his task of
melancholy. [[2]All the language he speaks yet is tears, and they serve
him well enough to express his necessity.] His hardest labour is his
tongue, as if he were loath to use so deceitful an organ; and he is best
company with it when he can but prattle. We laugh at his foolish ports,

Shakspeare, of a child, says,
"---- the hand of time
Shall draw this brief into as huge a volume."

_K. John II._ i.

but his game is our earnest; and his drums, rattles, and hobby-horses, but
the emblems and mocking of man's business. His father hath writ him as his
own little story, wherein he reads those days of his life that he cannot
remember, and sighs to see what innocence he hath out-lived. The elder he
grows, he is a stair lower from God; and, like his first father, much
worse in his breeches.[3] He is the Christian's example, and the old man's
relapse; the one imitates his pureness, and the other falls into his
simplicity. Could he put off his body with his little coat, he had got
eternity without a burden, and exchanged but one heaven for another.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] So Washbourne, in his _Divine Poems_, 12mo. 1654:

"---- ere 'tis accustom'd unto sin,
_The mind white paper_ is, and will admit
Of any lesson you will write in it."--p. 26.

[2] This, and every other passage throughout the volume, [included between
brackets,] does not appear in the first edition of 1628.

[3] Adam did not, to use the words of the old Geneva Bible, "make himself
breeches," till he knew sin: the meaning of the passage in the text is
merely that, as a child advances in age, he commonly proceeds in the
knowledge and commission of vice and immorality.

II.

A YOUNG RAW PREACHER

Is a bird not yet fledged, that hath hopped out of his nest to be chirping
on a hedge, and will be straggling abroad at what peril soever. His
backwardness in the university hath set him thus forward; for had he not
truanted there, he had not been so hasty a divine. His small standing, and
time, hath made him a proficient only in boldness, out of which, and his
table-book, he is furnished for a preacher. His collections of study are
the notes of sermons, which, taken up at St. Mary's,[4] he utters in the
country: and if he write brachigraphy,[5] his stock is so much the
better. His writing is more than his reading, for he reads only what he
gets without book. Thus accomplished he comes down to his friends, a