THOUGH the corporal had been as good as his word in putting my uncle
_Toby_’s great ramallie-wig into pipes, yet the time was too short to
produce any great effects from it: it had lain many years squeezed up
in the corner of his old campaign trunk; and as bad forms are not so
easy to be got the better of, and the use of candle-ends not so well
understood, it was not so pliable a business as one would have wished.
The corporal with cheary eye and both arms extended, had fallen back
perpendicular from it a score times, to inspire it, if possible, with a
better air——had SPLEEN given a look at it, ’twould have cost her
ladyship a smile——it curl’d every where but where the corporal would
have it; and where a buckle or two, in his opinion, would have done it
honour, he could as soon have raised the dead.
Such it was——or rather such would it have seem’d upon any other brow;
but the sweet look of goodness which sat upon my uncle _Toby_’s,
assimilated every thing around it so sovereignly to itself, and Nature
had moreover wrote GENTLEMAN with so fair a hand in every line of his
countenance, that even his tarnish’d gold-laced hat and huge cockade of
flimsy taffeta became him; and though not worth a button in themselves,
yet the moment my uncle _Toby_ put them on, they became serious
objects, and altogether seem’d to have been picked up by the hand of
Science to set him off to advantage.
Nothing in this world could have co-operated more powerfully towards
this, than my uncle _Toby_’s blue and gold——_had not Quantity in some
measure been necessary to Grace:_ in a period of fifteen or sixteen
years since they had been made, by a total inactivity in my uncle
_Toby_’s life, for he seldom went further than the bowling-green—his
blue and gold had become so miserably too straight for him, that it was
with the utmost difficulty the corporal was able to get him into them;
the taking them up at the sleeves, was of no advantage.——They were
laced however down the back, and at the seams of the sides, &c. in the
mode of King _William_’s reign; and to shorten all description, they
shone so bright against the sun that morning, and had so metallick and
doughty an air with them, that had my uncle _Toby_ thought of attacking
in armour, nothing could have so well imposed upon his imagination.
As for the thin scarlet breeches, they had been unripp’d by the taylor
between the legs, and left at _sixes and sevens_——
——Yes, Madam,——but let us govern our fancies. It is enough they were
held impracticable the night before, and as there was no alternative in
my uncle _Toby_’s wardrobe, he sallied forth in the red plush.
The corporal had array’d himself in poor _Le Fever_’s regimental coat;
and with his hair tuck’d up under his _Montero_-cap, which he had
furbish’d up for the occasion, march’d three paces distant from his
master: a whiff of military pride had puff’d out his shirt at the
wrist; and upon that in a black leather thong clipp’d into a tassel
beyond the knot, hung the corporal’s stick——my uncle _Toby_ carried his
cane like a pike.
——It looks well at least; quoth my father to himself.