The similitude of the stile and manner of it, with those my father constantly had heard preached in his parish-church, was the ground of his conjecture,—proving it as strongly, as an argument à priori could prove such a thing to a philosophic mind, That it was Yorick’s and no one’s else:—It was proved to be so, a posteriori , the day after, when Yorick sent a servant to my uncle Toby’s house to enquire after it.
It seems that Yorick , who was inquisitive after all kinds of knowledge, had borrowed Stevinus of my uncle Toby , and had carelessly popped his sermon, as soon as he had made it, into the middle of Stevinus ; and by an act of forgetfulness, to which he was ever subject, he had sent Stevinus home, and his sermon to keep him company.
Ill-fated sermon! Thou wast lost, after this recovery of thee, a second time, dropped thro’ an unsuspected fissure in thy master’s pocket, down into a treacherous and a tattered lining,—trod deep into the dirt by the left hind-foot of his Rocinante inhumanly stepping upon thee as thou falledst;—buried ten days in the mire,⸺raised up out of it by a beggar,—sold for a halfpenny to