I am now beginning to get fairly into my work; and by the help of a vegetable diet, with a few of the cold seeds, I make no doubt but I shall be able to go on with my uncle Toby’s story, and my own, in a tolerable strait line. Now,
These were the four lines I moved in through my first, second, third, and fourth volumes.—In the fifth volume I have been very good,⸺the precise line I have described in it being this:
By which it appears, that except at the curve, marked A , where I took a trip to Navarre ,—and the indented curve B , which is the short airing when I was there with the Lady Baussiere and her page,—I have not taken the least frisk of a digression, till John de la Casse’s devils led me the round you see marked D .—for as for c c c c c they are nothing but parentheses, and the common ins and outs incident to the lives of the greatest ministers of state; and when compared with what men have done,—or with my own transgressions at the letters A B D —they vanish into nothing.
In this last volume I have done better still—for from the end of Le Fever’s episode, to the beginning of my uncle Toby’s campaigns,—I have scarce stepped a yard out of my way.
If I mend at this rate, it is not impossible⸺by the good leave of his grace of Benevento’s devils⸺but I may arrive hereafter at the excellency of going on even thus:
which is a line drawn as straight as I could draw it, by a writing-master’s ruler (borrowed for that purpose), turning neither to the right hand or to the left.