Is one that wears his feather on the inside of his head. His brain is
like quicksilver, apt to receive any impression but retain none. His
mind is made of changeable stuff, that alters colour with every motion
towards the light. He is a cormorant that has but one gut, devours
everything greedily, but it runs through him immediately. He does not
know so much as what he would be, and yet would be everything he knows.
He is like a paper-lantern, that turns with the smoke of a candle. He
wears his clothes as the ancient laws of the land have provided,
according to his quality, that he may be known what he is by them; and
it is as easy to decipher him by his habit as a pudding. He is rigged
with ribbon, and his garniture is his tackle; all the rest of him is
hull. He is sure to be the earliest in the fashion, and lays out for it
like the first peas and cherries. He is as proud of leading a fashion as
others are of a faction, and glories as much to be in the head of a mode
as a soldier does to be in the head of an army. He is admirably skilful
in the mathematics of clothes, and can tell, at the first view, whether
they have the right symmetry. He alters his gait with the times, and has
not a motion of his body that (like a dottrel) he does not borrow from
somebody else. He exercises his limbs like a pike and musket, and all
his postures are practised. Take him altogether, and he is nothing but a
translation, word for word, out of French, an image cast in
plaster-of-Paris, and a puppet sent over for others to dress themselves
by. He speaks French as pedants do Latin, to show his breeding, and most
naturally where he is least understood. All his non-naturals, on which
his health and diseases depend, are _stile nuovo_, French is his holiday
language, that he wears for his pleasure and ornament, and uses English
only for his business and necessary occasions. He is like a Scotchman;
though he is born a subject of his own nation, he carries a French
faction within him.
He is never quiet, but sits as the wind is said to do when it is most in
motion. His head is as full of maggots as a pastoral poet's flock. He
was begotten, like one of Pliny's Portuguese horses, by the wind. The
truth is, he ought not to have been reared; for, being calved in the
increase of the moon, his head is troubled with a ----
_N.B._--The last word not legible.