The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman · Laurence Sterne

Volume III, Chapter 80

200 of 315 · 1 min of reading

----’TWILL come out of itself by and bye.----All I contend for is, that I am not obliged to set out with a definition of what love is; and so long as I can go on with my story intelligibly, with the help of the word itself, without any other idea to it, than what I have in common with the rest of the world, why should I differ from it a moment before the time?----When I can get on no further,--and find myself entangled on all sides of this mystic labyrinth,--my Opinion will then come in, in course,--and lead me out.

At present, I hope I shall be sufficiently understood, in telling the reader, my uncle Toby fell in love:_

--Not that the phrase is at all to my liking: for to say a man is fallen in love,--or that he is deeply in love,--or up to the ears in love,--and sometimes even over head and ears in it,--carries an idiomatical kind of implication, that love is a thing below a man:--this is recurring again to Plato’s opinion, which, with all his divinityship,--I hold to be damnable and heretical:--and so much for that.

Let love therefore be what it will,--my uncle Toby fell into it.

----And possibly, gentle reader, with such a temptation--so wouldst thou: For never did thy eyes behold, or thy concupiscence covet any thing in this world, more concupiscible than widow Wadman._

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End of part 200 of 315