Vulgar words in Character Writings of the 17th Century (Page 1)
This book at a glance
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~ ~ ~ Sentence 8 ~ ~ ~
Sir THOMAS OVERBURY A Good Woman A Very Woman Her Next Part A Dissembler A Courtier A Golden Ass A Flatterer An Ignorant Glory-Hunter A Timist An Amorist An Affected Traveller A Wise Man A Noble Spirit An Old Man A Country Gentleman A Fine Gentleman An Elder Brother A Braggadocio Welshman A Pedant A Serving-Man An Host An Ostler The True Character of a Dunce A Good Wife A Melancholy Man A Sailor A Soldier A Tailor A Puritan A Mere Common Lawyer A Mere Scholar A Tinker An Apparitor An Almanac-Maker A Hypocrite A Chambermaid A Precisian An Inns of Court Man A Mere Fellow of a House A Worthy Commander in the Wars A Vainglorious Coward in Command A Pirate An Ordinary Fence A Puny Clerk A Footman A Noble and Retired Housekeeper An Intruder into Favour A Fair and Happy Milkmaid An Arrant Horse-Courser A Roaring Boy A Drunken Dutchman resident in England A Phantastique: An Improvident Young Gallant A Button-Maker of Amsterdam A Distaster of the Time A Mere Fellow of a House A Mere Pettifogger An Ingrosser of Corn A Devilish Usurer A Waterman A Reverend Judge A Virtuous Widow An Ordinary Widow A Quack-Salver A Canting Rogue A French Cook A Sexton A Jesuit An Excellent Actor A Franklin A Rhymer A Covetous Man The Proud Man A Prison A Prisoner A Creditor A Sergeant His Yeoman A Common Cruel Jailer What a Character is The Character of a Happy Life An Essay on Valour JOSEPH HALL HIS SATIRES-- A Domestic Chaplain The Witless Gallant HIS CHARACTERS OF VIRTUES AND VICES I.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 134 ~ ~ ~
A good feast-hound or banquet-beagle, that will scent you out a supper some three miles off, and swear to his patrons, damn him!
~ ~ ~ Sentence 145 ~ ~ ~
And, in that hoodwinked humour, lives more like a suitor than a husband; standing in as true dread of her displeasure, as when he first made love to her.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 280 ~ ~ ~
Occasion is his Cupid, and he hath but one receipt of making love.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 286 ~ ~ ~
A GOLDEN ASS Is a young thing, whose father went to the devil; he is followed like a salt bitch, and limbed by him that gets up first; his disposition is cut, and knaves rend him like tenter-hooks; he is as blind as his mother, and swallows flatterers for friends.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 622 ~ ~ ~
A mere scholar is an intelligible ass, or a silly fellow in black that speaks sentences more familiarly than sense.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 723 ~ ~ ~
He will not stick to commit fornication or adultery so it be done in the fear of God and for the propagation of the godly, and can find in his heart to lie with any whore save the whore of Babylon.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 1,163 ~ ~ ~
His actions are guilty of more crimes than any other men's, thoughts; and he conceives no sin which he dare not act save only lust, from which he abstains for fear he should be charged with keeping bastards.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 1,905 ~ ~ ~
He cares not (for no great advantage) to lose his friend, pine his body, damn his soul; and would despatch himself when corn falls, but that he is loth to cast away money on a cord.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 2,432 ~ ~ ~
He will inveigle you to naughtiness to get your good name into his clutches; he will be your pandar to have you on the hip for a whore-master, and make you drunk to shew you reeling.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 2,460 ~ ~ ~
He is drawn into naughtiness with company, but suffers alone, and the bastard commonly laid to his charge.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 2,545 ~ ~ ~
She has heard of the rag of Rome, and thinks it a very sluttish religion, and rails at the whore of Babylon for a very naughty woman.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 2,724 ~ ~ ~
He has taken pains to be an ass, though not to be a scholar, and is at length discovered and laughed at.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 2,729 ~ ~ ~
He is a great diver in the streams or issues of gentry, and hot a by-channel or bastard escapes him; yea he does with them like some shameless quean, fathers more children on them than ever they begot.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 2,782 ~ ~ ~
He tastes styles as some discreeter palates do wine; and tells you which is genuine, which sophisticate and bastard.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 2,834 ~ ~ ~
An unclean jest shall shame him more than a bastard another man, and he that got it shall censure him among the rest.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 3,549 ~ ~ ~
He is in nature a dog, in wit an ass, in passion a bedlam, and in action a devil.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 3,557 ~ ~ ~
The tavern is his palace and his belly is his god; a whore is his mistress and the devil is his master.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 3,705 ~ ~ ~
He makes love commonly with his purse, and brags most of his maidenhead.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 4,425 ~ ~ ~
When he was a captain he made all the furniture of his horse, from the bit to the crupper, in beaten poetry, every verse being fitted to the proportion of the thing, with a moral allusion of the sense to the thing; as the bridle of moderation, the saddle of content, and the crupper of constancy; so that the same thing was both epigram and emblem, even as a mule is both horse and ass.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 4,436 ~ ~ ~
There was a young practitioner in poetry that found there was no good to be done without a mistress; for he that writes of love before he hath tried it doth but travel by the map, and he that makes love without a dame does like a gamester that plays for nothing.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 4,446 ~ ~ ~
For he that writes but one sonnet upon any of the public persons shall be sure to have his reader at every third word cry out, "What an ass is this to call Spanish paper and ceruse lilies and roses, or claps influences; to say the Graces are her waiting-women, when they are known to be no better than her bawds; that day breaks from her eyes when she looks asquint; or that her breath perfumes the Arabian winds when she puffs tobacco!"
