wear it after. To cover the mask afresh, was more than the mask was worth ;-and to wear a mask which was bald, or which could be half seen through, was as bad as having no mask at all.

-This is the reason, may it please your reverences, that in all our numerous family, for these four generations, we count no more than one archbishop, a Welsh judge, some three or four aldermen, and a single mountebank.

In the sixteenth century, we boast of no less than a dozen alchymists.

CHAPTER CCXLVIII.

It is with love as with cuckoldom;'-the suffering party is at least the third, but, generally, the last in the house who knows any thing about the matter: this comes, as all the world knows, from having half a dozen words for one thing; and so long as what in this vessel of the human frame is love,-may be hatred in that,―sentiment half a yard higher,—and nonsense,

-No, madam,--not there;-I mean at the part I am now pointing to with my fore-finger,-how can we help ourselves?

Of all mortal, and immortal men too, if you please, who ever soliloquized upon this mystic subject, my uncle Toby was the worst fitted to have pushed his researches through such a contention of feelings; and he had infallibly let them all run on, as we do worse matters, to see what they would turn out,-had not Bridget's pre-notification of them to Susannah, and Susannah's repeated manifestoes thereupon to all the world, made it necessary for my uncle Toby to look into the affair.

CHAPTER CCXLIX.

Why weavers, gardeners, and gladiators,—or a man with a pined leg (proceeding from some ailment in the foot)-should ever have had some tender nymph breaking her heart in secret for them, are points well and duly settled and accounted for, by ancient and modern physiologists.

A water-drinker, provided he is a professed one, and does it without fraud or covin, is precisely in the same predicament: not that, at first sight, there is any consequence, or show of logic in it, that a rill of cold water dribbling through my inward parts, should light up a torch in my Jenny's

-The proposition does not strike one on the contrary, it seems to run opposite to the natural workings of causes and effects;

But it shows the weakness and imbecility of human reason.

-And in perfect good health with it?' -The most perfect, madam, that Friendship herself could wish me.

- And drink nothing,-nothing but water?' -Impetuous fluid! the moment thou pressest against the flood-gates of the brain,-see how they give way!

In swims Curiosity, beckoning to her damsels to follow ;-they dive into the centre of the current.

Fancy sits musing upon the bank, and, with her eyes following the stream, turns straws and bulrushes into masts and bowsprits.-And Desire, with vest held up to the knee in one hand, snatches at them, as they swim by her, with the other.

O ye water-drinkers! is it then by this delusive fountain, that ye have so often governed and turned this world about like a mill-wheel,-grinding the faces of the impotent,-bepowdering their ribs,-be

peppering their noses, and changing sometimes even the very frame and face of nature!

If I was you, quoth Yorick, I would drink more water, Eugenius. And, if I was you, Yorick, re

plied Eugenius, so would I.

Which shows they had both read Longinus.

For my own part, I am resolved never to read book but my own, as long as I live.

any

CHAPTER CCL.

I wish my uncle Toby had been a water-drinker ; for then the thing had been accounted for,-that the first moment Widow Wadman saw him, she felt something stirring within her in his favour; something, something.

-Something, perhaps, more than friendship,-less than love;-something,-no matter what,-no matter where; I would not give a single hair off my mule's tail, and be obliged to pluck it off myself, (indeed, the villain has not many to spare, and is not a little vicious into the bargain) to be let by your worships into the

secret.

But the truth is, my uncle Toby was not a waterdrinker; he drank it neither pure nor mixed, nor anyhow, nor any-where, except fortuitously upon some advanced posts, where better liquor was not to be had, --or during the time he was under cure; when, the surgeon telling him it would extend the fibres, and bring them sooner into contact,-my uncle Toby drank it for quietness' sake.

Now, as all the world knows that no effect in nature can be produced without a cause, and as it is as well known that my uncle Toby was neither a weaver, a gardener, nor a gladiator,-unless, as a captain, you

will needs have him one; but then he was only a captain of foot, and, besides, the whole is an equivocation,

there is nothing left for us to suppose, but that my uncle Toby's leg,—but that will avail us little in the present hypothesis, unless it had proceeded from some ailment in the foot,-whereas his leg was not emaciated from any disorder in his foot, for my uncle Toby's leg was not emaciated at all. It was a little stiff and awkward, from a total disuse of it for the three years he lay confined at my father's house in town; but it was plump and muscular, and, in all other respects, as good and promising a leg as the other.

I declare, I do not recollect any one opinion or passage of my life, where my understanding was more at a loss to make ends meet, and torture the chapter I had been writing, to the service of the chapter following it, than in the present case: one would think I took a pleasure in running into difficulties of this kind, merely to make fresh experiments of getting out of them.-Inconsiderate soul that thou art! What! are not the unavoidable distresses with which, as an author and a man, thou art hemmed in on every side of thee; -are they, Tristram, not sufficient, but thou must entangle thyself still more?

Is it not enough that thou art in debt, and that thou hast ten cart-loads of thy fifth and sixth volumes 1 still, still unsold, and art almost at thy wit's ends how to get them off thy hands?

To this hour art thou not tormented with the vile asthma that thou gattest in skating against the wind in Flanders? and it is but two months ago that, in a fit of laughter, on seeing a cardinal make water like a quirister (with both hands) thou brakest a vessel in thy lungs, whereby, in two hours, thou lost as many quarts of blood; and, hadst thou lost as much more, did not the faculty tell thee,-it would have amounted to a gallon?

1 Alluding to the first edition.

CHAPTER CCLI.

-But, for Heaven's sake, let us not talk of quarts or gallons,-let us take the story straight before us; it is so nice and intricate a one, it will scarce bear the transposition of a single tittle; and, somehow or other, you have got me thrust almost into the middle of it.

-I beg we may take more care.

CHAPTER CCLII.

My uncle Toby and the Corporal had posted down with so much heat and precipitation, to take possession of the spot of ground we have so often spoke of, in order to open their campaign as early as the rest of the allies, that they had forgot one of the most necessary articles of the whole affair; it was neither a pioneer's spade, a pick-axe, or a shovel;

-It was a bed to lie on so that, as Shandy-hall was at that time unfurnished, and the little inn where poor Le Fevre died, not yet built, my uncle Toby was constrained to accept of a bed at Mrs. Wadman's, for a night or two, till Corporal Trim, (who, to the character of an excellent valet, groom, cook, sempster, surgeon, and engineer, superadded that of an excellent upholsterer too) with the help of a carpenter and a couple of tailors, constructed one in my uncle Toby's house.

A daughter of Eve, for such was Widow Wadman, and 'tis all the character I intend to give of her,

That she was a perfect woman,'-had better be fifty leagues off, or in her warm bed,-or playing with a case-knife, or any thing you please,-than make a man the object of her attention, when the house and all the furniture is her own.

-or