⸺And the story too—if you please: for though I have all along been hastening towards this part of it, with so much earnest desire, as well knowing it to be the choicest morsel of what I had to offer to the world, yet now that I am got to it, anyone is welcome to take my pen, and go on with the story for me that will—I see the difficulties of the descriptions I’m going to give—and feel my want of powers.
It is one comfort at least to me, that I lost some fourscore ounces of blood this week in a most uncritical fever which attacked me at the beginning of this chapter; so that I have still some hopes remaining, it may be more in the serous or globular parts of the blood, than in the subtle aura of the brain⸺be it which it will—an Invocation can do no hurt⸺and I leave the affair entirely to the invoked , to inspire or to inject me according as he sees good.
The Invocation
Gentle Spirit of sweetest humour, who erst did sit upon the easy pen of my beloved Cervantes ; Thou who glided’st daily through his lattice, and turned’st the twilight of his prison into noonday brightness by thy presence⸺tinged’st his little urn of water with heaven-sent nectar, and all the time he wrote of Sancho and his master, didst cast thy mystic mantle o’er his wither’d stump, and wide extended it to all the evils of his life⸻
⸺Turn in hither, I beseech thee!⸺behold these breeches!⸺they are all I have in the world⸺that piteous rent was given them at Lyons ⸻
My shirts! see what a deadly schism has happen’d amongst ’em—for the laps are in Lombardy , and the rest of ’em here—I never had but six,