CHAPTER XVII

When the misfortune of my NOSE fell so heavily upon my father’s head; --the reader remembers that he walked instantly up stairs, and cast himself down upon his bed; and from hence, unless he has a great insight into human nature, he will be apt to expect a rotation of the same ascending and descending movements from him, upon his misfortune of my NAME; ----no.

The different weight, dear Sir----nay even the different package of two vexations of the same weight----makes a very wide difference in our manner of bearing and getting through with them. ----It is not half an hour ago, when (in the great hurry and precipitation of a poor devil’s writing for daily bread) I threw a fair sheet, which I had just finished, and carefully wrote out, slap into the fire, instead of the foul one.

Instantly I snatch’d off my wig, and threw it perpendicularly, with all imaginable violence, up to the top of the room--indeed I caught it as it fell----but there was an end of the matter; nor do I think anything else in _Nature_ would have given such immediate ease: She, dear Goddess, by an instantaneous impulse, in all _provoking cases_, determines us to a sally of this or that member--or else she thrusts us into this or that place or posture of body, we know not why ----But mark, madam, we live amongst riddles and mysteries----the most obvious things, which come in our way, have dark sides, which the quickest sight cannot penetrate into; and even the clearest and most exalted understandings amongst us find ourselves puzzled and at a loss in almost every cranny of nature’s works: so that this, like a thousand other things, falls out for us in a way, which tho’ we cannot reason upon it--yet we find the good of it, may it please your reverences and your worships----and that’s enough for us.

Now, my father could not lie down with this affliction for his life----nor could he carry it up stairs like the other--he walked composedly out with it to the fish-pond.

Had my father leaned his head upon his hand, and reasoned an hour which way to have gone------reason, with all her force, could not have directed him to anything like it: there is something, Sir, in fish-ponds----but what it is, I leave to system-builders and fish-pond-diggers betwixt ’em to find out--but there is something, under the first disorderly transport of the humours, so unaccountably becalming in an orderly and a sober walk towards one of them, that I have often wondered that neither _Pythagoras_, nor _Plato_, nor _Solon_, nor _Lycurgus_, nor _Mahomet_, nor any one of your noted lawgivers, ever gave order about them.

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