’There is not such great odds, brother Toby, betwixt good and evil, as the world imagines’—(this way of setting off, by the bye, was not likely to cure my uncle Toby’s suspicions).—’Labour, sorrow, grief, sickness, want, and woe, are the sauces of life.’—Much good may do them—said my uncle Toby to himself.—

’My son is dead!—so much the better;—’tis a shame in such a tempest to have but one anchor.

’But he is gone for ever from us!—be it so. He is got from under the hands of his barber before he was bald—he is but risen from a feast before he was surfeited—from a banquet before he had got drunken.

’The Thracians wept when a child was born,’—(and we were very near it, quoth my uncle Toby,)—’and feasted and made merry when a man went out of the world; and with reason.—Death opens the gate of fame, and shuts the gate of envy after it,—it unlooses the chain of the captive, and puts the bondsman’s task into another man’s hands.

’Shew me the man, who knows what life is, who dreads it, and I’ll shew thee a prisoner who dreads his liberty.’

Is it not better, my dear brother Toby, (for mark—our appetites are but diseases,)—is it not better not to hunger at all, than to eat?—not to thirst, than to take physic to cure it?

Is it not better to be freed from cares and agues, from love and melancholy, and the other hot and cold fits of life, than, like a galled traveller, who comes weary to his inn, to be bound to begin his journey afresh?

There is no terrour, brother Toby, in its looks, but what it borrows from groans and convulsions—and the blowing of noses and the wiping away of tears with the bottoms of curtains, in a dying man’s room.—Strip it of these, what is it?—’Tis better in battle than in bed, said my uncle Toby.- -Take away its hearses, its mutes, and its mourning,—its plumes, scutcheons, and other mechanic aids—What is it?—Better in battle! continued my father, smiling, for he had absolutely forgot my brother Bobby—’tis terrible no way—for consider, brother Toby,—when we are— death is not;—and when death is—we are not. My uncle Toby laid down his pipe to consider the proposition; my father’s eloquence was too rapid to stay for any man—away it went,—and hurried my uncle Toby’s ideas along with it.—

For this reason, continued my father, ’tis worthy to recollect, how little alteration, in great men, the approaches of death have made.—Vespasian died in a jest upon his close-stool—Galba with a sentence—Septimus Severus in a dispatch—Tiberius in dissimulation, and Cæsar Augustus in a compliment.—I hope ’twas a sincere one—quoth my uncle Toby.

—’Twas to his wife,—said my father.