s
turned, and then runs out again. His opinions are too violent to last,
for, like other things of the same kind in Nature, they quickly spend
themselves and fall to nothing. All his opinions are like wefts and
strays that are apt to straggle from their owners and belong to the lord
of the manor where they are taken up. His soul has no retentive faculty,
but suffers everything to run from him as fast as he receives it. His
whole life is like a preposterous ague in which he has his hot fit
always before his cold one, and is never in a constant temper. His
principles and resolves are but a kind of movables, which he will not
endure to be fastened to any freehold, but left loose to be conveyed
away at pleasure as occasion shall please to dispose of him. His soul
dwells, like a Tartar, in a hoord, without any settled habitation, but
is always removing and dislodging from place to place. He changes his
head oftener than a deer, and when his imaginations are stiff and at
their full growth, he casts them off to breed new ones, only to cast off
again the next season. All his purposes are built on air, the
chamelion's diet, and have the same operation to make him change colour
with every object he comes near. He pulls off his judgment as commonly
as his hat to every one he meets with. His word and his deed are all
one, for when he has given his word he has done, and never goes farther.
His judgment, being unsound, has the same operation upon him that a
disease has upon a sick man, that makes him find some ease in turning
from side to side, and still the last is the most uneasy.

A GLUTTON

Eats his children, as the poets say Saturn did, and carries his felicity
and all his concernments in his paunch. If he had lived when all the
members of the body rebelled against the stomach there had been no
possibility of accommodation. His entrails are like the sarcophagus,
that devours dead bodies in a small space, or the Indian zampatan, that
consumes flesh in a moment. He is a great dish made on purpose to carry
meat. He eats out his own head, and his horses' too; he knows no grace
but grace before meat, nor mortification but in fasting. If the body be
the tabernacle of the soul, he lives in a sutler's hut. He celebrates
mass, or rather mess, to the idol in his belly, and, like a papist, eats
his adoration. A third course is the third heaven to him, and he is
ravished into it. A feast is a good conscience to him, and he is
troubled