Is a counterfeit stone, and the larger and fairer he appears the more
apt he is to be discovered; whilst small ones, that pretend to no great
value, pass unsuspected. He is made like a man in arras-hangings, after
some great master's design, though far short of the original. He is like
a spectrum or walking spirit, that assumes the shape of some particular
person and appears in the likeness of something that he is not because
he has no shape of his own to put on. He has a kind of monkey and baboon
wit, that takes after some man's way whom he endeavours to imitate, but
does it worse than those things that are naturally his own; for he does
not learn, but take his pattern out, as a girl does her sampler. His
whole life is nothing but a kind of education, and he is always learning
to be something that he is not nor ever will be. For Nature is free, and
will not be forced out of her way, nor compelled to do anything against
her own will and inclination. He is but a retainer to wit and a follower
of his master, whose badge he wears everywhere, and therefore his way is
called servile imitation. His fancy is like the innocent lady's, who, by
looking on the picture of a Moor that hung in her chamber, conceived a
child of the same complexion; for all his conceptions are produced by
the pictures of other men's imaginations, and by their features betray
whose bastards they are. His Muse is not inspired, but infected with
another man's fancy; and he catches his wit, like the itch, of somebody
else that had it before, and when he writes he does but scratch himself.
His head is, like his hat, fashioned upon a block and wrought in a shape
of another man's invention. He melts down his wit and casts it in a
mould; and as metals melted and cast are not so firm and solid as those
that are wrought with the hammer, so those compositions that are founded
and run in other men's moulds are always more brittle and loose than
those that are forged in a man's own brain. He binds himself apprentice
to a trade which he has no stock to set up with, if he should serve out
his time and live to be made free. He runs a-whoring after another man's
inventions, for he has none of his own to tempt him to an incontinent
thought, and begets a kind of mongrel breed that never comes to good.