[ CHAPTER XI]
What a vast advantage is travelling! only it heats one; but there is a remedy for that, which you may pick out of the next chapter.
[ CHAPTER XII]
Was I in a condition to stipulate with Death, as I am this moment with my apothecary, how and where I will take his clyster——I should certainly declare against submitting to it before my friends; and therefore I never seriously think upon the mode and manner of this great catastrophe, which generally takes up and torments my thoughts as much as the catastrophe itself; but I constantly draw the curtain across it with this wish, that the Disposer of all things may so order it, that it happen not to me in my own house——but rather in some decent inn——at home, I know it,——the concern of my friends, and the last services of wiping my brows, and smoothing my pillow, which the quivering hand of pale affection shall pay me, will so crucify my soul; that I shall die of a distemper which my physician is not aware of: but in an inn, the few cold offices I wanted, would be purchased with a few guineas, and paid me with an undisturbed, but punctual attention——but mark. This inn should not be the inn at Abbeville——if there was not another inn in the universe, I would strike that inn out of the capitulation: so
Let the horses be in the chaise exactly by four in the morning——Yes, by four, Sir,——or by Genevieve! I’ll raise a clatter in the house shall wake the dead.
[ CHAPTER XIII]
“Make them like unto a wheel,” is a bitter sarcasm, as all the learned know, against the grand tour, and that restless spirit for making it, which David prophetically foresaw would haunt the children of men in the latter days; and therefore, as thinketh the great bishop Hall, ’tis one of the severest imprecations which David ever utter’d against the enemies of the Lord—and, as if he had said, “I wish them no worse luck than always to be rolling about”—So much motion, continues he (for he was very corpulent)—is so much unquietness; and so much of rest, by the same analogy, is so much of heaven.
Now, I (being very thin) think differently; and that so much of motion, is so much of life, and so much of joy——and that to stand still, or get on but slowly, is death and the devil——
Hollo! Ho!——the whole world’s asleep!——bring out the horses——grease the wheels—tie on the mail——and drive a nail into that moulding——I’ll not lose a moment——
Now the wheel we are talking of, and whereinto (but not whereunto, for that would make an Ixion’s wheel of it) he curseth his enemies, according to the bishop’s habit of body, should certainly be a post-chaise wheel, whether they were set up in Palestine at that time or not——and my wheel, for the contrary reasons, must as certainly be a cart-wheel groaning round its revolution once in an age; and of which sort, were I to turn commentator, I should make no scruple to affirm, they had great store in that hilly country.