Page:The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy (Volume 1).pdf/172

 other accounts, I say, as well play the fool out o'doors as in her own house.

But this, as I said above, is not the case of the inhabitants of this earth;—our minds shine not through the body, but are warptwrapt [sic] up here in a dark covering of uncrystalized flesh and blood; so that if we would come to the specifick characters of them, we must go some other way to work.

Many, in good truth, are the ways which human wit has been forced to take to do this thing with exactness.

Some, for instance, draw all their characters with wind instruments.—Virgil takes notice of that way in the affair of Dido and Æneas;—but it is as fallacious as the breath of fame;—and, moreover,