I declare, I do not recollect any one opinion or passage of my life, where my understanding was more at a loss to make ends meet, and torture the chapter I had been writing, to the service of the chapter following it, than in the present case: one would think I took a pleasure in running into difficulties of this kind, merely to make fresh experiments of getting out of ’em⸺Inconsiderate soul that thou art! What! are not the unavoidable distresses with which, as an author and a man, thou art hemm’d in on every side of thee⸺are they, Tristram , not sufficient, but thou must entangle thyself still more?
Is it not enough that thou art in debt, and that thou hast ten cartloads of thy fifth and sixth volumes still—still unsold, and art almost at thy wit’s ends, how to get them off thy hands?
To this hour art thou not tormented with the vile asthma that thou gattest in skating against the wind in Flanders? and is it but two months ago, that in a fit of laughter, on seeing a cardinal make water like a quirister (with both hands) thou brakest a vessel in thy lungs, whereby, in two hours, thou lost as many quarts of blood; and hadst thou lost as much more, did not the faculty tell thee⸻it would have amounted to a gallon?⸻