CHAPTER XXXII

THERE will be just time, whilst my uncle Toby and Trim are walking to my father's, to inform you, that Mrs. Wadman had, some moons before this, made a confident of my mother; and that Mrs. Bridget, who had the burden of her own, as...

CHAPTER XXIX

IT was like the momentary contest in the moist eye-lids of an April morning, "Whether Bridget should laugh or cry." She snatch'd up a rolling-pin——'twas ten to one, she had laugh'd—— She laid it down—she cried; and had one single tear of 'em but tasted...

THE INVOCATION.

GENTLE Spirit of sweetest humour, who erst didst sit upon the easy pen of my beloved CERVANTES; Thou who glided'st daily through his lattice, and turned'st the twilight of his prison into noon day brightness by thy presence——tinged'st his little urn of water with heaven-sent...

CHAPTER XIV

As I never had any intention of beginning the Digression, I am making all this preparation for, till I come to the 15th chapter——I have this chapter to put to whatever use I think proper——I have twenty this moment ready for it——I could write my...

CHAPTER XIII

Now in ordinary cases, that is, when I am only stupid, and the thoughts rise heavily and pass gummous1 through my pen—— Or that I am got, I know not how, into a cold unmetaphorical vein of infamous writing, and cannot take a plumb-lift...

CHAPTER XII

UPON looking back from the end of the last chapter and surveying the texture of what has been wrote, it is necessary, that upon this page and the five following, a good quantity of heterogeneous matter be inserted, to keep up that just balance betwixt...

CHAPTER VIII

ALL womankind, continued Trim, (commenting upon his story) from the highest to the lowest, an' please your honour, love jokes; the difficulty is to know how they chuse to have them cut; and there is no knowing that, but by trying as we do with...

Chapter XXXI

IF any thing in this world, which my father said, could have provoked my uncle Toby, during the time he was in love, it was the perverse use my father was always making of an expression of Hilarion1 the hermit; who,...

Chapter XXVII

THE world is ashamed of being virtuous——My uncle Toby knew little of the world; and therefore when he felt he was in love with widow Wadman, he had no conception that the thing was any more to be made a mystery of, than if Mrs....

Chapter 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...