the cure, which, he told him, might surely have been accomplished at least by that time:—He dwelt long upon the miseries he had undergone, and the sorrows of his four years melancholy imprisonment;—adding, that had it not been for the kind looks and fraternal cheerings of the best of brothers,—he had long since sunk under his misfortunes.⸺My father was by: My uncle Toby’s eloquence brought tears into his eyes;⸺’twas unexpected:⸺My uncle Toby , by nature was not eloquent;—it had the greater effect:⸺The surgeon was confounded;⸺not that there wanted grounds for such, or greater marks of impatience,—but ’twas unexpected too; in the four years he had attended him, he had never seen anything like it in my uncle Toby’s carriage; he had never once dropped one fretful or discontented word;⸺he had been all patience,—all submission.
—We lose the right of complaining sometimes by forbearing it;—but we often treble the force:—The surgeon was astonished; but much more so, when he heard my uncle Toby go on, and peremptorily insist upon his healing up the wound directly,—or sending for Monsieur Ronjat , the king’s serjeant-surgeon, to do it for him.
The desire of life and health is implanted in man’s nature;⸺the love of liberty and enlargement is a sister-passion to it: These my uncle Toby had in common with his species;⸺and either of them had been sufficient to account for his earnest desire to get well and out of doors;⸺but I have told you before, that nothing wrought with our family after the common way;⸺and from the time and manner in which this eager desire showed itself in the present case, the penetrating reader will suspect there was some other cause or crotchet for it in my uncle Toby’s head:⸺There was so, and ’tis the subject of the next chapter to set forth what that cause and crotchet was. I own, when that’s done, ’twill be time to return back to the parlour fireside, where we left my uncle Toby in the middle of his sentence.