• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The world enjoys other pleasures, says he, as they do that of sleep, without tasting or feeling it as it slips and passes by—We should study and ruminate upon it, in order to render proper thanks to him who grants it to us—for this end I cause myself to be disturbed in my sleep, that I may the better and more sensibly relish it—And yet I see few, says he again, who live with less sleep when need requires; my body is capable of a firm, but not of a violent and sudden agitation—I evade of late all violent exercises—I am never weary with walking—but from my youth, I never liked to ride upon pavements. I love to lie hard and alone, and even without my wife—This last word may stagger the faith of the world—but remember, “La Vraisemblance (as Baylet says in the affair of Liceti) n’est pas toujours du Cotè de la Verité.”3 And so much for sleep.

CHAP. XVI

If my wife will but venture him—brother Toby, Trismegistus shall be dress’d and brought down to us, whilst you and I are getting our breakfasts together.—

—Go, tell Susannah, Obadiah, to step here.

She is run up stairs, answered Obadiah, this very instant, sobbing and crying, and wringing her hands as if her heart would break.—

We shall have a rare month of it, said my father, turning his head from Obadiah, and looking wistfully in my uncle Toby’s face for some time—we shall have a devilish month of it, brother Toby, said my father, setting his arms a-kimbo, and shaking his head; fire, water, women, wind—brother Toby!—’tis some misfortune, quoth my uncle Toby—That it is, cried my father,—to have so many jarring elements breaking loose, and riding triumph in every corner of a gentleman’s house—Little boots it to the peace of a family, brother Toby, that you and I possess ourselves, and sit here silent and unmoved,—whilst such a storm is whistling over our heads.——

—And what’s the matter, Susannah? They have called the child Tristram——and my mistress is just got out of an hysterick fit about it—No!—’tis not my fault, said Susannah—I told him it was Tristram-gistus.

——Make tea for yourself, brother Toby, said my father, taking down his hat—but how different from the sallies and agitations of voice and members which a common reader would imagine!

—For he spake in the sweetest modulation—and took down his hat with the gentlest movement of limbs, that ever affliction harmonized and attuned together.

—Go to the bowling-green for corporal Trim, said my uncle Toby, speaking to Obadiah, as soon as my father left the room.

CHAP. XVII

When the misfortune of my NOSE fell so heavily upon my father’s head,—the reader remembers that he walked instantly up stairs, and cast himself down upon his bed; and from hence, unless he has a great insight into human nature, he will be apt to expect a rotation of the same ascending and descending movements from him, upon this misfortune of my NAME;——no.

The different weight, dear Sir,—nay even the different package of two vexations of the same weight,—makes a very wide difference in our manners of bearing and getting through with them.—It is not half an hour ago, when (in the great hurry and precipitation of a poor devil’s writing for daily bread) I threw a fair sheet, which I had just finished, and carefully wrote out, slap into the fire, instead of the foul one.

Instantly I snatch’d off my wig, and threw it perpendicularly, with all imaginable violence, up to the top of the room—indeed I caught it as it fell—but there was an end of the matter; nor do I think any thing else in Nature, would have given such immediate ease: She, dear Goddess, by an instantaneous impulse, in all provoking cases, determines us to a sally of this or that member—or else she thrusts us into this or that place, or posture of body, we know not why—But mark, madam, we live amongst riddles and mysteries—the most obvious things, which come in our way, have dark sides, which the quickest sight cannot penetrate into; and even the clearest and most exalted understandings amongst us find