wever in this case,
and that is, when you are so fortunate a fellow, as to have had your
jerkin made of gum-taffeta, and the body-lining to it of a sarcenet, or
thin persian.

Zeno, Cleanthes, Diogenes Babylonius, Dionysius, Heracleotes, Antipater,
Panaetius, and Possidonius amongst the Greeks;--Cato and Varro and
Seneca amongst the Romans;--Pantenus and Clemens Alexandrinus and
Montaigne amongst the Christians; and a score and a half of good,
honest, unthinking Shandean people as ever lived, whose names I can't
recollect,--all pretended that their jerkins were made after this
fashion,--you might have rumpled and crumpled, and doubled and creased,
and fretted and fridged the outside of them all to pieces;--in short,
you might have played the very devil with them, and at the same time,
not one of the insides of them would have been one button the worse, for
all you had done to them.

I believe in my conscience that mine is made up somewhat after this
sort:--for never poor jerkin has been tickled off at such a rate as it
has been these last nine months together,--and yet I declare, the lining
to it,--as far as I am a judge of the matter,--is not a three-penny
piece the worse;--pell-mell, helter-skelter, ding-dong, cut and thrust,
back stroke and fore stroke, side way and long-way, have they
been trimming it for me:--had there been the least gumminess in my
lining,--by heaven! it had all of it long ago been frayed and fretted to
a thread.

--You Messrs. the Monthly Reviewers!--how could you cut and slash my
jerkin as you did?--how did you know but you would cut my lining too?

Heartily and from my soul, to the protection of that Being who will
injure none of us, do I recommend you and your affairs,--so God bless
you;--only next month, if any one of you should gnash his teeth, and
storm and rage at me, as some of you did last May (in which I remember
the weather was very hot)--don't be exasperated, if I pass it by again
with good temper,--(being determined as long as I live or write) which in
my case means the same thing) never to give the honest gentleman a worse
word or a worse wish than my uncle Toby gave the fly which buzz'd about
his nose all dinner-time,--'Go,--go, poor devil,' quoth he,--'get thee
gone,--why should I hurt thee! This world is surely wide enough to hold
both thee and me.'

Chapter 1.XLIX.

Any man, Madam, reasoning upwards, and observing the prodigious
suffusion of blood in my father's coun