Philosophy has a fine saying for every thing.—For Death it has an entire set; the misery was, they all at once rushed into my father’s head, that ’twas difficult to string them together, so as to make any thing of a consistent show out of them.—He took them as they came.

’’Tis an inevitable chance—the first statute in Magna Charta—it is an everlasting act of parliament, my dear brother,—All must die.

’If my son could not have died, it had been matter of wonder,—not that he is dead.

’Monarchs and princes dance in the same ring with us.

’—To die, is the great debt and tribute due unto nature: tombs and monuments, which should perpetuate our memories, pay it themselves; and the proudest pyramid of them all, which wealth and science have erected, has lost its apex, and stands obtruncated in the traveller’s horizon.’ (My father found he got great ease, and went on)—’Kingdoms and provinces, and towns and cities, have they not their periods? and when those principles and powers, which at first cemented and put them together, have performed their several evolutions, they fall back.’—Brother Shandy, said my uncle Toby, laying down his pipe at the word evolutions—Revolutions, I meant, quoth my father,—by heaven! I meant revolutions, brother Toby—evolutions is nonsense.—’Tis not nonsense—said my uncle Toby.—But is it not nonsense to break the thread of such a discourse upon such an occasion? cried my father—do not—dear Toby, continued he, taking him by the hand, do not—do not, I beseech thee, interrupt me at this crisis.—My uncle Toby put his pipe into his mouth.

’Where is Troy and Mycenae, and Thebes and Delos, and Persepolis and Agrigentum?’—continued my father, taking up his book of post-roads, which he had laid down.—’What is become, brother Toby, of Nineveh and Babylon, of Cizicum and Mitylenae? The fairest towns that ever the sun rose upon, are now no more; the names only are left, and those (for many of them are wrong spelt) are falling themselves by piece-meals to decay, and in length of time will be forgotten, and involved with every thing in a perpetual night: the world itself, brother Toby, must—must come to an end.

’Returning out of Asia, when I sailed from Ægina towards Megara,’ (when can this have been? thought my uncle Toby,) ’ I began to view the country round about. Aegina was behind me, Megara was before, Pyraeus on the right hand, Corinth on the left.—What flourishing towns now prostrate upon the earth! Alas! alas! said I to myself, that man should disturb his soul for the loss of a child, when so much as this lies awfully buried in his presence—Remember, said I to myself again—remember thou art a man.’—

Now my uncle Toby knew not that this last paragraph was an extract of Servius Sulpicius’s consolatory letter to Tully.—He had as little skill, honest man, in the fragments, as he had in the whole pieces of antiquity.— And as my father, whilst he was concerned in the Turkey trade, had been three or four different times in the Levant, in one of which he had stayed a whole year and an half at Zant, my uncle Toby naturally concluded, that, in some one of these periods, he had taken a trip across the Archipelago into Asia; and that all this sailing affair with Aegina behind, and Megara before, and Pyraeus on the right hand, &c. &c. was nothing more than the true course of my father’s voyage and reflections.—’Twas certainly in his manner, and many an undertaking critic would have built two stories higher upon worse foundations.—And pray, brother, quoth my uncle Toby, laying the end of his pipe upon my father’s hand in a kindly way of interruption—but waiting till he finished the account—what year of our Lord was this?— ’Twas no year of our Lord, replied my father.—That’s impossible, cried my uncle Toby.—Simpleton! said my father,—’twas forty years before Christ was born.

My uncle Toby had but two things for it; either to suppose his brother to be the wandering Jew, or that his misfortunes had disordered his brain.— ’May the Lord God of heaven and earth protect him and restore him!’ said my uncle Toby, praying silently for my father, and with tears in his eyes.

—My father placed the tears to a proper account, and went on with his harangue with great spirit.