can get on no further, and find myself entangled on all fides of this myftick labyrinth,-my Opinion will then come in, in course,—and lead me out.

At prefent, I hope I fhall be fufficiently understood, in telling the reader, my uncle Toby fell in love:

-Not that the phrafe is at all to my liking for to fay a man is fallen in love, -or that he is deeply in love,-or up to the ears in love,-and fometimes even over head and ears in it,-carries an idiomatical kind of implication, that love is a thing below a man :-this is recurring again to Plato's opinion, which, with all his divinityfhip,-I hold to be damnable and heretical;-and fo much for that.

Let love therefore be what it will,my uncle Toby fell into it.

VOL, VI.

L

-And

And poffibly, gentle reader, with fuch a temptation-fo wouldst thou: For never did thy eyes behold, or thy concupifcence covet any thing in this world, more concupifcible than widow Wadman.

CHA P. XXXVIII.

то conceive this right,-call for pen and ink-here's paper ready to your hand. Sit down, Sir, paint her to your own mind-as like your mistress as you can as unlike your wife as your confcience will let you-'tis all -please but your own fancy

one to me in it.

Was ever any thing in Nature

fo fweet!-fo exquifite!

Then, dear Sir, how could my

uncle Toby refift it?

Thrice happy book! thou wilt have one page, at leaft, within thy covers, which MALICE will not blacken, and which IGNORANCE cannot mifreprefent.

As

CHAP. XXXIX.

S Susannah was informed by an exprefs from Mrs. Bridget, of my uncle Toby's falling in love with her miftrefs, fifteen days before it happened, -the contents of which exprefs, Susannah communicated to my mother the next day, it has juft given me an opportunity of entering upon my uncle. Toby's amours a fortnight before their existence.

I have an article of news to tell you, Mr. Shandy, quoth my mother, which will surprise you greatly.

Now my father was then holding one of his fecond beds of juftice, and was mufing within himself about the hardfhips of matrimony, as my mother broke filence.

દ

My brother Toby, quoth fhe,

is going to be married to Mrs. Wad"man."

Then he will never, quoth my father, be able to lie diagonally in his bed again as long as he lives.

It was a confuming vexation to my father, that my mother never afked the meaning of a thing fhe did not underftand.

L 3

That