gion, like their
gentility, is the extract of their acres; being therefore spiritual
because they are earthly; not forgetting the man of the law, whose
corruption gives the Hogan to the sincere Juncto. These are the simples
of this precious compound; a kind of Dutch hotch-potch, the Hogan Mogan
committee-man.

The Committee-man hath a sideman, or rather a setter, hight a
Sequestrator, of whom you may say, as of the great Sultan's horse, where
he treads the grass grows no more. He is the State's cormorant, one that
fishes for the public but feeds himself; the misery is he fishes without
the cormorant's property, a rope to strengthen the gullet and to make
him disgorge. A sequestrator! He is the devil's nut-hook, the sign with
him is always in the clutches. There are more monsters retain to him
than to all the limbs in anatomy. It is strange physicians do not apply
him to the soles of the feet in a desperate fever, he draws far beyond
pigeons. I hope some mountebank will slice him and make the experiment.
He is a tooth-drawer once removed; here is the difference, one applauds
the grinder the other the grist. Never till now could I verify the
poet's description, that the ravenous harpy had a human visage. Death
himself cannot quit scores with him; like the demoniac in the gospel, he
lives among tombs, nor is all the holy water shed by widows and orphans
a sufficient exorcism to dispossess him. Thus the cat sucks your breath
and the fiend your blood; nor can the brotherhood of witchfinders, so
sagely instituted with all their terror, wean the familiars.

But once more to single out my embossed committee-man; his fate (for I
know you would fain see an end of him) is either a whipping audit, when
he is wrung in the withers by a committee of examinations, and so the
sponge weeps out the moisture which he had soaked before; or else he
meets his passing peal in the clamorous mutiny of a gut-foundered
garrison, for the hedge-sparrow will be feeding the cuckoo till he
mistake his commons and bites off her head. Whatever it is, it is within
his desert, for what is observed of some creatures that at the same time
they trade in productions three stories high, suckling the first, big
with the second, and clicketing for the third: a committee-man is the
counterpoint, his mischief is superfoetation, a certain scale of
destruction, for he ruins the father, beggars the son, and strangles the
hope of all posterity.

THE CHARACTER OF