"--DR. DEEMS, _in the
New York Independent_.
* * * * *
XXII.
MY UNCLE TOBY
ONE OF THE BEAUTIFUL CREATIONS OF A GREAT GENIUS.
"If I were requested," says Leigh Hunt in his "Essay on Wit and Humor,"
"to name the book of all others which combines wit and humor under their
highest appearance of levity with the profoundest wisdom, it would be
'Tristram Shandy,'" the chief work of Laurence Sterne, who was born in
1713, and died in 1768. The following story of LeFevre, drawn from that
unique book, full of simple pathos and gentle kindness, presents,
perhaps, the best picture of the character that names this chapter:
It was some time in the Summer of that year in which Dendermond was
taken by the allies--which was about seven years before my father came
into the country, and about as many after the time that my uncle Toby
and Trim had privately decamped from my father's house in town, in order
to lay some of the finest sieges to some of the finest fortified cities
in Europe--when my uncle Toby was one evening getting his supper, with
Trim sitting behind him at a small sideboard, the landlord of a little
inn in the village came into the parlor, with an empty phial in his
hand, to beg a glass or two of sack. "'Tis for a poor gentleman, I
think, of the army," said the landlord, "who has been taken ill at my
house four days ago, and has never held up his head since, or had a
desire to taste any thing till just now, that he has a fancy for a glass
of sack and a thin toast.
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