strike together at all thy infirmities and mistakes:⸺The best of us, my dear lad, lie open there,⸺and trust me,⸺trust me, Yorick , when to gratify a private appetite, it is once resolved upon, that an innocent and an helpless creature shall be sacrificed, ’tis an easy matter to pick up sticks enough from any thicket where it has strayed, to make a fire to offer it up with .
Yorick scarce ever heard this sad vaticination of his destiny read over to him, but with a fear stealing from his eye, and a promissory look attending it, that he was resolved, for the time to come, to ride his tit with more sobriety.—But, alas, too late!—a grand confederacy, with * and *** at the head of it, was formed before the first prediction of it.—The whole plan of the attack, just as Eugenius had foreboded, was put in execution all at once,—with so little mercy on the side of the allies,—and so little suspicion in Yorick , of what was carrying on against him,—that when he thought, good easy man! full surely preferment was o’ ripening,—they had smote his root, and then he fell, as many a worthy man had fallen before him.
Yorick , however, fought it out with all imaginable gallantry for some time; till, overpowered by numbers, and worn out at length by the calamities of the war,—but more so, by the ungenerous manner in which it was carried on,—he threw down the sword; and though he kept up his spirits in appearance to the last, he died, nevertheless, as was generally thought, quite brokenhearted.
What inclined Eugenius to the same opinion was as follows:
A few hours before Yorick breathed his last, Eugenius stepped in with an intent to take his last sight and last farewell of him. Upon his drawing Yorick’s curtain, and asking how he felt himself, Yorick looking up in his face took hold of his hand,—and after thanking him for the many tokens of his friendship to him, for which, he said, if it was their fate to meet