~ ~ ~ Sentence 4,449 ~ ~ ~
He that wants teeth may as well venture upon a piece of tough horny brawn as such a line, for he will look like an ass eating thistles.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 4,486 ~ ~ ~
He has no quarrel to it but because he was born in it, and, like a bastard, he is ashamed of his mother, because she is of him.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 4,520 ~ ~ ~
He professes arms not for use, but ornament only, and yet makes the basest things in the world, as dogs' turds and women's spindles, weapons of good and worshipful bearings.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 4,555 ~ ~ ~
He inverts the moral of that fable of him that caressed his dog for fawning and leaping up upon him and beat his ass for doing the same thing, for it is all one to him whether he be applauded by an ass or a wiser creature, so he be but applauded.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 4,851 ~ ~ ~
They are all bastards commonly and unlawfully begotten, but being his own, he had rather, out of natural affection, take any pains, or beg, than they should want a subsistence.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 4,978 ~ ~ ~
The history of his life begins with keeping of whores, and ends with keeping of hogs; and as he fed high at first, so he does at last, for acorns are very high food.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 5,120 ~ ~ ~
For a buffoon is like a mad dog that has a worm in his tongue, which makes him bite at all that light in his way; and as he can do nothing alone, but must have somebody to set him that he may throw at, he that performs that office with the greatest freedom and is contented to be laughed at to give his patron pleasure cannot but be understood to have done very good service, and consequently deserves to be well rewarded, as a mountebank's pudding, that is content to be cut and slashed and burnt and poisoned, without which his master can show no tricks, deserves to have a considerable share in his gains.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 5,204 ~ ~ ~
For as strong bodies may freely venture to do and suffer that, without any hurt to themselves, which would destroy those that are feeble, so a saint that is strong in grace may boldly engage himself in those great sins and iniquities that would easily damn a weak brother, and yet come off never the worse.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 5,213 ~ ~ ~
His passion is as easily set on fire as a fart, and as soon out again.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 5,215 ~ ~ ~
He has commonplaces, and precedents of repartees, and letters for all occasions, and falls as readily into his method of making love as a parson does into his form of matrimony.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 5,218 ~ ~ ~
For these virtues he never fails of his summons to all balls, where he manages the country-dances with singular judgment, and is frequently an assistant at _l'ombre_; and these are all the uses they make of his parts, beside the sport they give themselves in laughing at him, which he takes for singular favours and interprets to his own advantage, though it never goes further; for, all his employments being public, he is never admitted to any private services, and they despise him as not woman's meat; for he applies to too many to be trusted by any one, as bastards by having many fathers have none at all.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 5,317 ~ ~ ~
He never shows himself humane or kind in anything but when he pimps to his cow or makes a match for his mare; in all things else he is surly and rugged, and does not love to be pleased himself, which makes him hate those that do him any good.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 5,346 ~ ~ ~
Impudence is the bastard of ignorance, not only unlawfully but incestuously begotten by a man upon his own understanding, and laid by himself at his own door, a monster of unnatural production; for shame is as much the propriety of human nature, though overseen by the philosophers, and perhaps more than reason, laughing, or looking asquint, by which they distinguish man from beasts; and the less men have of it the nearer they approach to the nature of brutes.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 5,363 ~ ~ ~
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.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 5,368 ~ ~ ~
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.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 5,371 ~ ~ ~
He measures his time by glasses of wine, as the ancients did by water-glasses; and as Hermes Trismegistus is said to have kept the first account of hours by the pissing of a beast dedicated to Serapis, he revives that custom in his own practice, and observes it punctually in passing his time.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 5,374 ~ ~ ~
He has washed down his soul and pissed it out, and lives now only by the spirit of wine or brandy, or by an extract drawn off his stomach.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 5,391 ~ ~ ~
He is like one of Homer's gods, that sets men together by the ears and fetches them off again how he pleases; brings armies into the field like Janello's leaden soldiers; leads up both sides himself, and gives the victory to which he pleases, according as he finds it fit the design of his story; makes love and lovers too, brings them acquainted, and appoints meetings when and where he pleases, and at the same time betrays them in the height of all their felicity to miserable captivity, or some other horrid calamity; for which he makes them rail at the gods and curse their own innocent stars when he only has done them all the injury; makes men villains, compels them to act all barbarous inhumanities by his own directions, and after inflicts the cruellest punishments upon them for it.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 5,401 ~ ~ ~
He exposes his wit like a bastard, for the next comer to take up and put out to nurse, which it seldom fails of, so ready is every man to contribute to the infamy of another.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 5,414 ~ ~ ~
He fathers all his own passions and concerns, like bastards, on the people, because, being entrusted by them without articles or conditions, they are bound to acknowledge whatsoever he does as their own act and deed.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 5,419 ~ ~ ~
Besides this, he makes no conscience of stealing anything that lights in his way, and borrows the advice of so many to correct, enlarge, and amend what he has ill-favouredly patched together, that it becomes like a thing drawn by counsel, and none of his own performance, or the son of a whore that has no one certain father.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 5,568 ~ ~ ~
He is intimate with no man but his pimp and his surgeon, with whom he keeps no state, but communicates all the states of his body.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 5,582 ~ ~ ~
He is always taking the name of his honour in vain, and will rather damn it like a knighthood of the post than want occasion to pawn it for every idle trifle, perhaps for more than it is worth, or any man will give to redeem it; and in this he deals uprightly, though perhaps in nothing else.