windows and benches
must take physic. He tells you your malady in Greek, though it be but a
cold, or head-ache; which by good endeavour and diligence he may bring
to some moment indeed. His most unfaithful act is, that he leaves a man
gasping, and his pretence is, death and he have a quarrel and must not
meet; but his fear is, lest the carcase should bleed.[15] Anatomies, and
other spectacles of mortality, have hardened him, and he is no more
struck with a funeral than a grave-maker. Noblemen use him for a
director of their stomach, and the ladies for wantonness,[16] especially
if he be a proper man. If he be single, he is in league with his
she-apothecary; and because it is the physician, the husband is patient.
If he have leisure to be idle (that is to study), he has a smatch at
alchemy, and is sick of the philosopher's stone; a disease uncurable,
but by an abundant phlebotomy of the purse. His two main opposites are a
mountebank and a good woman, and he never shews his learning so much as
in an invective against them and their boxes. In conclusion, he is a
sucking consumption, and a very brother to the worms, for they are both
ingendered out of man's corruption.

AN ALDERMAN.

He is venerable in his gown, more in his beard, wherewith he sets not
forth so much his own, as the face of a city. You must look on him as
one of the town gates, and consider him not as a body, but a
corporation. His eminency above others hath made him a man of worship,
for he had never been preferred, but that he was worth thousands. He
over-sees the commonwealth, as his shop, and it is an argument of his
policy, that he has thriven by his craft. He is a rigorous magistrate in
his ward; yet his scale of justice is suspected, lest it be like the
balances in his warehouse. A ponderous man he is, and substantial, for
his weight is commonly extraordinary, and in his preferment nothing
rises so much as his belly. His head is of no great depth, yet well
furnished; and when it is in conjunction with his brethren, may bring
forth a city apophthegm, or some such sage matter. He is one that will
not hastily run into error, for he treads with great deliberation, and
his judgment consists much as his pace. His discourse is commonly the
annals of his mayoralty, and what good government there was in the days
of his gold chain, though the door posts were the only things that
suffered reformation. He seems most sincerely religious, especially on
solem