The learned Bishop Hall , I mean the famous Dr. Joseph Hall , who was Bishop of Exeter in King James the First’s reign, tells us in one of his Decads , at the end of his divine art of meditation, imprinted at London , in the year 1610, by John Beal , dwelling in Aldersgate-street , “That it is an abominable thing for a man to commend himself;”⸺and I really think it is so.
And yet, on the other hand, when a thing is executed in a masterly kind of a fashion, which thing is not likely to be found out;—I think it is full as abominable, that a man should lose the honour of it, and go out of the world with the conceit of it rotting in his head.
This is precisely my situation.
For in this long digression which I was accidentally led into, as in all my digressions (one only excepted) there is a masterstroke of digressive skill, the merit of which has all along, I fear, been overlooked by my reader,—not for want of penetration in him,—but because ’tis an excellence seldom looked for, or expected indeed, in a digression;—and it is this: That though my digressions are all fair, as you observe,—and that I fly off from what I am about, as far, and as often too, as any writer in Great Britain ; yet I constantly take care to order affairs so that my main business does not stand still in my absence.
I was just going, for example, to have given you the great outlines of my uncle Toby’s most whimsical character;—when my aunt Dinah and the coachman came across us, and led us a vagary some millions of miles into the very heart of the planetary system: Notwithstanding all this, you perceive that the drawing of my uncle Toby’s character went on gently all the time;—not the great contours of it,—that was impossible,—but