“_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 _whereunto_,
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 “χωρισμὸν ἀπὸ τοῦ Σώματος, εἰς τὸ καλῶς
φιλοσοφεῖν”---- [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.