s
learning as his faculty, yet, like St. Austin's soul, _Creando
infunditur, infundendo creatur_. Nero was the first emperor of his
calling, though it be not much for his credit. He is like an elephant
that, though he cannot swim, yet of all creatures most delights to walk
along a river's side; and as, in law, things that appear not and things
that are not are all one, so he had rather not be than not appear. The
top of his ambition is to have his picture graved in brass and published
upon walls, if he has no work of his own to face with it. His want of
judgment inclines him naturally to the most extravagant undertakings,
like that of making old dogs young, telling how many persons there are
in a room by knocking at a door, stopping up of words in bottles, &c. He
is like his books, that contain much knowledge, but know nothing
themselves. He is but an index of things and words, that can direct
where they are to be spoken with, but no farther. He appears a great man
among the ignorant, and, like a figure in arithmetic, is so much the
more as it stands before ciphers that are nothing of themselves. He
calls himself an antisocordist, a name unknown to former ages, but
spawned by the pedantry of the present. He delights most in attempting
things beyond his reach, and the greater distance he shoots at, the
farther he is sure to be off his mark. He shows his parts as drawers do
a room at a tavern, to entertain them at the expense of their time and
patience. He inverts the moral of that fable of him that caressed his
dog for fawning and leaping up upon him and beat his ass for doing the
same thing, for it is all one to him whether he be applauded by an ass
or a wiser creature, so he be but applauded.

AN INTELLIGENCER

Would give a penny for any statesman's thought at any time. He travels
abroad to guess what princes are designing by seeing them at church or
dinner, and will undertake to unriddle a government at first sight, and
tell what plots she goes with, male or female; and discover, like a
mountebank, only by seeing the public face of affairs, what private
marks there are in the most secret parts of the body politic. He is so
ready at reasons of State, that he has them, like a lesson, by rote; but
as charlatans make diseases fit their medicines, and not their medicines
diseases, so he makes all public affairs conform to his own established
reason of State, and not his reason, though the case alter ever so much,
com