is nonsense.⸺’Tis not nonsense,—said my uncle Toby .⸺But is it not nonsense to break the thread of such a discourse upon such an occasion? cried my father—do not—dear Toby , continued he, taking him by the hand, do not—do not, I beseech thee, interrupt me at this crisis.⸺My uncle Toby put his pipe into his mouth.
“Where is Troy and Mycenæ , and Thebes and Delos , and Persepolis and Agrigentum? ”—continued my father, taking up his book of postcards, which he had laid down.—“What is become, brother Toby , of Nineveh and Babylon , of Cizicum and Mitylenæ? The fairest towns that ever the sun rose upon, are now no more; the names only are left, and those (for many of them are wrong spelt) are falling themselves by piece-meals to decay, and in length of time will be forgotten, and involved with everything in a perpetual night: the world itself, brother Toby , must—must come to an end.
“Returning out of Asia , when I sailed from Ægina towards Megara ,” ( when can this have been? thought my uncle Toby ) “I began to view the country round about. Ægina was behind me, Megara was before, Pyræus on the right hand, Corinth on the left.—What flourishing towns now prostrate upon the earth! Alas! alas! said I to myself, that man should disturb his soul for the loss of a child, when so much as this lies awfully buried in his presence⸺Remember, said I to myself again—remember thou art a man.”—
Now my uncle Toby knew not that this last paragraph was an extract of Servius Sulpicius’s consolatory letter to Tully .—He had as little skill, honest man, in the fragments, as he had in the whole pieces of antiquity.—And as my father, whilst he was concerned in the Turkey trade, had been three or four different times in the Levant , in one of which he had stayed a whole year and an half at Zant , my uncle Toby naturally concluded, that, in some one of these periods, he had taken a trip across the Archipelago into Asia ; and that all this sailing affair with