Is one that hath been a monied man, and is still a very close fellow;
whosoever is of his acquaintance, let them make much of him, for they
shall find him as fast a friend as any in England: he is a sure man, and
you know where to find him. The corruption of a bankrupt is commonly the
generation of this creature. He dwells on the back side of the world, or
in the suburbs of society, and lives in a tenement which he is sure none
will go about to take over his head. To a man that walks abroad, he is
one of the antipodes, that goes on the top of the world, and this under
it. At his first coming in, he is a piece of new coin, all sharking old
prisoners lie sucking at his purse. An old man and he are much alike,
neither of them both go far. They are still angry and peevish, and they
sleep little. He was born at the fall of Babel, the confusion of
languages is only in his mouth. All the vacations he speaks as good
English as any man in England, but in term times he breaks out of that
hopping one-legged pace into a racking trot of issues, bills,
replications, rejoinders, demures, querelles, subpoenas, &c., able to
fright a simple country fellow, and make him believe he conjures.
Whatsoever his complexion was before, it turns in this place to choler
or deep melancholy, so that he needs every hour to take physic to loose
his body; for that, like his estate, is very foul and corrupt, and
extremely hard bound. The taking of an execution off his stomach give
him five or six stools, and leaves his body very soluble. The
withdrawing of an action is a vomit. He is no sound man, and yet an
utter barrister, nay, a sergeant of the case, will feed heartily upon
him; he is very good picking meat for a lawyer. The barber-surgeons may,
if they will, beg him for an anatomy after he hath suffered an
execution. An excellent lecture may be made upon his body; for he is a
kind of dead carcase--creditors, lawyers, and jailors devour it:
creditors peck out his eyes with his own tears; lawyers flay off his own
skin, and lap him in parchment; and jailors are the Promethean vultures
that gnaw his very heart. He is a bond-slave to the law, and, albeit he
were a shopkeeper in London, yet he cannot with safe conscience write
himself a freeman. His religion is of five or six colours: this day he
prays that God would turn the hearts of his creditors, and to-morrow he
curseth the time that ever he saw them. His apparel is daubed commonly
with statute lace, the suit itself of durance, and the hose full of long
pains. He hath many other lasting suits which he himself is never able
to wear out, for they wear out him. The zodiac of his life is like that
of the sun, marry not half so glorious. It begins in Aries and ends in
Pisces. Both head and feet are, all the year long, in troublesome and
laborious motions, and Westminster Hall is his sphere. He lives between
the two tropics Cancer and Capricorn, and by that means is in double
danger of crabbed creditors for his purse, and horns for his head, if
his wife's heels be light. If he be a gentleman, he alters his arms so
soon as he comes in. Few here carry fields or argent, but whatsoever
they bear before, here they give only sables. Whiles he lies by it, he
is travelling over the Alps, and the hearts of his creditors are the
snows that lie unmelted in the middle of summer. He is an almanac out of
date; none of his days speak of fair weather. Of all the files of men,
he marcheth in the last, and comes limping, for he is shot, and is no
man of this world. He hath lost his way, and being benighted, strayed
into a wood full of wolves, and nothing so hard as to get away without
being devoured. He that walks from six to six in Paul's goes still but a
quoit's cast before this man.