——Softer visions,—gentler vibrations stole sweetly in upon his slumbers;—the trumpet of war fell out of his hands,—he took up the lute, sweet instrument! of all others the most delicate! the most difficult!——how wilt thou touch it, my dear uncle _Toby_? C H A P. LXXIX NOW, because I have once or twice said, in my inconsiderate way of talking, That I was confident the following memoirs of my uncle _Toby_’s courtship of widow _Wadman_, whenever I got time to write them, would turn out one of the most complete systems, both of the elementary and practical part of love and love-making, that ever was addressed to the world——are you to imagine from thence, that I shall set out with a description of _what love is?_ whether part God and part Devil, as _Plotinus_ will have it—— ——Or by a more critical equation, and supposing the whole of love to be as ten——to determine with _Ficinus_, “_How many parts of it—the one,—and how many the other;_”—or whether it is _all of it one great Devil_, from head to tail, as _Plato_ has taken upon him to pronounce; concerning which conceit of his, I shall not offer my opinion:—but my opinion of _Plato_ is this; that he appears, from this instance, to have been a man of much the same temper and way of reasoning with doctor _Baynyard_, who being a great enemy to blisters, as imagining that half a dozen of ’em at once, would draw a man as surely to his grave, as a herse and six—rashly concluded, that the Devil himself was nothing in the world, but one great bouncing _Cantharidis._—— I have nothing to say to people who allow themselves this monstrous liberty in arguing, but what _Nazianzen_ cried out (_that is, polemically_) to _Philagrius_—— “’Ευγε!” _O rare! ’tis fine reasoning, Sir indeed!_—“οτι φιλοσοφεισ ευ Παθεσ.” _and most nobly do you aim at truth, when you philosophize about it in your moods and passions._ Nor is it to be imagined, for the same reason, I should stop to inquire, whether love is a disease,——or embroil myself with _Rhasis_ and _Dioscorides_, whether the seat of it is in the brain or liver;—because this would lead me on, to an examination of the two very opposite manners, in which patients have been treated——the one, of _Aœtius_, who always begun with a cooling clyster of hempseed and bruised cucumbers;—and followed on with thin potations of water-lilies and purslane—to which he added a pinch of snuff, of the herb _Hanea;_—and where _Aœtius_ durst venture it,—his topaz-ring. ——The other, that of _Gordonius_, who (in his cap. 15. _de Amore_) directs they should be thrashed, “_ad putorem usque_,”——till they stink again.