r the
same notion, as one whose pockets are picked goes to Moll Cutpurse, as
the predominant in that faculty.

He outdives a Dutchman, gets a noble of him that was never worth
sixpence; for the poorest do not escape, but Dutch-like he will be
draining even in the driest ground. He aliens a delinquent's estate with
as little remorse as his other holiness gives away an heretic's kingdom,
and for the truth of the delinquency, both chapmen have as little share
of infallibility. Lye is the grand salad of arbitrary government,
executor to the star-chamber and the high commission; for those courts
are not extinct, they survive in him like dollars changed into single
money. To speak the truth, he is the universal tribunal; for since these
times all causes fall to his cognisance, as in a great infection all
diseases turn oft to the plague. It concerns our masters the parliament
to look about them; if he proceedeth at this rate the jack may come to
swallow the pike, as the interest often eats out the principal. As his
commands are great, so he looks for a reverence accordingly. He is
punctual in exacting your hat, and to say right his due, but by the same
title as the upper garment is the vails of the executioner. There was a
time when such cattle would hardly have been taken upon suspicion for
men in office, unless the old proverb were renewed, that the beggars
make a free company, and those their wardens. You may see what it is to
hang together. Look upon them severally, and you cannot but fumble for
some threads of charity. But oh, they are termagants in conjunction!
like fiddlers who are rogues when they go single, and joined in consort,
gentlemen musicianers. I care not much if I untwist my committee-man,
and so give him the receipt of this grand Catholicon.

Take a state martyr, one that for his good behaviour hath paid the
excise of his ears, so suffered captivity by the land-piracy of
ship-money; next a primitive freeholder, one that hates the king because
he is a gentleman transgressing the Magna Charta of delving Adam. Add to
these a mortified bankrupt that helps out his false weights with some
scruples of conscience, and with his peremptory scales can doom his
prince with a _mene tekel_. These with a new blue-stockinged justice,
lately made of a good basket-hilted yeoman, with a short-handed clerk
tacked to the rear of him to carry the knapsack of his understanding,
together with two or three equivocal sirs whose reli