A prisoner is an impatient patient, lingering under the rough hands of a
cruel physician: his creditor having cast his water knows his disease,
and hath power to cure him, but takes more pleasure to kill him. He is
like Tantalus, who hath freedom running by his door, yet cannot enjoy
the least benefit thereof. His greatest grief is that his credit was so
good and now no better. His land is drawn within the compass of a
sheep's skin, and his own hand the fornication that bars him of
entrance: he is fortune's tossing-ball, an object that would make mirth
melancholy: to his friends an abject, and a subject of nine days' wonder
in every barber's shop, and a mouthful of pity (that he had no better
fortune) to midwives and talkative gossips; and all the content that
this transitory life can give him seems but to flout him, in respect the
restraint of liberty bars the true use. To his familiars he is like a
plague, whom they dare scarce come nigh for fear of infection; he is a
monument ruined by those which raised him, he spends the day with a _hei
mihi! væ miserum!_ and the night with a _nullis est medicabilis herbis._