No wonder I itch so much as I do, to get at these amours—They are the choicest morsel of my whole story! and when I do get at ’em⸺assure yourselves, good folks—(nor do I value whose squeamish stomach takes offence at it) I shall not be at all nice in the choice of my words!⸺and that’s the thing I have to declare .⸻I shall never get all through in five minutes, that I fear⸺and the thing I hope is, that your worships and reverences are not offended—if you are, depend upon’t I’ll give you something, my good gentry, next year to be offended at⸺that’s my dear Jenny’s way—but who my Jenny is—and which is the right and which the wrong end of a woman, is the thing to be concealed —it shall be told you in the next chapter but one to my chapter of Buttonholes⸺and not one chapter before.
And now that you have just got to the end of these four volumes⸺the thing I have to ask is, how you feel your heads? my own akes dismally!⸻as for your healths, I know, they are much better.—True Shandeism , think what you will against it, opens the heart and lungs, and like all those affections which partake of its nature, it forces the blood and other vital fluids of the body to run freely through its channels, makes the wheel of life run long and cheerfully round.
Was I left, like Sancho Panca , to choose my kingdom, it should not be maritime—or a kingdom of blacks to make a penny of;—no, it should be a kingdom of hearty laughing subjects: And as the bilious and more saturnine passions, by creating disorders in the blood and humours, have as bad an influence, I see, upon the body politick as body natural⸺and as nothing but a habit of virtue can fully govern those passions, and subject them to reason⸻I should add to my prayer—that God would give my subjects grace to be as wise as they were merry ; and then should I be the happiest monarch, and they the happiest people under heaven.
And so, with this moral for the present, may it please your worships and your reverences, I take my leave of you till this time twelvemonth,