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<h2>Chapter 3.LI.</h2>
<h3>The Story of Le Fever Continued.</h3>
<p>It was to my uncle Toby's eternal honour,—though I tell it
only for the sake of those, who, when coop'd in betwixt a natural
and a positive law, know not, for their souls, which way in the
world to turn themselves—That notwithstanding my uncle Toby
was warmly engaged at that time in carrying on the siege of
Dendermond, parallel with the allies, who pressed theirs on so
vigorously, that they scarce allowed him time to get his
dinner—that nevertheless he gave up Dendermond, though he had
already made a lodgment upon the counterscarp;—and bent his
whole thoughts towards the private distresses at the inn; and
except that he ordered the garden gate to be bolted up, by which he
might be said to have turned the siege of Dendermond into a
blockade,—he left Dendermond to itself—to be relieved
or not by the French king, as the French king thought good; and
only considered how he himself should relieve the poor lieutenant
and his son.</p>
<p>—That kind Being, who is a friend to the friendless, shall
recompence thee for this.</p>
<p>Thou hast left this matter short, said my uncle Toby to the
corporal, as he was putting him to bed,—and I will tell thee
in what, Trim.—In the first place, when thou madest an offer
of my services to Le Fever,—as sickness and travelling are
both expensive, and thou knowest he was but a poor lieutenant, with
a son to subsist as well as himself out of his pay,—that thou
didst not make an offer to him of my purse; because, had he stood
in need, thou knowest, Trim, he had been as welcome to it as
myself.—Your honour knows, said the corporal, I had no
orders;—True, quoth my uncle Toby,—thou didst very
right, Trim, as a soldier,—but certainly very wrong as a
man.</p>
<p>In the second place, for which, indeed, thou hast the same
excuse, continued my uncle Toby,—when thou offeredst him
whatever was in my house,—thou shouldst have offered him my
house too:—A sick brother officer should have the best
quarters, Trim, and if we had him with us,—we could tend and
look to him:—Thou art an excellent nurse thyself,
Trim,—and what with thy care of him, and the old woman's and
his boy's, and mine together, we might recruit him again at once,
and set him upon his legs.—</p>
<p>—In a fortnight or three weeks, added my uncle Toby,
smiling,—he might march.—He will never march; an'
please your honour, in this world, said the corporal:—He will
march; said my uncle Toby, rising up from the side of the bed, with
one shoe off:—An' please your honour, said the corporal, he
will never march but to his grave:—He shall march, cried my
uncle Toby, marching the foot which had a shoe on, though without
advanceing an inch,—he shall march to his regiment.—He
cannot stand it, said the corporal;—He shall be supported,
said my uncle Toby;—He'll drop at last, said the corporal,
and what will become of his boy?—He shall not drop, said my
uncle Toby, firmly.—A-well-o'day,—do what we can for
him, said Trim, maintaining his point,—the poor soul will
die:—He shall not die, by G.., cried my uncle Toby.</p>
<p>—The Accusing Spirit, which flew up to heaven's chancery
with the oath, blush'd as he gave it in;—and the Recording
Angel, as he wrote it down, dropp'd a tear upon the word, and
blotted it out for ever.</p>
<SPAN name="linkCH0170" id="linkCH0170"></SPAN>
<h2>Chapter 3.LII.</h2>
<p>—My uncle Toby went to his bureau,—put his purse
into his breeches pocket, and having ordered the corporal to go
early in the morning for a physician,—he went to bed, and
fell asleep.</p>
<SPAN name="linkCH0171" id="linkCH0171"></SPAN>
<h2>Chapter 3.LIII.</h2>
<h3>The Story of Le Fever Continued.</h3>
<p>The sun looked bright the morning after, to every eye in the
village but Le Fever's and his afflicted son's; the hand of death
pressed heavy upon his eye-lids,—and hardly could the wheel
at the cistern turn round its circle,—when my uncle Toby, who
had rose up an hour before his wonted time, entered the
lieutenant's room, and without preface or apology, sat himself down
upon the chair by the bed-side, and, independently of all modes and
customs, opened the curtain in the manner an old friend and brother
officer would have done it, and asked him how he did,—how he
had rested in the night,—what was his complaint,—where
was his pain,—and what he could do to help him:—and
without giving him time to answer any one of the enquiries, went
on, and told him of the little plan which he had been concerting
with the corporal the night before for him.—</p>
<p>—You shall go home directly, Le Fever, said my uncle Toby,
to my house,—and we'll send for a doctor to see what's the
matter,—and we'll have an apothecary,—and the corporal
shall be your nurse;—and I'll be your servant, Le Fever.</p>
<p>There was a frankness in my uncle Toby,—not the effect of
familiarity,—but the cause of it,—which let you at once
into his soul, and shewed you the goodness of his nature; to this
there was something in his looks, and voice, and manner,
superadded, which eternally beckoned to the unfortunate to come and
take shelter under him, so that before my uncle Toby had half
finished the kind offers he was making to the father, had the son
insensibly pressed up close to his knees, and had taken hold of the
breast of his coat, and was pulling it towards him.—The blood
and spirits of Le Fever, which were waxing cold and slow within
him, and were retreating to their last citadel, the
heart—rallied back,—the film forsook his eyes for a
moment,—he looked up wishfully in my uncle Toby's
face,—then cast a look upon his boy,—and that ligament,
fine as it was,—was never broken.—</p>
<p>Nature instantly ebb'd again,—the film returned to its
place,—the pulse fluttered—stopp'd—went
on—throbb'd—stopp'd
again—moved—stopp'd—shall I go on?—No.</p>
<SPAN name="linkCH0172" id="linkCH0172"></SPAN>
<h2>Chapter 3.LIV.</h2>
<p>I am so impatient to return to my own story, that what remains
of young Le Fever's, that is, from this turn of his fortune, to the
time my uncle Toby recommended him for my preceptor, shall be told
in a very few words in the next chapter.—All that is
necessary to be added to this chapter is as follows.—</p>
<p>That my uncle Toby, with young Le Fever in his hand, attended
the poor lieutenant, as chief mourners, to his grave.</p>
<p>That the governor of Dendermond paid his obsequies all military
honours,—and that Yorick, not to be behind-hand—paid
him all ecclesiastic—for he buried him in his
chancel:—And it appears likewise, he preached a funeral
sermon over him—I say it appears,—for it was Yorick's
custom, which I suppose a general one with those of his profession,
on the first leaf of every sermon which he composed, to chronicle
down the time, the place, and the occasion of its being preached:
to this, he was ever wont to add some short comment or stricture
upon the sermon itself, seldom, indeed, much to its
credit:—For instance, This sermon upon the Jewish
dispensation—I don't like it at all;—Though I own there
is a world of Water-Landish knowledge in it;—but 'tis all
tritical, and most tritically put together.—This is but a
flimsy kind of a composition; what was in my head when I made
it?</p>
<p>—N.B. The excellency of this text is, that it will suit
any sermon,—and of this sermon,—that it will suit any
text.—</p>
<p>—For this sermon I shall be hanged,—for I have
stolen the greatest part of it. Doctor Paidagunes found me out.
