the left; and then, when the natural
exigency my father was under of rubbing his head, called out for his
handkerchief, he would have had nothing in the world to have done,
but to have put his right hand into his right coat pocket and taken
it out;--which he might have done without any violence, or the least
ungraceful twist in any one tendon or muscle of his whole body.

In this case, (unless, indeed, my father had been resolved to make a
fool of himself by holding the wig stiff in his left hand--or by making
some nonsensical angle or other at his elbow-joint, or armpit)--his
whole attitude had been easy--natural--unforced: Reynolds himself, as
great and gracefully as he paints, might have painted him as he sat.

Now as my father managed this matter,--consider what a devil of a figure
my father made of himself.

In the latter end of Queen Anne's reign, and in the beginning of the
reign of King George the first--'Coat pockets were cut very low down
in the skirt.'--I need say no more--the father of mischief, had he been
hammering at it a month, could not have contrived a worse fashion for
one in my father's situation.

Chapter 1.XLVII.

It was not an easy matter in any king's reign (unless you were as lean
a subject as myself) to have forced your hand diagonally, quite
across your whole body, so as to gain the bottom of your opposite coat
pocket.--In the year one thousand seven hundred and eighteen, when
this happened, it was extremely difficult; so that when my uncle Toby
discovered the transverse zig-zaggery of my father's approaches towards
it, it instantly brought into his mind those he had done duty in, before
the gate of St. Nicolas;--the idea of which drew off his attention so
intirely from the subject in debate, that he had got his right hand
to the bell to ring up Trim to go and fetch his map of Namur, and his
compasses and sector along with it, to measure the returning angles of
the traverses of that attack,--but particularly of that one, where he
received his wound upon his groin.

My father knit his brows, and as he knit them, all the blood in his body
seemed to rush up into his face--my uncle Toby dismounted immediately.

--I did not apprehend your uncle Toby was o'horseback.--

Chapter 1.XLVIII.

A man's body and his mind, with the utmost reverence to both I speak it,
are exactly like a jerkin, and a jerkin's lining;--rumple the one,--you
rumple the other. There is one certain exception ho