seek it. For instance, if my penknife is needed, I pull out twenty
things--a plough-wedge, a horse nail, an old letter, or a tattered
rhyme, in short, everything but my penknife; and that, at last, after a
painful, fruitless search, will be found in the unsuspected corner of an
unsuspected pocket, as if on purpose thrust out of the way. Still, Sir,
I long had a wishing eye to that inestimable blessing, a wife.

... A young fellow, after a few idle commonplace stories from a
gentleman in black ... no one durst say black was his eye; while I ...
only wanting that ceremony, am made a Sunday's laughing-stock, and
abused like a pickpocket. I was well aware, though, that if my
ill-starred fortune got the least hint of my connubial wish, my scheme
would go to nothing. To prevent this I determined to take my measures
with such thought and fore-thought, such cautions and precautions, that
all the malignant planets in the hemisphere should be unable to blight
my designs .... Heaven and Earth! must I remember? my damned star
wheeled about to the zenith, by whose baleful rays Fortune took the
alarm.[15a] ... In short, Pharaoh at the Red Sea, Darius at Arbela,
Pompey at Pharsalia, Edward at Bannockburn, Charles at Pultoway,
Burgoyne at Saratoga--no prince, potentate, or commander of ancient or
modern unfortunate memory ever got a more shameful or more total defeat.
How I bore this can only be conceived. All powers of recital labour far,
far behind. There is a pretty large portion of Bedlam in the composition
of a poet at any time; but on this occasion I was nine parts and nine
tenths, out of ten, stark staring mad. At first I was fixed in
stuporific insensibility, silent, sullen, staring like Lot's wife
besaltified in the plains of Gomorrha. But my second paroxysm chiefly
beggars description. The rifted northern ocean, when returning suns
dissolve the chains of winter, and loosening precipices of
long-accumulated ice tempest with hideous crash the foaming