-You shall go home directly, Le Fevre, said my uncle Toby, to my house ;-and we'll send for a doctor to see what's the matter;-and we'll have an apothecary;-and the Corporal shall be your nurse ;and I'll be your servant, Le Fevre.

There was a frankness in my uncle Toby, not the effect of familiarity, but the cause of it, which let you at once into his soul, and showed you the goodness of his nature. To this, there was something in his looks, and voice, and manner, superadded, which eternally beckoned to the unfortunate to come and take shelter under him; so that before my uncle Toby had half finished the kind offers he was making to the father, had the son insensibly pressed up close to his knees, and had taken hold of the breast of his coat, and was pulling it towards him.-The blood and spirits of Le Fevre, which were waxing cold and slow within him, and were retreating to their last citadel, the heart, rallied back ;-the film forsook his eyes for a moment;-he looked up wishfully in my uncle Toby's face; then cast a look upon his boy;-and that ligament, fine as it was, was never broken.—

Nature instantly ebbed again;-the film returned to its place; the pulse fluttered,-stopped,-went on,-throbbed, stopped again,-moved,-stopped.Shall I go on?- -No.

CHAPTER CLXXII.

I am so impatient to return to my own story, that what remains of young Le Fevre's, that is, from this turn of his fortune to the time my uncle Toby recommended him for my preceptor, shall be told in a very few words in the next chapter.-All that is necessary to be added to this chapter, is as follows:

That my uncle Toby, with young Le Fevre in his

hand, attended the poor Lieutenant, as chief mourners, to his grave.

That the governor of Dendermond paid his obsequies all military honours;-and that Yorick, not to be behind-hand,-paid him all ecclesiastic,-for he buried him in his chancel.-And it appears likewise, he preached a funeral sermon over him. -I say it appears, for it was Yorick's custom, which I suppose a general one with those of his profession, on the first leaf of every sermon which he composed, to chronicle down the time, the place, and the occasion of its being preached to this, he was ever wont to add some short comment or stricture upon the sermon itself,-seldom, indeed, much to its credit.-For instance, This sermon upon the Jewish dispensation, -I don't like it at all:-though I own there is a world of water-landish knowledge in it;-but 'tis all tritical, and most tritically put together.-This is but a flimsy kind of composition. What was in my head

when I made it?'

-N. B. The excellency of this text is, that it will suit any sermon ;-and of this sermon,—that it will suit any text.'

*

- For this sermon I shall be hanged,—for I have stolen the greatest part of it. Doctor Paidagunes found me out. **Set a thief to catch a thief." On the back of half a dozen I find written, So, so, and no more:-and upon a couple Moderato; by which, as far as one may gather from Altieri's Italian Dictionary, but mostly from the authority of a piece of green whipcord, which seemed to have been the unravelling of Yorick's whip-lash, with which he has left us the two sermons marked Moderato, and the half dozen of so so, tied fast together in one bundle by themselves, one may safely suppose he meant pretty nearly the same thing.

There is but one difficulty in the way of this conjecture, which is this; that the moderatos are five

times better than the so sos;-show ten times more knowledge of the human heart;-have seventy times more wit and spirit in them;-(and, to rise properly in my climax)-discover a thousand times more genius;—and, to crown all, are infinitely more entertaining than those tied up with them :-for which reason, whenever Yorick's dramatic sermons are offered to the world, though I shall admit but one out of the whole number of the so sos, I shall, nevertheless, adventure to print the two moderatos without any sort of scruple.

What Yorick could mean by the words lentamentè, —tenutè,—gravè,—and sometimes adagio, -as applied to theological compositions, and with which he has characterized some of these sermons, I dare not venture to guess.-I am more puzzled still, upon finding a l'octavo alta! upon one;-Con strepito upon the back of another;-Scicilliana upon a third;—Alla capella upon a fourth ;-Con l'arco upon this;--Senza l'arco upon that.-All I know is, that they are musical terms, and have a meaning;-and as he was a musical man, I will make no doubt but that, by some quaint application of such metaphors to the compositions in hand, they impressed very distinct ideas of their several characters upon his fancy,-whatever they may do upon that of others.

Amongst these, there is that particular sermon which has unaccountably led me into this digression-the funeral sermon upon poor. Le Fevre, wrote out very fairly, as if from a hasty copy.-I take notice of it the more, because it seems to have been his favourite composition. It is upon mortality; and is tied lengthways and cross-ways with a yarn-thrum, and then rolled up and twisted round with a half-sheet of dirty blue paper, which seems to have been once the cast cover of a general review, which to this day smells horribly of horse-drugs. Whether these marks of humiliation were designed, I something doubt;-be

cause at the end of the sermon (and not at the beginning of it)-very different from his way of treating the rest, he had wrote

Bravo!

-Though not very offensively, for it is at two inches, at least, and a half's distance from and below the concluding line of the sermon, at the very extremity of the page, and in that right-hand corner of it which, you know, is generally covered with your thumb: and, to do it justice, it is wrote besides with a crow's quill, so faintly, in a small Italian hand, as scarce to solicit the eye towards the place, whether your thumb is there or not;-so that, from the manner of it, it stands half excused; and being wrote, moreover, with very pale ink, diluted almost to nothing,-'tis more like a ritratto of the shadow of Vanity than of Vanity herself, of the two; resembling rather a faint thought of transient applause, secretly stirring up in the heart of the composer, than a gross mark of it, coarsely obtruded upon the world.

With all these extenuations, I am aware, that, in publishing this, I do no service to Yorick's character as a modest man;-but all men have their failings! and what lessens this still farther, and almost wipes it away, is this, that the word was struck through sometime afterwards (as appears from a different tint of the ink) with a line quite across it,—as if he had retracted, or was ashamed of the opinion he had once entertained of it.

These short characters of his sermons were always written, excepting in this one instance, upon the first leaf of his sermon, which served as a cover to it; and usually upon the inside of it, which was turned towards the text;-but at the end of his discourse, where, perhaps, he had five or six pages, and sometimes, perhaps, a whole score to turn himself in,—he took a larger circuit, and, indeed, a much more met.

tlesome one;— -as if he had snatched the occasion of unlacing himself with a few more frolicsome strokes at vice, than the straitness of the pulpit allowed.These, though, hussar-like, they skirmish lightly and out of all order, are still auxiliaries on the side of Virtue. Tell me, then, Mynheer Vander Blonederdondergewdenstronke, why they should not be printed

together!

CHAPTER CLXXIII.

When my uncle Toby had turned every thing into money, and settled all accounts betwixt the agent of the regiment and Le Fevre, and betwixt Le Fevre and all mankind, there remained nothing more in my uncle Toby's hands than an old regimental coat and sword; so that my uncle Toby found little or no opposition from the world in taking administration. The coat my uncle Toby gave the Corporal. Wear it, Trim, said my uncle Toby, as long as it will hold together, for the sake of the poor Lieutenant.-And this, said my uncle Toby, taking up the sword in his hand, and drawing it out of the scabbard as he spoke, and this, Le Fevre, I'll save for thee;-'tis all the fortune, continued my uncle Toby, hanging it up upon a crook, and pointing to it, 'tis all the fortune, my dear Le Fevre, which God has left thee; but if he has given thee a heart to fight thy way with it in the world,and thou doest it like a man of honour,-'tis enough for us.

As soon as my uncle Toby had laid a foundation, and taught him to inscribe a regular polygon in a circle, he sent him to a public school, where,-excepting Whitsuntide and Christmas, at which times the Corporal was punctually despatched for him,—he remained to the spring of the year seventeen; when the stories of the Emperor's sending his army into