Is a man too quick for himself; one whose actions put a leg still before
his judgement, and out-run it. Every hot fancy or passion is the signal
that sets him forward, and his reason comes still in the rear. One that
has brain enough, but not patience to digest a business, and stay the
leisure of a second thought. All deliberation is to him a kind of sloth
and freezing of action, and it shall burn him rather than take cold. He
is always resolved at first thinking, and the ground he goes upon is,
_hap what may_. Thus he enters not, but throws himself violently upon
all things, and for the most part is as violently upon all off again;
and as an obstinate _"I will"_ was the preface to his undertaking, so
his conclusion is commonly _"I would I had not;"_ for such men seldom do
anything that they are not forced to take in pieces again, and are so
much farther off from doing it, as they have done already. His friends
are with him as his physician, sought to only in his sickness and
extremity, and to help him out of that mire he has plunged himself into;
for in the suddenness of his passions he would hear nothing, and now his
ill success has allayed him he hears too late. He is a man still swayed
with the first reports, and no man more in the power of a pick-thank
than he. He is one will fight first, and then expostulate, condemn
first, and then examine. He loses his friend in a fit of quarrelling,
and in a fit of kindness undoes himself; and then curses the occasion
drew this mischief upon him, and cries God mercy for it, and curses
again. His repentance is merely a rage against himself, and he does
something in itself to be repented again. He is a man whom fortune must
go against much to make him happy, for had he been suffered his own way,
he had been undone.