From “Characters.”

A USURER is sowed as cumin or hempseed, with curses, and thinks he thrives the better; he is better read in the penal statutes than the Bible, and his evil angel persuades him he shall no sooner be saved by them. He can be no man’s friend, for all men he hath most interest in he undoes; and a double dealer he is certainly, for by his good-will he ever takes the forfeit. He puts his money to the unnatural act of generation, and his scrivener is the supervivor bawd to it; good deeds he loves none, but sealed and delivered; nor doth he wish anything to thrive in the country, but beehives, for they make him wax rich. He hates all but law Latin, yet thinks he might be drawn to love a scholar, could he reduce the year to a shorter compass, that his use-money might come in the faster; he seems to be the son of a tailor, for all his estate is most heavy and cruel bonds. He doth not give, but sell days of payments, and those at the rate of a man’s undoing; he doth only fear that the day of judgment should fall sooner than the payment of some great sum of money due to him; he removes his lodging when a subsidy comes, and if he be found out, and pay it, he grumbles treason, but it is in such a deformed silence, as witches raise their spirits in;… and it seems, he was at Tilbury camp, for you must not tell him of a Spaniard. He is a man of no conscience; for, like the farmer that swooned with going into Bucklersbury, he falls into a cold sweat, if he but look into the Chancery; he thinks it his religion,—we are in the right for everything if that were abolished; he hides his money as if he thought to find it again at the last day, and then begin his old trade with it; his clothes plead prescription, and whether they or his body are more rotten, is a question; yet should he live to be hanged in them, this good they would do him, the very hangman would pity his case; the table he keeps is able to starve twenty tall men; his servants have not their living, but their dying from him, and that is of hunger; a spare diet he commends in all men but himself; he comes to cathedrals only for love of the singing boys, because they look hungry; he likes our religion best, because ’tis best cheap, yet would fain allow of purgatory, because ’twas of his trade, and brought in so much money; his heart closes with the same snaphance his purse doth, ’tis seldom open to any man; friendship he accounts but a word without any signification; nay, he loves all the world so little, that if it were possible, he would make himself his own executor; for certain he is made administrator to his own good name, while he is in perfect memory, for that dies long before him, but he is so far from being at the charge of a funeral for it, that he lets it stink above ground. In conclusion, for neighborhood you were better dwell by a contentious lawyer; and for his death, ’tis rather surfeit, or despair; for seldom such as he die of God’s making, as honest men should do.