yme now and then into the bargain, or run upon a letter,
it is a work of supererogation.

For similitudes, he likes the hardest and most obscure best; for as
ladies wear black patches to make their complexions seem fairer than
they are, so when an illustration is more obscure than the sense that
went before it, it must of necessity make it appear clearer than it did,
for contraries are best set off with contraries.

He has found out a way to save the expense of much wit and sense; for he
will make less than some have prodigally laid out upon five or six words
serve forty or fifty lines. This is a thrifty invention, and very easy,
and, if it were commonly known, would much increase the trade of wit and
maintain a multitude of small poets in constant employment. He has found
out a new sort of poetical Georgics, a trick of sowing wit like
clover-grass on barren subjects which would yield nothing before. This
is very useful for the times, wherein, some men say, there is no room
left for new invention. He will take three grains of wit like the
elixir, and projecting it upon the iron age, turn it immediately into
gold. All the business of mankind has presently vanished; the whole
world has kept holiday; there have been no men but heroes and poets, no
women but nymphs and shepherdesses; trees have borne fritters, and
rivers flowed plum-porridge.

We read that Virgil used to make fifty or sixty verses in a morning, and
afterwards reduce them to ten. This was an unthrifty vanity, and argues
him as well ignorant in the husbandry of his own poetry as Seneca says
he was in that of a farm; for, in plain English, it was no better than
bringing a noble to nine-pence. And as such courses brought the prodigal
son to eat with hogs, so they did him to feed with horses, which were
not much better company, and may teach us to avoid doing the like. For
certainly it is more noble to take four or five grains of sense, and,
like a gold-beater, hammer them into so many leaves as will fill a whole
book, than to write nothing but epitomes, which many wise men believe
will be the bane and calamity of learning. When he writes he commonly
steers the sense of his lines by the rhyme that is at the end of them,
as butchers do calves by the tail. For when he has made one line, which
is easy enough, and has found out some sturdy hard word that will but
rhyme, he will hammer the sense upon it, like a piece of hot iron upon
an anvil, into what form he ple