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 this 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 any think 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 any think 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.