o not know what envy is:
for never do I hit upon any invention or device which tendeth to the
furtherance of good writing, but I instantly make it public; willing
that all mankind should write as well as myself.

--Which they certainly will, when they think as little.

Chapter 4.LXXII.

Now in ordinary cases, that is, when I am only stupid, and the thoughts
rise heavily and pass gummous through my pen--

Or that I am got, I know not how, into a cold unmetaphorical vein of
infamous writing, and cannot take a plumb-lift out of it for my soul; so
must be obliged to go on writing like a Dutch commentator to the end of
the chapter, unless something be done--

--I never stand conferring with pen and ink one moment; for if a pinch
of snuff, or a stride or two across the room will not do the business
for me--I take a razor at once; and having tried the edge of it upon
the palm of my hand, without further ceremony, except that of first
lathering my beard, I shave it off; taking care only if I do leave a
hair, that it be not a grey one: this done, I change my shirt--put on a
better coat--send for my last wig--put my topaz ring upon my finger; and
in a word, dress myself from one end to the other of me, after my best
fashion.

Now the devil in hell must be in it, if this does not do: for consider,
Sir, as every man chuses to be present at the shaving of his own beard
(though there is no rule without an exception), and unavoidably sits
over-against himself the whole time it is doing, in case he has a hand
in it--the Situation, like all others, has notions of her own to put
into the brain.--

--I maintain it, the conceits of a rough-bearded man, are seven years
more terse and juvenile for one single operation; and if they did not
run a risk of being quite shaved away, might be carried up by continual
shavings, to the highest pitch of sublimity--How Homer could write with
so long a beard, I don't know--and as it makes against my hypothesis, I
as little care--But let us return to the Toilet.

Ludovicus Sorbonensis makes this entirely an affair of the body (Greek)
as he calls it--but he is deceived: the soul and body are joint-sharers
in every thing they get: A man cannot dress, but his ideas get cloth'd
at the same time; and if he dresses like a gentleman, every one of them
stands presented to his imagination, genteelized along with him--so that
he has nothing to do, but take his pen, and write like himself.

For this c