ed me in my life, that I always suspect it, right or
wrong,--at least I am seldom hot upon cold subjects. For all this, I
reverence truth as much as any body; and when it has slipped us, if a
man will but take me by the hand, and go quietly and search for it,
as for a thing we have both lost, and can neither of us do
well without,--I'll go to the world's end with him:--But I hate
disputes,--and therefore (bating religious points, or such as touch
society) I would almost subscribe to any thing which does not choak me
in the first passage, rather than be drawn into one--But I cannot
bear suffocation,--and bad smells worst of all.--For which reasons, I
resolved from the beginning, That if ever the army of martyrs was to be
augmented,--or a new one raised,--I would have no hand in it, one way or
t'other.

Chapter 3.XII.

--But to return to my mother.

My uncle Toby's opinion, Madam, 'that there could be no harm in
Cornelius Gallus, the Roman praetor's lying with his wife;'--or rather
the last word of that opinion,--(for it was all my mother heard of it)
caught hold of her by the weak part of the whole sex:--You shall not
mistake me,--I mean her curiosity,--she instantly concluded herself the
subject of the conversation, and with that prepossession upon her fancy,
you will readily conceive every word my father said, was accommodated
either to herself, or her family concerns.

--Pray, Madam, in what street does the lady live, who would not have
done the same?

From the strange mode of Cornelius's death, my father had made a
transition to that of Socrates, and was giving my uncle Toby an abstract
of his pleading before his judges;--'twas irresistible:--not the oration
of Socrates,--but my father's temptation to it.--He had wrote the Life
of Socrates (This book my father would never consent to publish; 'tis in
manuscript, with some other tracts of his, in the family, all, or most
of which will be printed in due time.) himself the year before he left
off trade, which, I fear, was the means of hastening him out of it;--so
that no one was able to set out with so full a sail, and in so swelling
a tide of heroic loftiness upon the occasion, as my father was. Not
a period in Socrates's oration, which closed with a shorter word than
transmigration, or annihilation,--or a worse thought in the middle of it
than to be--or not to be,--the entering upon a new and untried state of
things,--or, upon a long, a profound and peaceful