assumes a shape, as his master, the
devil, does when he appears. He wears counterfeit hands (as the Italian
pickpocket did), which are fastened to his breast as if he held them up
to heaven, while his natural fingers are in his neighbour's pocket. The
whole scope of all his actions appears to be directed, like an archer's
arrow, at heaven, while the clout he aims at sticks in the earth. The
devil baits his hook with him when he fishes in troubled waters. He
turns up his eyes to heaven like birds that have no upper lid. He is a
weathercock upon the steeple of the church, that turns with every wind
that blows from any point of the compass. He sets his words and actions
like a printer's letters, and he that will understand him must read him
backwards. He is much more to be suspected than one that is no
professor, as a stone of any colour is easier counterfeited than a
diamond that is of none. The inside of him tends quite cross to the
outside, like a spring that runs upward within the earth and down
without. He is an operator for the soul, and corrects other men's sins
with greater of his own, as the Jews were punished for their idolatry by
greater idolaters than themselves. He is a spiritual highwayman that
robs on the road to heaven. His professions and his actions agree like a
sweet voice and a stinking breath.

AN OPINIONATER

Is his own confidant, that maintains more opinions than he is able to
support. They are all bastards commonly and unlawfully begotten, but
being his own, he had rather, out of natural affection, take any pains,
or beg, than they should want a subsistence. The eagerness and violence
he uses to defend them argues they are weak, for if they were true they
would not need it. How false soever they are to him, he is true to them;
and as all extraordinary affections of love or friendship are usually
upon the meanest accounts, he is resolved never to forsake them, how
ridiculous soever they render themselves and him to the world. He is a
kind of a knight-errant that is bound by his order to defend the weak
and distressed, and deliver enchanted paradoxes, that are bewitched and
held by magicians and conjurers in invisible castles. He affects to have
his opinions as unlike other men's as he can, no matter whether better
or worse, like those that wear fantastic clothes of their own devising.
No force of argument can prevail upon him; for, like a madman, the
strength of two men in their wits is not able