Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Henry Craik, ed. English Prose. 1916.
Vol. I. Fourteenth to Sixteenth Century

A Roaring Boy

Sir Thomas Overbury (1581–1613)

HIS life is a mere counterfeit patent: which nevertheless makes many a country justice tremble. Don Quixote’s watermills are still Scotch bagpipes to him. He sends challenges by word of mouth: for he protests (as he is a gentleman and a brother of the sword) he can neither write nor read. He hath run through divers parcels of land, and great houses, beside both the counters. If any private quarrel happen among our great courtiers, he proclaims the business, that’s the word, the business; as if the united forces of the Romish Catholics were making up for Germany. He cheats young gulls that are newly come to town; and when the keeper of the ordinary blames him for it, he answers him in his own profession, that a woodcock must be pluckt ere he be drest. He is a supervisor to brothels, and in them is a more unlawful reformer of vice, than prentices on Shrove-Tuesday. He loves his friend, as a councillor-at-law loves the velvet breeches he was first made barrister in; he’ll be sure to wear him threadbare ere he forsake him. He sleeps with a tobacco-pipe in’s mouth; and his first prayer i’ th’ morning is, he may remember whom he fell out with overnight. Soldier he is none, for he cannot distinguish between onion-seed and gunpowder: if he have worn it in his hollow tooth for the toothache, and so come to the knowledge of it, that’s all. The tenure by which he holds his means, is an estate at will; and that’s borrowing. Land-lords have but four quarter-days; but he three hundred and odd. He keeps very good company; yet is a man of no reckoning: and when he goes not drunk to bed, he is very sick next morning. He commonly dies like Anacreon, with a grape in’s throat; or Hercules, with fire in’s marrow. And I have heard of some (that have scap’t hanging) begged for anatomies; only to deter man from taking tobacco.