ts words and language
out of its ordinary pace and breaks it to his own fancy, which makes it
go so uneasy in a shuffle, which it has not been used to. He delivers
himself in a forced way, like one that sings with a feigned voice beyond
his natural compass. He loves the sound of words better than the sense,
and will rather venture to incur nonsense than leave out a word that he
has a kindness for. If he be a statesman, the slighter and meaner his
employments are the bigger he looks, as an ounce of tin swells and looks
bigger than an ounce of gold; and his affectations of gravity are the
most desperate of all, as the aphorism says--Madness of study and
consideration are harder to be cured than those of lighter and more
fantastic humour.

A MEDICINE-TAKER

Has a sickly mind and believes the infirmity is in his body, like one
that draws the wrong tooth and fancies his pain in the wrong place. The
less he understands the reason of physic the stronger faith he has in
it, as it commonly fares in all other affairs of the world. His disease
is only in his judgment, which makes him believe a doctor can fetch it
out of his stomach or his belly, and fright those worms out of his guts
that are bred in his brain. He believes a doctor is a kind of conjurer
that can do strange things, and he is as willing to have him think so;
for by that means he does not only get his money, but finds himself in
some possibility by complying with that fancy to do him good for it,
which he could never expect to do any other way; for, like those that
have been cured by drinking their own water, his own imagination is a
better medicine than any the doctor knows how to prescribe, even as the
weapon-salve cures a wound by being applied to that which made it. He is
no sooner well but any story or lie of a new famous doctor or strange
cure puts him into a relapse, and he falls sick of a medicine instead of
a disease, and catches physic like him that fell into a looseness at the
sight of a purge. He never knows when he is well or sick, but is always
tampering with his health till he has spoiled it, like a foolish
musician that breaks his strings with striving to put them in tune; for
Nature, which is physic, understands better how to do her own work than
those that take it from her at second hand. Hippocrates says, _Ars
longa, vita brevis_, and it is the truest of all his aphorisms--

"For he that's given much to the long art
Does not prolong hi