My mother and my uncle Toby expected my father would be the death of Obadiah —and that there never would be an end of the disaster.⸺See here! you rascal, cried my father, pointing to the mule, what you have done!⸺It was not me, said Obadiah .⸺How do I know that? replied my father.
Triumph swam in my father’s eyes, at the repartee—the Attic salt brought water into them—and so Obadiah heard no more about it.
Now let us go back to my brother’s death.
Philosophy has a fine saying for everything.—For Death it has an entire set; the misery was, they all at once rushed into my father’s head, that ’twas difficult to string them together, so as to make anything of a consistent show out of them.—He took them as they came.
“ ’Tis an inevitable chance—the first statute in Magna Charta —it is an everlasting act of parliament, my dear brother,⸺ All must die.
“If my son could not have died, it had been matter of wonder,—not that he is dead.
“Monarchs and princes dance in the same ring with us.
“— To die , is the great debt and tribute due unto nature: tombs and monuments, which should perpetuate our memories, pay it themselves; and the proudest pyramid of them all, which wealth and science have erected, has lost its apex, and stands obtruncated in the traveller’s horizon.” (My father found he got great ease, and went on)—“Kingdoms and provinces, and towns and cities, have they not their periods? and when those principles and powers, which at first cemented and put them together, have performed their several evolutions, they fall back.”—Brother Shandy , said my uncle Toby , laying down his pipe at the word evolutions —Revolutions, I meant, quoth my father,—by heaven! I meant revolutions, brother Toby —evolutions