interrogative, "have they not their periods?" "Where," he proceeds,
"is Troy, and Mycenae, and Thebes, and Delos, and Persepolis, and
Agrigentum? What is become, brother Toby, of Nineveh and Babylon, of
Cyzicum and Mytilene? The fairest towns that ever the sun rose upon"
(and all, with the curious exception of Mytilene, enumerated by
Burton) "are now no more." And then the famous consolatory letter
from Servius Sulpicius to Cicero on the death of Tullia is laid under
contribution--Burton's rendering of the Latin being followed almost
word for word. "Returning out of Asia," declaims Mr. Shandy, "when I
sailed from Aegina towards Megara" (when can this have been? thought
my Uncle Toby), "I began to view the country round about. Aegina
was behind me, Megara before," &c., and so on, down to the final
reflection of the philosopher, "Remember that thou art but a man;" at
which point Sterne remarks coolly, "Now, my Uncle Toby knew not that
this last paragraph was an extract of Servius Sulpicius's consolatory
letter to Tully"--the thing to be really known being that the
paragraph was, in fact, Servius Sulpicius filtered through Burton.
Again, and still quoting from the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Mr. Shandy
remarks how "the Thracians wept when a child was born, and feasted and
made merry when a man went out of the world; and with reason." He then
goes on to lay predatory hands on that fine, sad passage in Lucian,
which Burton had quoted before him: "Is it not better not to hunger at
all, than to eat? not to thirst, than to take physic to cure it?"
(why not "than to drink to satisfy thirst?" as Lucian wrote and Burton
translated). "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"