«Caracteres» (en Remains 1759-obra póstuma)
Original: «A play writer: ... Nothing encourages him more in his undertaking than his ignorance, for he has not wit enough to understand so much as the difficulty of what he attempts; therefore he runs on boldly like a foolhardy wit, and Fortune, that favours fools and the bold, sometimes takes notice of him for his double capacity, and receives him into her good graces. He has one motive more, and that is the concurrent ignorant judgment of the present age, in which his sottish fopperies pass with applause, like Oliver Cromwell's oratory among fanatics of his own canting inclination. He finds it easier to write in rhyme than prose, for the world being over-charged with romances, he finds his plots, passions, and repartees ready made to his hand, and if he can but turn them into rhyme the thievery is disguised, and they pass for his own wit and invention...».
Fuente: Remains, vol. 2 (1759)
Samuel Butler (poeta): Propio
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«Caracteres» (en Remains 1759-obra póstuma)
Original: «A libeller: ... All his works treat but of two things, his own malice and another man's faults, both which he describes in very proper and pertinent language. He is not much concerned whether what he writes be true or false; that's nothing to his purpose, which aims only at filthy and bitter, and therefore his language is, like pictures of the devil, the fouler the better. He robs a man of his good name, not for any good it will do him (for he dares not own it), but merely, as a jackdaw steals money, for his pleasure... He deals with a man as the Spanish Inquisition does with heretics, clothes him in a coat painted with hellish shapes of fiends, and so shows him to the rabble to render him the more odious...».
Fuente: Remains, vol. 2 (1759)
«Caracteres» (en Remains 1759-obra póstuma)
Original: «A lawyer: Is a retailer of justice that uses false lights, false weights, and false measures. He measures right and wrong by his retaining fee, and, like a French duellist, engages on that side that first bespeaks him, though it be against his own brother; not because it is right, but merely upon a punctilio of profit, which is better than honour to him, because riches will buy nobility, and nobility nothing, as having no intrinsic value... He believes it no fault in himself to err in judgment, because that part of the law belongs to the judge and not to him...».
Fuente: [Morley] (1891).
Fuente: Remains, vol. 2 (1759)