A book of characters, selected from the writings of Overbury, Earle, and Butler - Softcover

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1865 Excerpt: ... does) and yet presently will undertake to teach it; but conjure every scholar to keep it to himself, like treason that dies if it take air. Then they forbid them to converse with any that have not faith in the art, that they may hear as little against it as they have to say for it,--an excellent preservative to keep an implicit faith from taking cold. This is the highway of all impostors, who can never do more than another believes. But after so many precepts and rules, delivered with the greatest confidence and presumption of certainty, they will tell you, that this art is not to be attained but by divine revelation, and only to be expected by holy and sanctified persons, that have left behind them all the concernments of this world; whereby it seems, this shadow of art follows those only that fly it, and flies from those that follow it. A HERALD Calls himself a king because he has power and authority to hang, draw, and quarter arms; for, assuming a jurisdiction over the distributive justice of titles of honour as far as words extend, he gives himself as great a latitude that way as other magistrates use to do where they have authority, and would enlarge it as far as they can. It is true he can make no lords nor knights of himself, but as many squires and gentlemen as he pleases, and adopt them into what family they have a mind. His dominions abound with all sorts of cattle, fish, and fowl, and all manner of manufactures, besides whole fields of gold and silver, which he magnificently bestows upon his followers, or sells as cheap as lands in Jamaica. The language they use is barbarous, as being but a dialect of pedlar's French or the Egyptian, though of a loftier sound, and in the propriety affecting brevity, as the other does verbosity. His business is li...