——Or by a more critical equation, and supposing the whole of love to be as ten——to determine with Ficinus, “How many parts of it—the one,—and how many the other;”—or whether it is all of it one great Devil, from head to tail, as Plato has taken upon him to pronounce; concerning which conceit of his, I shall not offer my opinion:—but my opinion of Plato is this; that he appears, from this instance, to have been a man of much the same temper and way of reasoning with doctor Baynyard, who being a great enemy to blisters, as imagining that half a dozen of ’em at once, would draw a man as surely to his grave, as a herse and six—rashly concluded, that the Devil himself was nothing in the world, but one great bouncing Canthari[di]s.———
I have nothing to say to people who allow themselves this monstrous liberty in arguing, but what Nazianzen cried out (that is, polemically) to Philagrius——
“Εὖγε!” O rare! ’tis fine reasoning, Sir, indeed!—“ὅτι φιλοσοφεῖς ἐν Πάθεσι”—and most nobly do you aim at truth, when you philosophize about it in your moods and passions.
Nor is it to be imagined, for the same reason, I should stop to inquire, whether love is a disease,——or embroil myself with Rhasis and Dioscorides, whether the seat of it is in the brain or liver;—because this would lead me on, to an examination of the two very opposite manners, in which patients have been treated——the one, of Aætius, who always begun with a cooling clyster of hempseed and bruised cucumbers;—and followed on with thin potations of water-lillies and purslane—to which he added a pinch of snuff of the herb Hanea;—and where Aætius durst venture it,—his topaz-ring.
——The other, that of Gordonius, who (in his cap. 15. de Amore) directs they should be thrashed, “ad putorem usque,”——till they stink again.
These are disquisitions, which my father, who had laid in a great stock of knowledge of this kind, will be very busy with in the progress of my uncle Toby’s affairs: I must anticipate thus much, That from his theories of love, (with which, by the way, he contrived to crucify my uncle Toby’s mind, almost as much as his amours themselves)—he took a single step into practice;—and by means of a camphorated cerecloth, which he found means to impose upon the taylor for buckram, whilst he was making my uncle Toby a new pair of breeches, he produced Gordonius’s effect upon my uncle Toby without the disgrace.
What changes this produced, will be read in its proper place: all that is needful to be added to the anecdote, is this——That whatever effect it had upon my uncle Toby,——it had a vile effect upon the house;——and if my uncle Toby had not smoaked it down as he did, it might have had a vile effect upon my father too.
[ CHAPTER XXXVII]
——’Twill come out of itself by and bye.——All I contend for is, that I am not obliged to set out with a definition of what love is; and so long as I can go on with my story intelligibly, with the help of the word itself, without any other idea to it, than what I have in common with the rest of the world, why should I differ from it a moment before the time?——When I can get on no further,——and find myself entangled on all sides of this mystic labyrinth,—my Opinion will then come in, in course,—and lead me out.
At present, I hope I shall be sufficiently understood, in telling the reader, my uncle Toby fell in love: