Is a congregation or assembly of the States-general sent from their
several and respective shops, stalls, and garrets. They are full of
controversy, and every one of a several judgment concerning the business
under present consideration, whether it be mountebank, show, hanging, or
ballad-singer. They meet, like Democritus's atoms, _in vacuo_, and by a
fortuitous jostling together produce the greatest and most savage beast
in the whole world; for though the members of it may have something of
human nature while they are asunder, when they are put together they
have none at all, as a multitude of several sounds make one great noise
unlike all the rest, in which no one particular is distinguished. They
are a great dunghill where all sorts of dirty and nasty humours meet,
stink, and ferment, for all the parts are in a perpetual tumult. 'Tis no
wonder they make strange Churches, for they take naturally to any
imposture, and have a great antipathy to truth and order as being
contrary to their original confusion. They are a herd of swine possessed
with a dry devil that run after hanging instead of drowning. Once a
month they go on pilgrimage to the gallows, to visit the sepulchres of
their ancestors, as the Turks do once a week. When they come there they
sing psalms, quarrel, and return full of satisfaction and narrative.
When they break loose they are like a public ruin, in which the highest
parts lie undermost, and make the noblest fabrics heaps of rubbish. They
are like the sea, that's stirred into a tumult with every blast of wind
that blows upon it, till it become a watery Apennine, and heap mountain
billows upon one another, as once the giants did in the war with heaven.
A crowd is their proper element, in which they make their way with their
shoulders as pigs creep through hedges. Nothing in the world delights
them so much as the ruin of great persons or any calamity in which they
have no share, though they get nothing by it. They love nothing but
themselves in the likeness of one another, and, like sheep, run all that
way the first goes, especially if it be against their governors, whom
they have a natural disaffection to.