nature that ever Galileo looked for a spot in thought, had drawn me aside to interrogate the sun. In vain! for, by all the powers which animate the organ-Widow Wadman's left eye shines this moment as lucid as her right;there is neither mote, nor sand, nor dust, nor chaff, nor speck, nor particle of opaque matter' floating in it. There is nothing, my dear paternal uncle! but one lambent delicious fire, furtively shooting out from every part of it, in all directions into thine. If thou lookest, uncle Toby, in search of this mote one moment longer, thou art undone. me how much I had taken care for? Upon telling him the exact sum, Eugenius shook his head and said it would not do; so pulled out his purse, in order to empty it into mine. I've enough, in conscience, Eugenius, said I. Indeed Yorick, you have not, replied Eugenius; I know France and Italy better than you. But you don't consider, Eugenius, said I, refusing his offer, that before I have been three days in Paris, I shall take care to say or do something or other for which I shall get clapped up into the Bastile, and that I shall live there a couple of months entirely at I protest, madam, said my uncle Toby, I the King of France's expense. I beg pardon, can see nothing whatever in your eye. -It is not in the white, said Mrs. Wadman., -My uncle Toby looked 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 imperiousof high claims and terrifying exactions, which would have curdled at once that milk of human nature 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 said Eugenius, drily; really, I had forgot that resource. Now the event I had treated gaily came seriously to my door. Is it folly, or nonchalance, or philosophy, or pertinacity;—or what is it in me, that, after all, when La Fleur had gone down stairs, and I was quite alone, I could not bring down my mind to think of it otherwise than I had then spoken of it to Eugenius? -And as for the Bastile-the terror is in the word.-Make the most of it you can, said I to myself, the Bastile is but another word for a tower;-and a tower is but another word for a house you can't get out of.-Mercy on the gouty! for they are in it twice a year.But with nine livres a day, and pen and ink and paper and patience, albeit a man can't get out, he may do very well within,—at least for a month or six weeks; at the end of which, if he is a harmless fellow, his innocence appears, and he comes out a better and wiser man than he went in. I had some occasion (I forget what) to step into the court-yard, as I settled this account; and remember I walked down stairs in no But I shall be in love with it myself, if I small triumph with the conceit of my reasonsay another word about it. It did my uncle Toby's business. THE BASTILE v. LIBERTY. (FROM "A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY.") And here, I know, Eugenius, thou wilt smile at the remembrance of a short dialogue which passed betwixt us, the moment I was going to set out.-I must tell it here. Eugenius, knowing that I was as little subject to be overburthened with money as ing. Beshrew the sombre pencil! said I, vauntingly-for I envy not its power, which paints the evils of life with so hard and deadly a colouring. The mind sits terrified at the objects she has magnified herself, and blackened; reduce them to their proper size and hue, she overlooks them. "Tis true, said I, correcting the proposition-the Bastile is not an evil to be despised. But strip it of its towers-fill up the foss-unbarricade the doors-call it simply a confinement, and suppose 'tis some tyrant of a distemper-and not of a man, which holds you in it-the evil vanishes, and you bear the other half without complaint. I was interrupted in the hey-day of this soliloquy, with a voice which I took to be of a child, which complained "it could not get out."-I looked up and down the passage, and, seeing neither man, woman, nor child, I went out without further attention. In my return back through the passage, I heard the same words repeated twice over; and, looking up, I saw it was a starling hung in a little cage. "I can't get out I can't get out," said the starling. I stood looking at the bird; and to every person who came through the passage, it ran fluttering to the side towards which they approached it, with the same lamentation of its captivity, "I can't get out," said the starling. God help thee! said I, but I'll let thee out, cost what it will; so I turned about the cage to get the door: it was twisted and double twisted so fast with wire there was no getting it open without pulling the cage to pieces. I took both hands to it. The bird flew to the place where I was attempting his deliverance, and, thrusting his head through the trellis, pressed his breast against it, as if impatient. I fear, poor creature, said I, I cannot set thee at liberty. "No," said the starling; "I can't get out-I can't get out." I vow I never had my affections more tenderly awakened; nor do I remember an incident in my life where the dissipated spirits, to which my reason had been a bubble, were so suddenly called home. Mechanical as the notes were, yet so true in tune to nature were they chanted, that in one moment they overthrew all my systematic reasonings upon the, Bastile; and I heavily walked up stairs, unsaying every word I had said in going down them. Disguise thyself as thou wilt, still, Slavery, said I, still thou art a bitter draught! and, though thousands in all ages have been made to drink of thee, thou art no less bitter on that account.-"Tis thou, thrice sweet and gracious goddess, addressing myself to Liberty, whom all, in public or in private, worship, whose taste is grateful, and ever will be so, till Nature herself shall change. No tint of words can spot thy snowy mantle, nor chymic power turn thy sceptre into iron;-with thee, to smile upon him as he eats his crust, the swain is happier than his monarch, from whose court thou art exiled.-Gracious Heaven! cried I, kneeling down upon the last step but one in my ascent, grant me but health, thou great Bestower of it, and give me but this fair goddess as my companion,— and shower down thy mitres, if it seem good unto thy Divine Providence, upon those heads which are aching for them! THE STORY OF YORICK. (FROM 'TRISTRAM SHANDY.") Yorick was this parson's name, and, what is very remarkable in it (as appears from a most ancient account of the family, wrote upon strong vellum, and now in perfect preservation), it had been exactly so spelt for nearI was within an ace of saying nine hundred years;-but I would not shake my credit in telling an improbable truth-however indisputable in itself;—and, therefore, I shall content myself with only saying-It had been exactly so spelt, without the least variation or transposition of a single letter, for I do not know how long; which is more than I would venture to say of one half of the best surnames in the kingdom; which, in a course of years, have generally undergone as many chops and changes as their owners. Has this been owing to the pride, or to the shame, of the respective proprietors?