Is a fellow newly great and newly proud; one that hath put himself into
another face upon his preferment, for his own was not bred to it; one
whom fortune hath shot up to some office or authority, and he shoots up
his neck to his fortune, and will not bate you an inch of either. His
very countenance and gesture bespeak how much he is, and if you
understand him not, he tells you, and concludes every period with his
place, which you must and shall know. He is one that looks on all men as
if he were angry, but especially on those of his acquaintance, whom he
beats off with a surlier distance, as men apt to mistake him, because
they have known him: and for this cause he knows not you 'till you have
told him your name, which he thinks he has heard, but forgot, and with
much ado seems to recover. If you have any thing to use him in, you are
his vassal for that time, and must give him the patience of any injury,
which he does only to shew what he may do. He snaps you up bitterly,
because he will be offended, and tells you, you are saucy and
troublesome, and sometimes takes your money in this language. His very
courtesies are intolerable, they are done with such an arrogance and
imputation; and he is the only man you may hate after a good turn, and
not be ungrateful; and men reckon it among their calamities to be
beholden unto him. No vice draws with it a more general hostility, and
makes men readier to search into his faults, and of them, his beginning;
and no tale so unlikely but is willingly heard of him and believed. And
commonly such men are of no merit at all, but make out in pride what
they want in worth, and fence themselves with a stately kind of
behaviour from that contempt which would pursue them. They are men whose
preferment does us a great deal of wrong, and when they are down, we may
laugh at them without breach of good-nature.