Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/328

learn the same happily, that cannot readily imitate all the sounds and tones of voices hee heareth.⁠3. No man can danse well or fence well, that cannot readily imitate all the motions which are taught in those exercises.⁠4. No man can be a good orrator that cannot attune and put on all the miens, looks, gestures, and appearances, which attend the passions that he would excite in his hearers.⁠5. Representation, or the art of making absent Persons and things present, as often as is requisite—this is imitation, monstration, or demonstration of persons and things. These are the only Mimicks that I like in my children, applied to good uses and not to hurt neighbours. If this be crooked timber, instead of straight, we must dispose of it to shipping—and beast hooks. I suppose you do not blame mimicking in this sense, but rather mean the act or practice of ridiculing any person or thing and making the same vile and contemptible, which faculty who is master of, saith your author, Clerambault,^[1] is master of the world. I incline to this opinion, notwithstanding what you say of the D. of Buckingham, whose case requires a special Essay. For why do you learn to ride the great horse, but to trample down your enemies? Why to fence, but to disarm or disable them? Why do you affect great offices, but to make men subject to you and to become low and weak, in comparison of yourself? Yet in all these cases you are not certain of victory, but only encouraged to fight upon occasion; nor doth it follow that whoever can ride or fence and shoot and wrestle, is thereby made more apt to offend or wrong his friends, but rather to defend himself against wrongs, by the reputation that hee can repay them. Now if the art of ridiculing be used as aforesaid, where is the evil, when it is only another more manlike sort of fighting; whereas in the other sort of fighting, beasts commonly excell men? I have expounded the faculty of mimic or ridiculing: there is another between them, which is, not to make men laughed at, but to bee facetious; that is to make the generality of men laugh, without offending any, but be conscious of their owne fault; of which more hereafter.'^[2]

1. The allusion is not clear. Clerambault, the celebrated musical composer, was only born in 1676.
2. May 4, 1686.