Calls himself a king because he has power and authority to hang, draw,
and quarter arms. For assuming a jurisdiction over the distributive
justice of titles of honour, as far as words extend, he gives himself as
great a latitude that way as other magistrates use to do where they have
authority and would enlarge it as far as they can. 'Tis true he can make
no lords nor knights of himself, but as many squires and gentlemen as he
pleases, and adopt them into what family they have a mind. His dominions
abound with all sorts of cattle, fish, and fowl, and all manner of
manufactures, besides whole fields of gold and silver, which he
magnificently bestows upon his followers or sells as cheap as lands in
Jamaica. The language they use is barbarous, as being but a dialect of
pedlar's French or the Egyptian, though of a loftier sound, and in the
propriety affecting brevity, as the other does verbosity. His business
is like that of all the schools, to make plain things hard with
perplexed methods and insignificant terms, and then appear learned in
making them plain again. He professes arms not for use, but ornament
only, and yet makes the basest things in the world, as dogs' turds and
women's spindles, weapons of good and worshipful bearings. He is wiser
than the fellow that sold his ass, but kept the shadow for his own use;
for he sells only the shadow (that is, the picture) and keeps the ass
himself. He makes pedigrees as apothecaries do medicines when they put
in one ingredient for another that they have not by them; by this means
he often makes incestuous matches, and causes the son to many the
mother. His chief province is at funerals, where he commands in chief,
marshals the _tristitiae irritamenta_, and, like a gentleman-sower to
the worms, serves up the feast with all punctual formality. He will join
as many shields together as would make a Roman _testudo_ or Macedonian
phalanx, to fortify the nobility of a new-made lord that will pay for
the impressing of them and allow him coat and conduct money. He is a
kind of a necromancer, and can raise the dead out of their graves to
make them marry and beget those they never heard of in their lifetime.
His coat is, like the King of Spain's dominions, all skirts, and hangs
as loose about him; and his neck is the waist, like the picture of
Nobody with his breeches fastened to his collar. He will sell the head
or a single joint of a beast or fowl as dear as the whole body, like a
pig's head in Bartholomew Fair, and after put off the rest to his
customers at the same rate. His arms, being utterly out of use in war
since guns came up, have been translated to dishes and cups, as the
ancients used their precious stones, according to the poet, _Gemmas ad
pocula transfert a gladiis, &c._; and since are like to decay every day
more and more, for since he gave citizens coats-of-arms, gentlemen have
made bold to take their letters of mark by way of reprisal. The hangman
has a receipt to mar all his work in a moment, for by nailing the wrong
end of a scutcheon upwards upon a gibbet all the honour and gentility
extinguishes of itself, like a candle that's held with the flame
downwards. Other arms are made for the spilling of blood, but his only
purify and cleanse it like scurvy-grass; for a small dose taken by his
prescription will refine that which is as base and gross as bull's blood
(which the Athenians used to poison withal) to any degree of purity.