Is by interpretation a man of forecast. He is an artist of plots,
designs, and expedients to find out money, as others hide it, where
nobody would look for it. He is a great rectifier of the abuses of all
trades and mysteries, yet has but one remedy for all diseases; that is,
by getting a patent to share with them, by virtue of which they become
authorised, and consequently cease to be cheats. He is a great promoter
of the public good, and makes it his care and study to contrive
expedients that the nation may not be ill served with false rags,
arbitrary puppet-plays, and insufficient monsters, of all which he
endeavours to get the superintendency. He will undertake to render
treasonable pedlars, that carry intelligence between rebels and
fanatics, true subjects and well-affected to the Government for
half-a-crown a quarter, which he takes for giving them license to do so
securely and uncontrolled. He gets as much by those projects that
miscarry as by those that hold (as lawyers are paid as well for undoing
as preserving of men); for when he has drawn in adventurers to purchase
shares of the profit, the sooner it is stopped the better it proves for
him; for, his own business being done, he is the sooner rid of theirs.
He is very expert at gauging the understandings of those he deals with,
and has his engines always ready with mere air to blow all their money
out of their pockets into his own, as vintners do wine out of one vessel
into another. He is very amorous of his country, and prefers the public
good before his own advantage, until he has joined them both together in
some monopoly, and then he thinks he has done his part, and may be
allowed to look after his own affairs in the second place. The chiefest
and most useful part of his talent consists in quacking and lying, which
he calls answering of objections and convincing the ignorant. Without
this he can do nothing; for as it is the common practice of most
knaveries, so it is the surest and best fitted to the vulgar capacities
of the world; and though it render him more ridiculous to some few, it
always prevails upon the greater part.