There is nothing shows the character of my father and my uncle Toby , in a more entertaining light, than their different manner of deportment, under the same accident⸺for I call not love a misfortune, from a persuasion, that a man’s heart is ever the better for it⸺Great God! what must my uncle Toby’s have been, when ’twas all benignity without it.
My father, as appears from many of his papers, was very subject to this passion, before he married⸺but from a little subacid kind of drollish impatience in his nature, whenever it befell him, he would never submit to it like a christian; but would pish, and huff, and bounce, and kick, and play the Devil, and write the bitterest Philippicks against the eye that ever man wrote⸺there is one in verse upon somebody’s eye or other, that for two or three nights together, had put him by his rest; which in his first transport of resentment against it, he begins thus:
“A Devil ’tis⸺and mischief such doth work As never yet did Pagan , Jew , or Turk .”
In short, during the whole paroxism, my father was all abuse and foul language, approaching rather towards malediction⸺only he did not do it with as much method as Ernulphus ⸺he was too impetuous; nor with Ernulphus’s policy⸺for though my father, with the most intolerant spirit, would curse both this and that, and everything under heaven, which was either aiding or abetting to his love⸺yet never concluded his chapter of curses upon it, without cursing himself in at the bargain, as one of the most egregious fools and coxcombs, he would say, that ever was let loose in the world.
My uncle Toby , on the contrary, took it like a lamb⸺sat still and let the poison work in his veins without resistance⸺in the sharpest