marriage-state," quoth Mrs. Wadman,
"are very great."

"I suppose so," said my uncle Toby.

"And therefore when a person," continued Mrs. Wadman, "is so much at
his ease as you are, so happy, Captain Shandy, in yourself, your
friends, and your amusements, I wonder what reasons can incline you to
the state?"

"They are written," quoth my uncle Toby, "in the Common Prayer-Book."

Thus far my uncle Toby went on warily, and kept within his depth,
leaving Mrs. Wadman to sail upon the gulf as she pleased.

"As for children," said Mrs. Wadman, "tho a principal end, perhaps, of
the institution, and the natural wish, I suppose, of every parent, yet
do not we all find that they are certain sorrows, and very uncertain
comforts? and what is there, dear sir, to pay one for the heart-aches,
what compensation for the many tender and disquieting apprehensions of
a suffering and defenseless mother who brings them into life?"

"I declare," said my uncle Toby, smitten with pity, "I know of none:
unless it be the pleasure which it has pleased God ..."

"A fiddlestick!" quoth she....

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 33: From the "Sentimental Journey."]

[Footnote 34: From the "Sentimental Journey."]

[Footnote 35: From "Tristram Shandy."]

[Footnote 36: From "Tristram Shandy."]

THOMAS GRAY

Born in 1716, died in 1771; educated at Eton, where he began
a lifelong friendship with Horace Walpole; traveled on the
Continent with Walpole in 1739; settled in Cambridge in
1741, where in 1768 he was made professor of Modern History;
refused the laureateship in 1757; published his "Elegy
Written in a Country Churchyard" in 1751; his poems and
letters collected by Mason in 1775.

I

WARWICK CASTLE[37]

I have been at Warwick, which is a place worth seeing. The town is on
an eminence surrounded every way with a fine cultivated valley,
through which the Avon winds, and at the distance of five or six
miles, a circle of hills, well wooded, and with various objects
crowning them, that close the prospect. Out of the town on one side of
it, rises a rock that might remind one of your rocks at Durham, but
that it is not so savage, or so lofty, and that the river, which,
washes its foot, is perfectly clear, and so gentle, that its current
is hardly visible. Upon it stands the castle, the noble old residence
of the Beauchamps and Nevilles, and now of Earl Brooke. He has sash'd
the great apartment tha