“MAKE _them like unto a wheel_,” is a bitter sarcasm, as all the
learned know, against the _grand tour_, and that restless spirit for
making it, which _David_ prophetically foresaw would haunt the children
of men in the latter days; and therefore, as thinketh the great bishop
_Hall_, ’tis one of the severest imprecations which _David_ ever
utter’d against the enemies of the Lord—and, as if he had said, “I wish
them no worse luck than always to be rolling about.”—So much motion,
continues he (for he was very corpulent)—is so much unquietness; and so
much of rest, by the same analogy, is so much of heaven.
Now, I (being very thin) think differently; and that so much of motion,
is so much of life, and so much of joy——and that to stand still, or get
on but slowly, is death and the devil——
Hollo! Ho!——the whole world’s asleep!——bring out the horses——grease the
wheels——tie on the mail——and drive a nail into that moulding——I’ll not
lose a moment——
Now the wheel we are talking of, and _whereinto_ (but not _whereonto_,
for that would make an Ixion’s wheel of it) he curseth his enemies,
according to the bishop’s habit of body, should certainly be a
post-chaise wheel, whether they were set up in _Palestine_ at that time
or not——and my wheel, for the contrary reasons, must as certainly be a
cart-wheel groaning round its revolution once in an age; and of which
sort, were I to turn commentator, I should make no scruple to affirm,
they had great store in that hilly country.
I love the Pythagoreans (much more than ever I dare tell my dear
_Jenny_) for their “Χωξισμον απο τκ Εωμαιος, εις το καλως
φιλοσοφειν”——[their] “getting out of the body, in order to think well.”
No man thinks right, whilst he is in it; blinded as he must be, with
his congenial humours, and drawn differently aside, as the bishop and
myself have been, with too lax or too tense a fibre——REASON is, half of
it, SENSE; and the measure of heaven itself is but the measure of our
present appetites and concoctions.——
——But which of the two, in the present case, do you think to be mostly
in the wrong?
You, certainly: quoth she, to disturb a whole family so early.