——Pray, Madam, in what street does the lady live, who would not have done the same?
From the strange mode of Cornelius’s death, my father had made a transition to that of Socrates, and was giving my uncle Toby an abstract of his pleading before his judges;——’twas irresistible:——not the oration of Socrates,—but my father’s temptation to it.——He had wrote the Life of Socrates[1] himself the year before he left off trade, which, I fear, was the means of hastening him out of it;——so that no one was able to set out with so full a sail, and in so swelling a tide of heroic loftiness upon the occasion, as my father was. Not a period in Socrates’s oration, which closed with a shorter word than transmigration, or annihilation,—or a worse thought in the middle of it than to be—or not to be,—the entering upon a new and untried state of things,—or, upon a long, a profound and peaceful sleep, without dreams, without disturbance?——That we and our children were born to die,—but neither of us born to be slaves.——No—there I mistake; that was part of Eleazer’s oration, as recorded by Josephus (de Bell. Judaic.)——Eleazer owns he had it from the philosophers of India; in all likelihood Alexander the Great, in his irruption into India, after he had over-run Persia, amongst the many things he stole,—stole that sentiment also; by which means it was carried, if not all the way by himself (for we all know he died at Babylon), at least by some of his maroders, into Greece,—from Greece it got to Rome,—from Rome to France,—and from France to England:——So things come round.——
By land carriage, I can conceive no other way.——
By water the sentiment might easily have come down the Ganges into the Sinus Gangeticus, or Bay of Bengal, and so into the Indian Sea; and following the course of trade (the way from India by the Cape of Good Hope being then unknown), might be carried with other drugs and spices up the Red Sea to Joddah, the port of Mekka, or else to Tor or Sues, towns at the bottom of the gulf; and from thence by karrawans to Coptos, but three days’ journey distant, so down the Nile directly to Alexandria, where the SENTIMENT would be landed at the very foot of the great stair-case of the Alexandrian library,——and from that store-house it would be fetched.———Bless me! what a trade was driven by the learned in those days!
[ CHAPTER XIII]
——Now my father had a way, a little like that of Job’s (in case there ever was such a man——if not, there’s an end of the matter.——
Though, by the bye, because your learned men find some difficulty in fixing the precise æra in which so great a man lived;—whether, for instance, before or after the patriarchs, &c.——to vote, therefore, that he never lived at all, is a little cruel,—’tis not doing as they would be done by,—happen that as it may)——My father, I say, had a way, when things went extremely wrong with him, especially upon the first sally of his impatience,—of wondering why he was begot,—wishing himself dead;—sometimes worse:——And when the provocation ran high, and grief touched his lips with more than ordinary powers—Sir, you scarce could have distinguished him from Socrates himself.——Every word would breathe the sentiments of a soul disdaining life, and careless about all its issues; for which reason, though my mother was a woman of no deep reading, yet the abstract of Socrates’s oration, which my father was giving my uncle Toby, was not altogether new to her.—She listened to it with composed intelligence, and would have done so to the end of the chapter, had not my father plunged (which he had no occasion to have done) into that part of the pleading where the great philosopher reckons up his connections, his alliances, and children; but renounces a security to be so won by working upon the passions of his judges.—“I have friends—I have relations,—I have three desolate children,”—says Socrates.—
——Then, cried my mother, opening the door,——you have one more, Mr. Shandy, than I know of.
By heaven! I have one less,—said my father, getting up and walking out of the room.