"Is it not better to be freed from cares and agues, love
and melancholy, and the other hot and cold fits of life, than, like a
galled traveller who comes weary to his inn, to be bound to begin his
journey afresh?" Then, closing his Burton and opening his Bacon at the
_Essay on Death_; he adds: "There is no terror, brother Toby, in its
(Death's) looks but what it borrows from groans and convulsions, and"
(here parody forces its way in) "the blowing of noses, and the wiping
away of tears with the bottoms of curtains in a sick man's bed-room;"
and with one more theft from Burton, after Seneca: "Consider, brother
Toby, when we are, death is not; and when death is, we are not," this
extraordinary cento of plagiarisms concludes.
Not that this is Sterne's only raid upon the quaint old writer of whom
he has here made such free use. Several other instances of word
for word appropriation might be quoted from this and the succeeding
volumes of _Tristram Shandy_. The apostrophe to "blessed health,"
in c. xxxiii. of vol. v. is taken direct from the _Anatomy of
Melancholy_; so is the phrase, "He has a gourd for his head and a
pippin for his heart," in c.
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