t with
a description of what love is? whether part God and part Devil, as
Plotinus will have it--

--Or by a more critical equation, and supposing the whole of love to be
as ten--to determine with Ficinus, 'How many parts of it--the one,--and
how many the other;'--or whether it is all of it one great Devil, from
head to tail, as Plato has taken upon him to pronounce; concerning which
conceit of his, I shall not offer my opinion:--but my opinion of Plato
is this; that he appears, from this instance, to have been a man of much
the same temper and way of reasoning with doctor Baynyard, who being a
great enemy to blisters, as imagining that half a dozen of 'em at once,
would draw a man as surely to his grave, as a herse and six--rashly
concluded, that the Devil himself was nothing in the world, but one
great bouncing Cantharidis.--

I have nothing to say to people who allow themselves this monstrous
liberty in arguing, but what Nazianzen cried out (that is, polemically)
to Philagrius--

'(Greek)!' O rare! 'tis fine reasoning, Sir indeed!--'(Greek)' and most
nobly do you aim at truth, when you philosophize about it in your moods
and passions.

Nor is it to be imagined, for the same reason, I should stop to
inquire, whether love is a disease,--or embroil myself with Rhasis and
Dioscorides, whether the seat of it is in the brain or liver;--because
this would lead me on, to an examination of the two very opposite
manners, in which patients have been treated--the one, of Aoetius,
who always begun with a cooling clyster of hempseed and bruised
cucumbers;--and followed on with thin potations of water-lilies and
purslane--to which he added a pinch of snuff, of the herb Hanea;--and
where Aoetius durst venture it,--his topaz-ring.

--The other, that of Gordonius, who (in his cap. 15. de Amore) directs
they should be thrashed, 'ad putorem usque,'--till they stink again.

These are disquisitions which my father, who had laid in a great stock
of knowledge of this kind, will be very busy with in the progress of
my uncle Toby's affairs: I must anticipate thus much, That from his
theories of love, (with which, by the way, he contrived to crucify my
uncle Toby's mind, almost as much as his amours themselves,)--he took
a single step into practice;--and by means of a camphorated cerecloth,
which he found means to impose upon the taylor for buckram, whilst he
was making my uncle Toby a new pair of breeches, he produced Gordonius's
effe