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Chapter 52 When the misfortune of my Nose fell so heavily upon my fathers head;the reader remembers that he walked instantly up stairs, and cast himself down upon his bed; and from hence, unless he has a great insight into human nature, he will be apt to expect a rotation of the same ascending and descending movements from him, upon this misfortune of my Name;no. The different weight, dear Sirnay even the different package of two vexations of the same weightmakes a very wide difference in our manner of bearing and getting through with them.It is not half an hour ago, when (in the great hurry and precipitation of a poor devils writing for daily bread) I threw a fair sheet, which I had just finished, and carefully wrote out, slap into the fire, instead of the foul one. Instantly I snatchd off my wig, and threw it perpendicularly, with all imaginable violence, up to the top of the roomindeed I caught it as it fellbut there was an end of the matter; nor do I think any think else in Nature would have given such immediate ease: She, dear Goddess, by an instantaneous impulse, in all provoking cases, determines us to a sally of this or that memberor else she thrusts us into this or that place, or posture of body, we know not whyBut mark, madam, we live amongst riddles and mysteriesthe most obvious things, which come in our way, have dark sides, which the quickest sight cannot penetrate into; and even the clearest and most exalted understandings amongst us find ourselves puzzled and at a loss in almost every cranny of natures works: so that this, like a thousand other things, falls out for us in a way, which tho we cannot reason upon ityet we find the good of it, may it please your reverences and your worshipsand thats enough for us. Now, my father could not lie down with this affliction for his lifenor could he carry it up stairs like the otherhe walked composedly out with it to the fish-pond. Had my father leaned his head upon his hand, and reasoned an hour which way to have gonereason, with all her force, could not have directed him to any think like it: there is something, Sir, in fish-pondsbut what it is, I leave to system-builders and fish-pond-diggers betwixt em to find out but there is something, under the first disorderly transport of the humours, so unaccountably becalming in an orderly and a sober walk towards one of them, that I have often wondered that neither Pythagoras, nor Plato, nor Solon, nor Lycurgus, nor Mahomet, nor any one of your noted lawgivers, ever gave order about them. |
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