But, sir, is this the way to recover your father’s favour? Why, Sir Sampson will be irreconcilable. If your younger brother should come from sea, he’d never look upon you again. You’re undone, sir; you’re ruined; you won’t have a friend left in the world if you turn poet. Ah, pox confound that Will’s coffee-house: it has ruined more young men than the Royal Oak lottery. Nothing thrives that belongs to’t. The man of the house would have been an alderman by this time, with half the trade, if he had set up in the city. For my part, I never sit at the door that I don’t get double the stomach that I do at a horse race. The air upon Banstead-Downs is nothing to it for a whetter; yet I never see it, but the spirit of famine appears to me, sometimes like a decayed porter, worn out with pimping, and carrying billet doux and songs: not like other porters, for hire, but for the jests’ sake. Now like a thin chairman, melted down to half his proportion, with carrying a poet upon tick, to visit some great fortune; and his fare to be paid him like the wages of sin, either at the day of marriage, or the day of death.

Jere Monologue from William Congreve

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