-time,--and which
after infinite attempts, he had caught at last, as it flew by him;--I'll
not hurt thee, says my uncle Toby, rising from his chair, and going
across the room, with the fly in his hand,--I'll not hurt a hair of
thy head:--Go, says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he
spoke, to let it escape;--go, poor devil, get thee gone, why should I
hurt thee?--This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.

I was but ten years old when this happened: but whether it was, that the
action itself was more in unison to my nerves at that age of pity, which
instantly set my whole frame into one vibration of most pleasurable
sensation;--or how far the manner and expression of it might go towards
it;--or in what degree, or by what secret magick,--a tone of voice and
harmony of movement, attuned by mercy, might find a passage to my heart,
I know not;--this I know, that the lesson of universal good-will then
taught and imprinted by my uncle Toby, has never since been worn out of
my mind: And tho' I would not depreciate what the study of the Literae
humaniores, at the university, have done for me in that respect, or
discredit the other helps of an expensive education bestowed upon me,
both at home and abroad since;--yet I often think that I owe one half of
my philanthropy to that one accidental impression.

This is to serve for parents and governors instead of a whole volume
upon the subject.

I could not give the reader this stroke in my uncle Toby's picture, by
the instrument with which I drew the other parts of it,--that taking in
no more than the mere Hobby-Horsical likeness:--this is a part of his
moral character. My father, in this patient endurance of wrongs, which I
mention, was very different, as the reader must long ago have noted; he
had a much more acute and quick sensibility of nature, attended with a
little soreness of temper; tho' this never transported him to any thing
which looked like malignancy:--yet in the little rubs and vexations
of life, 'twas apt to shew itself in a drollish and witty kind of
peevishness:--He was, however, frank and generous in his nature;--at all
times open to conviction; and in the little ebullitions of this subacid
humour towards others, but particularly towards my uncle Toby, whom he
truly loved:--he would feel more pain, ten times told (except in the
affair of my aunt Dinah, or where an hypothesis was concerned) than what
he ever gave.

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