⸺But to return to my mother.
My uncle Toby’s opinion, Madam, “that there could be no harm in Cornelius Gallus , the Roman prætor’s lying with his wife;”⸺or rather the last word of that opinion,—(for it was all my mother heard of it) caught hold of her by the weak part of the whole sex:⸺You shall not mistake me,—I mean her curiosity,—she instantly concluded herself the subject of the conversation, and with that prepossession upon her fancy, you will readily conceive every word my father said, was accommodated either to herself, or her family concerns.
⸺Pray, Madam, in what street does the lady live, who would not have done the same?
From the strange mode of Cornelius’s death, my father had made a transition to that of Socrates , and was giving my uncle Toby an abstract of his pleading before his judges;⸺’twas irresistible:⸺not the oration of Socrates ,—but my father’s temptation to it.⸺He had wrote the Life of Socrates himself the year before he left off trade, which, I fear, was the means of hastening him out of it;⸺so that no one was able to set out with so full a sail, and in so swelling a tide of heroic loftiness upon the occasion, as my father was. Not a period in Socrates’s oration, which closed with a shorter word than transmigration , or annihilation ,—or a worse thought in the middle of it than to be—or not to be ,—the entering upon a new and untried state of things,—or, upon a long, a profound and peaceful sleep, without dreams, without disturbance?⸺ That we and our children were born to die,—but neither of us born to be slaves .⸺No—there I mistake; that was part of Eleazer’s oration, as recorded by Josephus ( De Bell. Judaic. )⸺ Eleazer owns he had it from the philosophers of India ; in all likelihood