⸺’Twill come out of itself by and bye.⁠⸺⁠All I contend for is, that I am not obliged to set out with a definition of what love is; and so long as I can go on with my story intelligibly, with the help of the word itself, without any other idea to it, than what I have in common with the rest of the world, why should I differ from it a moment before the time?⁠⸺⁠When I can get on no further,⁠⸺⁠and find myself entangled on all sides of this mystic labyrinth,⁠—my Opinion will then come in, in course,⁠—and lead me out.

At present, I hope I shall be sufficiently understood, in telling the reader, my uncle Toby fell in love:

—Not that the phrase is at all to my liking: for to say a man is fallen in love,⁠—or that he is deeply in love,⁠—or up to the ears in love,⁠—and sometimes even over head and ears in it,⁠—carries an idiomatical kind of implication, that love is a thing below a man:⁠—this is recurring again to Plato’s opinion, which, with all his divinityship,⁠—I hold to be damnable and heretical:⁠—and so much for that.

Let love therefore be what it will,⁠—my uncle Toby fell into it.

⸺⁠And possibly, gentle reader, with such a temptation⁠—so wouldst thou: For never did thy eyes behold, or thy concupiscence covet anything in this world, more concupiscible than widow Wadman.