He studied the humour of the times; and, conforming to
what would gain him a maintenance, he turned his pulpit into a
stage-itinerant, and commenced Jack Priggins, a redoubtable Merry
Andrew.
Though the royalists, while in expectation of the restoration, had
promised to abstain from all suits of law on account of the injustice
they had suffered, the extortions of Morgan had so much out-heroded
Herod, that justice claimed a right of stripping the daw who had long
stalked in stolen trappings. Reduced, by repeated fines for
misdemeanors, to his primitive meanness, the little man lost all the
self-importance which had been the appendage of his greatness; and, from
being a happy, joyous person, who thought the world a very good world,
and all things going on as well as could be wished, he became a
discontented reviler, complaining that industry was unrewarded, and
talents left to perish on a dunghill. He gained a scanty support by
practising the basest chicane of his profession; and, after being
stripped of the affluence he had extorted from the rich, he contrived to
pick up the means of a bare existence, by inflaming the animosities, and
adding to the necessities of penury.
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