s make one great noise
unlike all the rest, in which no one particular is distinguished. They
are a great dunghill where all sorts of dirty and nasty humours meet,
stink, and ferment, for all the parts are in a perpetual tumult. 'Tis no
wonder they make strange Churches, for they take naturally to any
imposture, and have a great antipathy to truth and order as being
contrary to their original confusion. They are a herd of swine possessed
with a dry devil that run after hanging instead of drowning. Once a
month they go on pilgrimage to the gallows, to visit the sepulchres of
their ancestors, as the Turks do once a week. When they come there they
sing psalms, quarrel, and return full of satisfaction and narrative.
When they break loose they are like a public ruin, in which the highest
parts lie undermost, and make the noblest fabrics heaps of rubbish. They
are like the sea, that's stirred into a tumult with every blast of wind
that blows upon it, till it become a watery Apennine, and heap mountain
billows upon one another, as once the giants did in the war with heaven.
A crowd is their proper element, in which they make their way with their
shoulders as pigs creep through hedges. Nothing in the world delights
them so much as the ruin of great persons or any calamity in which they
have no share, though they get nothing by it. They love nothing but
themselves in the likeness of one another, and, like sheep, run all that
way the first goes, especially if it be against their governors, whom
they have a natural disaffection to.

A KNIGHT OF THE POST

Is a retailer of oaths, a deposition-monger, an evidence-maker, that
lives by the labour of his conscience. He takes money to kiss the
Gospel, as Judas did Christ when he betrayed Him. As a good conscience
is a continual feast, so an ill one is with him his daily food. He plies
at a court of justice, as porters do at a market, and his business is to
bear witness, as they do burdens for any man that will pay them for it.
He will swear his ears through an inch-board, and wears them merely by
favour of the Court; for, being _amicus curiae_, they are willing to let
him keep the pillory out of possession, though he has forfeited his
right never so often; for when he is once outed of his ears he is past
his labour, and can do the commonwealth of practisers no more service.
He is false weight in the balance of justice, and, as a lawyer's tongue
is the tongue of the balance that incl