Page:The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy (Volume 3).pdf/73



us go back to the ******—in the last chapter.

It is a singular stroke of eloquence (at least it was so, when eloquence flourished at Athens and Rome, and would be so now, did orators wear mantles) not to mention the name of a thing, when you had the thing about you, in petto, ready to produce, pop, in the place you want it. A scar, an axe, a sword, a pink'd doublet, a rusty helmet, a pound and a half of pot-ashes in an urn, or a three-halfpenny pickle pot,—but above all, a tender infant royally accoutred.—Tho' if it was too young, and the oration as long as Tully's second Philippick,—it must certainly have beshit the orator's