ll take you aside, and question you
of your affair, and listen with both ears, and look earnestly, and then
it is nothing so much yours as his. He snatches what you are doing out
of your hands, and cries "give it me," and does it worse, and lays an
engagement upon you too, and you must thank him for this pains. He lays
you down an hundred wild plots, all impossible things, which you must be
ruled by perforce, and he delivers them with a serious and counselling
forehead; and there is a great deal more wisdom in this forehead than
his head. He will woo for you, solicit for you, and woo you to suffer
him; and scarce any thing done, wherein his letter, or his journey, or
at least himself is not seen: if he have no task in it else, he will
rail yet on some side, and is often beaten when he need not. Such men
never thoroughly weigh any business, but are forward only to shew their
zeal, when many times this forwardness spoils it, and then they cry they
have done what they can, that is, as much hurt. Wise men still deprecate
these men's kindnesses, and are beholden to them rather to let them
alone; as being one trouble more in all business, and which a man shall
be hardest rid of.

A GOOD OLD MAN

Is the best antiquity, and which we may with least vanity admire. One
whom time hath been thus long a working, and like winter fruit, ripened
when others are shaken down. He hath taken out as many lessons of the
world as days, and learnt the best thing in it; the vanity of it. He
looks over his former life as a danger well past, and would not hazard
himself to begin again. His lust was long broken before his body, yet he
is glad this temptation is broke too, and that he is fortified from it
by this weakness. The next door of death sads him not, but he expects it
calmly as his turn in nature; and fears more his recoiling back to
childishness than dust. All men look on him as a common father, and on
old age, for his sake, as a reverent thing. His very presence and face
puts vice out of countenance, and makes it an indecorum in a vicious
man. He practises his experience on youth without the harshness of
reproof, and in his counsel is good company. He has some old stories
still of his own seeing to confirm what he says, and makes them better
in the telling; yet is not troublesome neither with the same tale again,
but remembers with them how oft he has told them. His old sayings and
morals seem proper to his beard; and the poetry of C