-In honest truth, I think sometimes to the one and sometimes to the other, just as the temptation has wrought. But a villainous affair it is, and will one day so blend and confound us altogether that no one shall be able to stand up and swear "That his own great-grandfather was the man who did either this or that." This evil has been sufficiently fenced against by the prudent care of the Yorick family, and their religious preservation of these records I quote; which do farther inform us that the family was originally of Danish extraction, and had been transplanted into England as early as in the reign of Horwendilus, king of Denmark, in whose court, it seems, an ancestor of this Mr. Yorick, and from whom he was lineally descended, held a considerable post to the day of his death. Of what nature this considerable post was this record saith notit only adds that, for near two centuries, it had been totally abolished as altogether unnecessary, not only in that court, but in every other court of the Christian world. It has often come into my head that this post could be no other than that of the king's chief jester;-and that Hamlet's Yorick, in our Shakspere, many of whose plays, you know, are founded upon authenticated facts, was declensions-with as much life and whim, and certainly the very man. I have not the time to look into SaxoGrammaticus's Danish history to know the certainty of this;-but, if you have leisure, and can easily get at the book, you may do it full as well yourself. I had just time, in my travels through Denmark with Mr. Noddy's eldest son, whom, in the year 1741, I accompanied as governor, riding along with him at a prodigious rate through most parts of Europe, and of which original journey, performed by us two, a most delectable narrative will be given in the progress of this work; I had just time, I say, and that was all, to prove the truth of an observation made by a long sojourner in that country -namely, "That nature was neither very lavish, nor was she was very stingy, in her gifts of genius and capacity to its inhabitants; ---but, like a discreet parent, was moderately kind to them all; observing such an equal tenour in the distribution of her favours as to bring them, in those points, pretty near to a level with each other; so that you will meet with few instances in that kingdom of refined parts, but a great deal of good plain household understanding, amongst all ranks of people, of which everybody has a share ;"—which is, I think, very right. gaite de cœur about him, as the kindliest climate could have engendered and put together. With all this sail poor Yorick carried not one ounce of ballast; he was utterly unpractised in the world; and, at the age of twenty-six, knew just about as well how to steer his course in it as a romping, unsuspicious girl of thirteen: so that upon his first setting out, the brisk gale of his spirits, as you will imagine, ran him foul ten times in a day of somebody's tackling; and as the grave and more slow-paced were oftenest in his way, you may likewise imagine it was with such he had generally the ill-luck to get the most entangled. For aught I know, there might be some mixture of unlucky wit at the bottom of such fracas:-for, to speak the truth, Yorick had an invincible dislike and opposition in his nature to gravity;---not to gravity as such:for, where gravity was wanted, he would be the most grave or serious of mortal men for days and weeks together;-but he was an enemy to the affectation of it, and declared open war against it only as it appeared a cloak for ignorance or for folly: and then, whenever it fell in his way, however sheltered and protected, he seldom gave it much quarter. In Sometimes, in his wild way of talking, he would say that gravity was an arrant scounWith us, you see, the case is quite different: drel, and he would add-of the most dan- we are all ups and downs in this matter;gerous kind too, because a sly one; and that, you are a great genius;-or, 'tis fifty to one, he verily believed, more honest, well-meaning sir, you are a great dunce and a blockhead;- people were bubbled out of their goods and not that there is a total want of intermediate money by it in one twelvemonth than by steps;-no, we are not so irregular as that pocket-picking and shop-lifting in seven. comes to;-but the two extremes are more the naked temper which a merry heart discommon, and in a greater degree, in this covered, he would say there was no dangerunsettled island, where Nature, in her gifts but to itself: whereas the very essence of and dispositions of this kind, is most whimsi- gravity was design, and consequently deceit : cal and capricious; Fortune herself not being it was a taught trick to gain credit of the more so in the bequest of her goods and chattels than she. This is all that ever staggered my faith in regard to Yorick's extraction, who, by what I can remember of him, and by all the accounts I could ever get of him, seemed not to have had one single drop of Danish blood in his whole crasis-in nine hundred years it might possibly have all run out:-I will not philosophize one moment with you about it; for, happen how it would, the fact was this,-that, instead of that cold phlegm and exact regularity of sense and humours you would have looked for in one so extracted-he was, on the contrary, as mercurial and sublimated a composition-as heteroclite a creature in all his world for more sense and knowledge than a man was worth; and that, with all its pretensions, it was no better, but often worse, than what a French wit had long ago defined it, viz. A mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind;-which definition of gravity Yorick, with great imprudence, would say deserved to be written in letters of gold. But, in plain truth, he was a man unhackneyed and unpractised in the world, and was altogether as indiscreet and foolish on every other subject of discourse where policy is wont to impress restraint. Yorick had no impression but one, and that was what arose from the nature of the deed spoken of; which impression he would usually translate into plain |