⸺I wonder what’s all that noise, and running backwards and forwards for, above stairs, quoth my father, addressing himself, after an hour and a half’s silence, to my uncle Toby ,⸺who, you must know, was sitting on the opposite side of the fire, smoking his social pipe all the time, in mute contemplation of a new pair of black plush-breeches which he had got on:—What can they be doing, brother?—quoth my father,—we can scarce hear ourselves talk.
I think, replied my uncle Toby , taking his pipe from his mouth, and striking the head of it two or three times upon the nail of his left thumb, as he began his sentence,⸺I think, says he:⸺But to enter rightly into my uncle Toby’s sentiments upon this matter, you must be made to enter first a little into his character, the outlines of which I shall just give you, and then the dialogue between him and my father will go on as well again.
Pray what was that man’s name,—for I write in such a hurry, I have no time to recollect or look for it,⸺who first made the observation, “That there was great inconstancy in our air and climate?” Whoever he was, ’twas a just and good observation in him.—But the corollary drawn from it, namely, “That it is this which has furnished us with such a variety of odd and whimsical characters;”—that was not his;—it was found out by another man, at least a century and a half after him: Then again,—that this copious storehouse of original materials, is the true and natural cause that our Comedies are so much better than those of France , or any others that either have, or can be wrote upon the Continent:⸺that discovery was not fully made till about the middle of King William’s reign,—when the great Dryden , in writing one of his long prefaces, (if I mistake not) most fortunately hit upon it. Indeed toward the latter end of Queen Anne , the great Addison began to