Though the corporal had been as good as his word in putting my uncle Toby’s great ramallie-wig into pipes, yet the time was too short to produce any great effects from it: it had lain many years squeezed up in the corner of his old campaign trunk; and as bad forms are not so easy to be got the better of, and the use of candle-ends not so well understood, it was not so pliable a business as one would have wished. The corporal with cheery eye and both arms extended, had fallen back perpendicular from it a score times, to inspire it, if possible, with a better air⸺had spleen given a look at it, ’twould have cost her ladyship a smile⸺it curl’d everywhere but where the corporal would have it; and where a buckle or two, in his opinion, would have done it honour, he could as soon have raised the dead.
Such it was⸺or rather such would it have seem’d upon any other brow; but the sweet look of goodness which sat upon my uncle Toby’s , assimilated everything around it so sovereignly to itself, and Nature had moreover wrote Gentleman with so fair a hand in every line of his countenance, that even his tarnish’d gold-laced hat and huge cockade of flimsy taffeta became him; and though not worth a button in themselves, yet the moment my uncle Toby put them on, they became serious objects, and altogether seem’d to have been picked up by the hand of Science to set him off to advantage.
Nothing in this world could have cooperated more powerfully towards this, than my uncle Toby’s blue and gold⸺ had not Quantity in some measure been necessary to Grace : in a period of fifteen or sixteen years since they had been made, by a total inactivity in my uncle Toby’s life, for he seldom went further than the bowling-green—his blue and gold had become so miserably too strait for him, that it was with the utmost difficulty the corporal was able to get him into them; the taking