“I hope,” said I to my guide, “that the attorneys shall have your good word too.” “Yes, yes, ye need not doubt it,” said the old man, “for your attorney and your catchpole always hunt in couples. The attorney draws the information, and has all his forms ready, so that ’tis no more then but to fill up the blanks, and away to the jail with the delinquent; if there be anything to be gotten ’tis not a halfpenny matter, whether the party be guilty or innocent: give but an attorney pen, ink, and paper, and let him alone for witnesses. In case of an examination, he has the grace not to insist too much upon plain and naked truth; but to set down only what makes for his purpose, and then when they come to signing, to read over in the deponent’s sense (for his memory is good) what he has written in his own; and by this means, the cause goes on as he pleases. To prevent this villainy, it were well, if the examiners were as well sworn to write the truth as the witnesses are to speak it. And yet there are some honest men of all sorts but among the attorneys; the very calling does by the honest catchpoles, marshal’s men, and their fellows, as the sea by the dead: it may entertain them for a while, but in a very short space it spews them up again.”
The good man would have proceeded, if he had not been taken off by the rattling of a gilt coach, wherein was a courtier that was blown up as big as pride and vanity could make him. He sat stiff and upright, as if he had swallowed a stake; and made it his glory to show himself in that posture: it would have hurt his eyes, to have exchanged a glance with anything that was vulgar, and therefore he was very sparing of his looks. He had a deep laced ruff on, that was right Spanish, which he wore erect, and stiff starched, that a man would have thought he had carried his head in a paper-lanthorn. He was a great studier of set faces, and much affected with looking politic and big. But, for his arms and body, he had utterly lost or forgotten the use of them: for he could neither bow nor move his hat to any man that saluted him; no, nor so much as turn from one side to the other; but sat as if he had been boxed up, like a Bartlemew-baby. After this magnificent statue, followed a swarm of gaudy butterfly-lackeys: and his lordship’s company in the coach was a buffoon and a parasite. “Oh blessed prince!” said I, “to live at this rate of ease and splendour, and to have the world at will! What a glorious train is that! Beyond all doubt, there never was a great fortune better bestowed.” With that, the old man took me up, and told me that the judgment I had made upon this occasion, from one end to the other, was all dotage and mistake; save only, when I said he had the world at will: “and in that,” says he, “you have reason; for what is the world but labour, vanity, and folly; which is likewise the composition and entertainment of this cavalier.