call to thrive, to do well; and
preferment only the grace of God. That aim all studies at this mark, and
shew you poor scholars as an example to take heed by. That think the
prison and want a judgment for some sin, and never like well hereafter of
a jail-bird. That know no other content but wealth, bravery, and the
town-pleasures; that think all else but idle speculation, and the
philosophers madmen. In short, men that are carried away with all
outwardnesses, shews, appearances, the stream, the people; for there is no
man of worth but has a piece of singularity, and scorns something.

XL.

A PLODDING STUDENT

Is a kind of alchymist or persecutor of nature, that would change the dull
lead of his brain into finer metal, with success many times as
unprosperous, or at least not quitting the cost, to wit, of his own oil
and candles. He has a strange forced appetite to learning, and to atchieve
it brings nothing but patience and a body. His study is not great but
continual, and consists much in the sitting up till after midnight in a
rug-gown and a night-cap, to the vanquishing perhaps of some six lines;
yet what he has, he has perfect, for he reads it so long to understand it,
till he gets it without book. He may with much industry make a breach into
logick, and arrive at some ability in an argument; but for politer studies
he dare not skirmish with them, and for poetry accounts it impregnable.
His invention is no more than the finding out of his papers, and his few
gleanings there; and his disposition of them is as just as the
bookbinders, a setting or glewing of them together. He is a great
discomforter of young students, by telling them what travel it has cost
him, and how often his brain turned at philosophy, and makes others fear
studying as a cause of duncery. He is a man much given to apothegms, which
serve him for wit, and seldom breaks any jest but which belongs to some
Lacedemonian or Roman in Lycosthenes. He is like a dull carrier's horse,
that will go a whole week together, but never out of a foot pace; and he
that sets forth on the Saturday shall overtake him.

XLI.

PAUL'S WALK[64]

Is the land's epitome, or you may call it the lesser isle of Great
Britain. It is more than this, the whole world's map, which you may here
discern in its perfectest motion, justling and turning. It is a heap of
stones and men, with a vast confusion of languages; and were the steeple
not sanctified, nothing l