[ CHAPTER IV]
“It is with Love as with Cuckoldom”——the suffering party is at least the third, but generally the last in the house who knows anything about the matter: this comes, as all the world knows, from having half a dozen words for one thing; and so long, as what in this vessel of the human frame, is Love—may be Hatred, in that——Sentiment half a yard higher——and Nonsense—————no, Madam,—not there——I mean at the part I am now pointing to with my forefinger——how can we help ourselves?
Of all mortal, and immortal men too, if you please, who ever soliloquized upon this mystic subject, my uncle Toby was the worst fitted, to have push’d his researches, thro’ such a contention of feelings; and he had infallibly let them all run on, as we do worse matters, to see what they would turn out——had not Bridget’s pre-notification of them to Susannah, and Susannah’s repeated manifestoes thereupon to all the world, made it necessary for my uncle Toby to look into the affair.
[ CHAPTER V]
Why weavers, gardeners, and gladiators—or a man with a pined leg (proceeding from some ailment in the foot)—should ever have had some tender nymph breaking her heart in secret for them, are points well and duly settled and accounted for by ancient and modern physiologists.
A water-drinker, provided he is a profess’d one, and does it without fraud or covin, is precisely in the same predicament: not that, at first sight, there is any consequence, or show of logic in it, “That a rill of cold water dribbling through my inward parts, should light up a torch in my Jenny’s—”
——The proposition does not strike one; on the contrary, it seems to run opposite to the natural workings of causes and effects——
But it shews the weakness and imbecility of human reason.
——“And in perfect good health with it?”
—The most perfect,—Madam, that friendship herself could wish me——