Is one that has studied the whole body of vice. His parts are
disproportionate to the whole, and, like a monster, he has more of some
and less of others than he should have. He has pulled down all that
fabric that Nature raised in him, and built himself up again after a
model of his own. He has dammed up all those lights that Nature made
into the noblest prospects of the world, and opened other little blind
loopholes backward by turning day into night and night into day. His
appetite to his pleasures is diseased and crazy, like the pica in a
woman that longs to eat that which was never made for food, or a girl in
the green sickness that eats chalk and mortar. Perpetual surfeits of
pleasure have filled his mind with bad and vicious humours (as well as
his body with a nursery of diseases), which makes him affect new and
extravagant ways as being sick and tired with the old. Continual wine,
women, and music put false values upon things which by custom become
habitual, and debauch his understanding so that he retains no right
notion nor sense of things; and as the same dose of the same physic has
no operation on those that are much used to it, so his pleasures require
a larger proportion of excess and variety to render him sensible of
them. He rises, eats, and goes to bed by the Julian account, long after
all others that go by the new style, and keeps the same hours with owls
and the antipodes. He is a great observer of the Tartars' customs, and
never eats till the great Cham, having dined, makes proclamation that
all the world may go to dinner. He does not dwell in his house, but
haunts it like an evil spirit that walks all night to disturb the
family, and never appears by day. He lives perpetually benighted, runs
out of his life, and loses his time, as men do their ways, in the dark;
and as blind men are led by their dogs, so is he governed by some mean
servant or other that relates to his pleasures. He is as inconstant as
the moon which he lives under; and although he does nothing but advise
with his pillow all day, he is as great a stranger to himself as he is
to the rest of the world. His mind entertains all things very freely
that come and go, but, like guests and strangers, they are not welcome
if they stay long. This lays him open to all cheats, quacks, and
impostors, who apply to every particular humour while it lasts, and
afterwards vanish. Thus, with St. Paul, though in a different sense, he
dies daily, and only lives in the night. He deforms Nature while he
intends to adorn her, like Indians that hang jewels in their lips and
noses. His ears are perpetually drilled with a fiddlestick. He endures
pleasures with less patience than other men do their pains.