ever I speak of Mrs. Wadman's eyes (except once in the next
period), that you keep it in your fancy.

I protest, Madam, said my uncle Toby, I can see nothing whatever in your
eye.

It is not in the white; said Mrs. Wadman: my uncle Toby look'd with
might and main into the pupil--

Now of all the eyes which ever were created--from your own, Madam, up to
those of Venus herself, which certainly were as venereal a pair of eyes
as ever stood in a head--there never was an eye of them all, so fitted
to rob my uncle Toby of his repose, as the very eye, at which he was
looking--it was not, Madam a rolling eye--a romping or a wanton one--nor
was it an eye sparkling--petulant or imperious--of high claims and
terrifying exactions, which would have curdled at once that milk of
human nature, of which my uncle Toby was made up--but 'twas an eye
full of gentle salutations--and soft responses--speaking--not like the
trumpet stop of some ill-made organ, in which many an eye I talk to,
holds coarse converse--but whispering soft--like the last low accent of
an expiring saint--'How can you live comfortless, captain Shandy, and
alone, without a bosom to lean your head on--or trust your cares to?'

It was an eye--

But I shall be in love with it myself, if I say another word about it.

--It did my uncle Toby's business.

Chapter 4.L.

There is nothing shews the character of my father and my uncle Toby, in
a more entertaining light, than their different manner of deportment,
under the same accident--for I call not love a misfortune, from a
persuasion, that a man's heart is ever the better for it--Great God!
what must my uncle Toby's have been, when 'twas all benignity without
it.

My father, as appears from many of his papers, was very subject to this
passion, before he married--but from a little subacid kind of drollish
impatience in his nature, whenever it befell him, he would never submit
to it like a christian; but would pish, and huff, and bounce, and kick,
and play the Devil, and write the bitterest Philippicks against the eye
that ever man wrote--there is one in verse upon somebody's eye or other,
that for two or three nights together, had put him by his rest; which in
his first transport of resentment against it, he begins thus:

'A Devil 'tis--and mischief such doth work
As never yet did Pagan, Jew, or Turk.'

(This will be printed with my father's Life of Socrates, &c. &c.)

In short, during the whole paroxis