> Set a thief to catch a thief.—</p>
<p>On the back of half a dozen I find written, So, so, and no
more—and upon a couple Moderato; by which, as far as one may
gather from Altieri's Italian dictionary,—but mostly from the
authority of a piece of green whipcord, which seemed to have been
the unravelling of Yorick's whip-lash, with which he has left us
the two sermons marked Moderato, and the half dozen of So, so, tied
fast together in one bundle by themselves,—one may safely
suppose he meant pretty near the same thing.</p>
<p>There is but one difficulty in the way of this conjecture, which
is this, that the moderato's are five times better than the so,
so's;—show ten times more knowledge of the human
heart;—have seventy times more wit and spirit in
them;—(and, to rise properly in my climax)—discovered a
thousand times more genius;—and to crown all, are infinitely
more entertaining than those tied up with them:—for which
reason, whene'er Yorick's dramatic sermons are offered to the
world, though I shall admit but one out of the whole number of the
so, so's, I shall, nevertheless, adventure to print the two
moderato's without any sort of scruple.</p>
<p>What Yorick could mean by the words
lentamente,—tenute,—grave,—and sometimes
adagio,—as applied to theological compositions, and with
which he has characterised some of these sermons, I dare not
venture to guess.—I am more puzzled still upon finding a
l'octava alta! upon one;—Con strepito upon the back of
another;—Scicilliana upon a third;—Alla capella upon a
fourth;—Con l'arco upon this;—Senza l'arco upon
that.—All I know is, that they are musical terms, and have a
meaning;—and as he was a musical man, I will make no doubt,
but that by some quaint application of such metaphors to the
compositions in hand, they impressed very distinct ideas of their
several characters upon his fancy,—whatever they may do upon
that of others.</p>
<p>Amongst these, there is that particular sermon which has
unaccountably led me into this digression—The funeral sermon
upon poor Le Fever, wrote out very fairly, as if from a hasty
copy.—I take notice of it the more, because it seems to have
been his favourite composition—It is upon mortality; and is
tied length-ways and cross-ways with a yarn thrum, and then rolled
up and twisted round with a half-sheet of dirty blue paper, which
seems to have been once the cast cover of a general review, which
to this day smells horribly of horse drugs.—Whether these
marks of humiliation were designed,—I something
doubt;—because at the end of the sermon (and not at the
beginning of it)—very different from his way of treating the
rest, he had wrote—Bravo!</p>
<p>—Though not very offensively,—for it is at two
inches, at least, and a half's distance from, and below the
concluding line of the sermon, at the very extremity of the page,
and in that right hand corner of it, which, you know, is generally
covered with your thumb; and, to do it justice, it is wrote besides
with a crow's quill so faintly in a small Italian hand, as scarce
to solicit the eye towards the place, whether your thumb is there
or not,—so that from the manner of it, it stands half
excused; and being wrote moreover with very pale ink, diluted
almost to nothing,—'tis more like a ritratto of the shadow of
vanity, than of Vanity herself—of the two; resembling rather
a faint thought of transient applause, secretly stirring up in the
heart of the composer; than a gross mark of it, coarsely obtruded
upon the world.</p>
<p>With all these extenuations, I am aware, that in publishing
this, I do no service to Yorick's character as a modest
man;—but all men have their failings! and what lessens this
still farther, and almost wipes it away, is this; that the word was
struck through sometime afterwards (as appears from a different
tint of the ink) with a line quite across it in this manner, BRAVO
(crossed out)—as if he had retracted, or was ashamed of the
opinion he had once entertained of it.</p>
<p>These short characters of his sermons were always written,
excepting in this one instance, upon the first leaf of his sermon,
which served as a cover to it; and usually upon the inside of it,
which was turned towards the text;—but at the end of his
discourse, where, perhaps, he had five or six pages, and sometimes,
perhaps, a whole score to turn himself in,—he took a large
circuit, and, indeed, a much more mettlesome one;—as if he
had snatched the occasion of unlacing himself with a few more
frolicksome strokes at vice, than the straitness of the pulpit
allowed.—These, though hussar-like, they skirmish lightly and
out of all order, are still auxiliaries on the side of
virtue;—tell me then, Mynheer Vander
Blonederdondergewdenstronke, why they should not be printed
together?</p>
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