a cripple with legs on. All the use he has of
this vessel himself, is to hold thus much; for his drinking is but a
scooping in of so many quarts, which are filled out into his body, and
that filled out again into the room, which is commonly as drunk as he.
Tobacco serves to air him after a washing, and is his only breath and
breathing while. He is the greatest enemy to himself, and the next to
his friend, and then most in the act of his kindness, for his kindness
is but trying a mastery, who shall sink down first: and men come from
him as a battle, wounded and bound up. Nothing takes a man off more from
his credit, and business, and makes him more recklessly careless what
becomes of all. Indeed he dares not enter on a serious thought, or if he
do, it is such melancholy that it sends him to be drunk again.

A PRISON

Is the grave of the living,[78] where they are shut up from the world
and their friends; and the worms that gnaw upon them their own thoughts
and the jailor. A house of meagre looks and ill smells, for lice, drink,
and tobacco are the compound. Plato's court was expressed from this
fancy; and the persons are much about the same parity that is there. You
may ask, as Menippus in Lucian, which is Nireus, which Thersites, which
the beggar, which the knight;--for they are all suited in the same form
of a kind of nasty poverty. Only to be out at elbows is in fashion here,
and a great indecorum not to be thread-bare. Every man shews here like
so many wrecks upon the sea, here the ribs of a thousand pound, here the
relicks of so many manors, a doublet without buttons; and 'tis a
spectacle of more pity than executions are. The company one with the
other is but a vying of complaints, and the causes they have to rail on
fortune and fool themselves, and there is a great deal of good
fellowship in this. They are commonly, next their creditors, most bitter
against the lawyers, as men that have had a great stroke in assisting
them hither. Mirth here is stupidity or hardheartedness, yet they feign
it sometimes to slip melancholy, and keep off themselves from
themselves, and the torment of thinking what they have been. Men huddle
up their life here as a thing of no use, and wear it out like an old
suit, the faster the better; and he that deceives the time best, best
spends it. It is the place where new comers are most welcomed, and, next
them, ill news, as that which extends their fellowship in misery, and
leaves few to