Is an artificial magician, that with his fingers casts a mist before the
eyes of the rabble and makes his balls walk invisible which way he
pleases. He does his feats behind a table, like a Presbyterian in a
conventicle, but with much more dexterity and cleanliness, and therefore
all sorts of people are better pleased with him. Most professions and
mysteries derive the practice of all their faculties from him, but use
them with less ingenuity and candour; for the more he deceives those he
has to do with the better he deals with them; while those that imitate
him in a lawful calling are far more dishonest, for the more they impose
the more they abuse. All his cheats are primitive, and therefore more
innocent and of greater purity than those that are by tradition from
hand to hand derived to them; for he conveys money out of one man's
pocket into another's with much more sincerity and ingenuity than those
that do it in a legal way, and for a less considerable, though more
conscientious, reward. He will fetch money out of his own throat with a
great deal more of delight and satisfaction to those that pay him for it
than any haranguer whatsoever, and make it chuck in his throat better
than a lawyer that has talked himself hoarse, and swallowed so many fees
that he is almost choked. He will spit fire and blow smoke out of his
mouth with less harm and inconvenience to the Government than a
seditious holder-forth, and yet all these disown and scorn him, even as
men that are grown great and rich despise the meanness of their
originals. He calls upon "Presto begone," and the Babylonian's tooth, to
amuse and divert the rabble from looking too narrowly into his tricks;
while a zealous hypocrite, that calls heaven and earth to witness his,
turns up the eye and shakes the head at his idolatry and profanation. He
goes the circuit to all country fairs, where he meets with good
strolling practice, and comes up to Bartholomew Fair as his Michaelmas
term; after which he removes to some great thoroughfare, where he hangs
out himself in effigy, like a Dutch malefactor, that all those that pass
by may for their money have a trial of his skill. He endeavours to plant
himself as near as he can to some puppet-play, monster, or mountebank,
as the most convenient situation; and when trading grows scant they join
all their forces together and make up one grand show, and admit the
cutpurse and balladsinger to trade under them, as orange-women do at a
playhouse.