so called, if they could dispend per annum so much. [3638]In the kingdom of Naples and France, he that buys such lands, buys the honour, title, barony, together with it; and they that can dispend so much amongst us, must be called to bear office, to be knights, or fine for it, as one observes, [3639]_nobiliorum ex censu judicant_, our nobles are measured by their means.  And what now is the object of honour?  What maintains our gentry but wealth? [3640]_Nobilitas sine re projecta vilior alga._ Without means gentry is naught worth, nothing so contemptible and base. [3641]_Disputare de nobilitate generis, sine divitiis, est disputare de nobilitate stercoris_, saith Nevisanus the lawyer, to dispute of gentry without wealth, is (saving your reverence) to discuss the original of a merd.  So that it is wealth alone that denominates, money which maintains it, gives esse to it, for which every man may have it.  And what is their ordinary exercise? [3642]"sit to eat, drink, lie down to sleep, and rise to play:”  wherein lies their worth and sufficiency? in a few coats of arms, eagles, lions, serpents, bears, tigers, dogs, crosses, bends, fesses, &c., and such like baubles, which they commonly set up in their galleries, porches, windows, on bowls, platters, coaches, in tombs, churches, men’s sleeves, &c. [3643]"If he can hawk and hunt, ride a horse, play at cards and dice, swagger, drink, swear,” take tobacco with a grace, sing, dance, wear his clothes in fashion, court and please his mistress, talk big fustian, [3644]insult, scorn, strut, contemn others, and use a little mimical and apish compliment above the rest, he is a complete, (Egregiam vero laudem) a well-qualified gentleman; these are most of their employments, this their greatest commendation.  What is gentry, this parchment nobility then, but as [3645] Agrippa defines it, “a sanctuary of knavery and naughtiness, a cloak for wickedness and execrable vices, of pride, fraud, contempt, boasting, oppression, dissimulation, lust, gluttony, malice, fornication, adultery, ignorance, impiety?” A nobleman therefore in some likelihood, as he concludes, is an “atheist, an oppressor, an epicure, a [3646]gull, a dizzard, an illiterate idiot, an outside, a glowworm, a proud fool, an arrant ass,” Ventris et inguinis mancipium, a slave to his lust and belly, solaque libidine fortis.  And as Salvianus observed of his countrymen the Aquitanes in France, sicut titulis primi fuere, sic et vitiis (as they were the first in rank so also in rottenness); and Cabinet du Roy, their own writer, distinctly of the rest.  “The nobles of Berry are most part lechers, they of Touraine thieves, they of Narbonne covetous, they of Guienne coiners, they of Provence