NOW in ordinary cases, that is, when I am only stupid, and the thoughts
rise heavily and pass gummous through my pen——
Or that I am got, I know not how, into a cold unmetaphorical vein of
infamous writing, and cannot take a plumb-lift out of it _for my soul;_
so must be obliged to go on writing like a _Dutch_ commentator to the
end of the chapter, unless something be done—
——I never stand conferring with pen and ink one moment; for if a pinch
of snuff, or a stride or two across the room will not do the business
for me—I take a razor at once; and having tried the edge of it upon the
palm of my hand, without further ceremony, except that of first
lathering my beard, I shave it off; taking care only if I do leave a
hair, that it be not a grey one: this done, I change my shirt—put on a
better coat—send for my last wig—put my topaz ring upon my finger; and
in a word, dress myself from one end to the other of me, after my best
fashion.
Now the devil in hell must be in it, if this does not do: for consider,
Sir, as every man chuses to be present at the shaving of his own beard
(though there is no rule without an exception), and unavoidably sits
over-against himself the whole time it is doing, in case he has a hand
in it—the Situation, like all others, has notions of her own to put
into the brain.——
——I maintain it, the conceits of a rough-bearded man, are seven years
more terse and juvenile for one single operation; and if they did not
run a risk of being quite shaved away, might be carried up by continual
shavings, to the highest pitch of sublimity—How _Homer_ could write
with so long a beard, I don’t know——and as it makes against my
hypothesis, I as little care——But let us return to the Toilet.
_Ludovicus Sorbonensis_ makes this entirely an affair of the body
(εξωιεριχη πραξις) as he calls it——but he is deceived: the soul and
body are joint-sharers in every thing they get: A man cannot dress, but
his ideas get cloth’d at the same time; and if he dresses like a
gentleman, every one of them stands presented to his imagination,
genteelized along with him—so that he has nothing to do, but take his
pen, and write like himself.
For this cause, when your honours and reverences would know whether I
writ clean and fit to be read, you will be able to judge full as well
by looking into my Laundress’s bill, as my book: there is one single
month in which I can make it appear, that I dirtied one and thirty
shirts with clean writing; and after all, was more abus’d, cursed,
criticis’d, and confounded, and had more mystic heads shaken at me, for
what I had wrote in that one month, than in all the other months of
that year put together.
——But their honours and reverences had not seen my bills.