The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [241]
——If thou lookest, uncle Toby, in search of this mote one moment longer——thou art undone.
*Rodope Thracia tam inevitabili fascino instructa, tam exacte oculis intuens attraxit, ut si in illam quis incidisset, fieri non posset, quin caperetur:——I know not who.
CHAP. XXV
An eye is for all the world exactly like a cannon, in this respect; That it is not so much the eye or the cannon, in themselves, as it is the carriage of the eye1——and the carriage of the cannon, by which both the one and the other are enabled to do so much execution. I don’t think the comparison a bad one: However, as ’tis made and placed at the head of the chapter, as much for use as ornament, all I desire in return, is, that whenever I speak of Mrs. Wadman’s eyes (except once in the next period)2 that you keep it in your fancy.
I protest, Madam, said my uncle Toby, I can see nothing whatever in your eye.
It is not in the white; said Mrs. Wadman: my uncle Toby look’d with might and main into the pupil——
Now of all the eyes, which ever were created——from your own, Madam, up to those of Venus herself, which certainly were as venereal a pair of eyes as ever stood in a head——there never was an eye of them all, so fitted to rob my uncle Toby of his repose, as the very eye, at which he was looking——it was not, Madam, a rolling eye——a romping or a wanton one—nor was it an eye sparkling—petulant or imperious—of high claims and terrifying exactions, which would have curdled at once that milk of human nature,3 of which my uncle Toby was made up——but ’twas an eye full of gentle salutations——and soft responses——speaking——not like the trumpet stop of some ill-made organ, in which many an eye I talk to, holds coarse converse——but whispering soft——like the last low accents of an expiring saint——“How can you live comfortless, captain Shandy, and alone, without a bosom to lean your head on——or trust your cares to?”
It was an eye———
But I shall be in love with it myself, if I say another word about it.
——It did my uncle Toby’s business.
CHAP. XXVI
There is nothing shews the characters of my father and my uncle Toby, in a more entertaining light, than their different manner of deportment, under the same accident——for I call not love a misfortune, from a persuasion, that a man’s heart is ever the better for it1——Great God! what must my uncle Toby’s have been, when ’twas all benignity without it.
My father, as appears from many of his papers, was very subject to this passion, before he married——but from a little subacid kind of drollish impatience in his nature, whenever it befell him, he would never submit to it like a christian; but would pish, and huff, and bounce, and kick, and play the Devil, and write the bitterest Philippicks against the eye that ever man wrote——there is one in verse upon some body’s eye or other, that for two or three nights together, had put him by his rest; which in his first transport of resentment against it, he begins thus:
“A Devil ’tis——and mischief such doth work
As never yet did Pagan, Jew, or Turk.”*2
In short during the whole paroxism, my father was all abuse and foul language, approaching rather towards malediction——only he did not do it with as much method as Ernulphus——he was too impetuous; nor with Ernulphus’s policy——for tho’ my father, with the most intolerant spirit, would curse both this and that, and every thing under heaven, which was either aiding or abetting to his love——yet never concluded his chapter of curses upon it, without cursing himself in at the bargain, as one of the most egregious fools and coxcombs, he would say, that ever was let loose in the world.
My uncle Toby, on the contrary, took it like a lamb——sat still and let the poison work in his veins without resistance——in the sharpest exacerbations of his wound (like that on his groin) he never dropt one fretful or discontented word——he blamed neither heaven nor earth——or thought or spoke an injurious