came to himself, and
taking the oath out of Ernulphus's digest of curses--(though to do my
father justice it was a fault (as he told Dr. Slop in the affair of
Ernulphus) which he as seldom committed as any man upon earth)--By all
that's good and great! brother Toby, said my father, if it was not for
the aids of philosophy, which befriend one so much as they do--you would
put a man beside all temper.--Why, by the solutions of noses, of which
I was telling you, I meant, as you might have known, had you favoured me
with one grain of attention, the various accounts which learned men of
different kinds of knowledge have given the world of the causes of short
and long noses.--There is no cause but one, replied my uncle Toby--why
one man's nose is longer than another's, but because that God pleases to
have it so.--That is Grangousier's solution, said my father.--'Tis
he, continued my uncle Toby, looking up, and not regarding my father's
interruption, who makes us all, and frames and puts us together in
such forms and proportions, and for such ends, as is agreeable to
his infinite wisdom,.--'Tis a pious account, cried my father, but not
philosophical--there is more religion in it than sound science. 'Twas no
inconsistent part of my uncle Toby's character--that he feared God, and
reverenced religion.--So the moment my father finished his remark--my
uncle Toby fell a whistling Lillabullero with more zeal (though more out
of tune) than usual.--

What is become of my wife's thread-paper?

Chapter 2.XXXV.

No matter--as an appendage to seamstressy, the thread-paper might be
of some consequence to my mother--of none to my father, as a mark in
Slawkenbergius. Slawkenbergius in every page of him was a rich treasure
of inexhaustible knowledge to my father--he could not open him amiss;
and he would often say in closing the book, that if all the arts and
sciences in the world, with the books which treated of them, were
lost--should the wisdom and policies of governments, he would say,
through disuse, ever happen to be forgot, and all that statesmen had
wrote or caused to be written, upon the strong or the weak sides of
courts and kingdoms, should they be forgot also--and Slawkenbergius only
left--there would be enough in him in all conscience, he would say,
to set the world a-going again. A treasure therefore was he indeed!
an institute of all that was necessary to be known of noses, and every
thing else--at matin, noon, and vespe