Now in ordinary cases, that is, when I am only stupid, and the thoughts rise heavily and pass gummous through my pen--Or that I am got, I know not how, into a cold unmetaphorical vein of infamous writing, and cannot take a plumb-lift out of it for my soul; so must be obliged to go on writing like a Dutch commentator to the end of the chapter, unless something be done----I never stand conferring with pen and ink one moment; for if a pinch of snuff, or a stride or two across the room will not do the business for me--I take a razor at once; and having tried the edge of it upon the palm of my hand, without further ceremony, except that of first lathering my beard, Ishave it off; taking care only if I do leave a hair, that it be not a grey one: this done, I change my shirt--put on a better coat--send for my last wig--put my topaz ring upon my finger; and in a word, dress myself from one end to the other of me, after my best fashion.
Now the devil in hell must be in it, if this does not do: for consider, Sir, as every man chuses to be present at the shaving of his own beard (though there is no rule without an exception), and unavoidably sits over-against himself the whole time it is doing, in case he has a hand in it--the Situation, like all others, has notions of her own to put into the brain.----I maintain it, the conceits of a rough-bearded man, are seven years more terse and juvenile for one single operation; and if they did not run a risk of being quite shaved away, might be carried up by continual shavings, to the highest pitch of sublimity--How Homer could write with so long a beard, I don't know--and as it makes against my hypothesis, I as little care--But let us return to the Toilet.
Ludovicus Sorbonensis makes this entirely an affair of the body (Greek) as he calls it--but he is deceived: the soul and body are joint-sharers in every thing they get: A man cannot dress, but his ideas get cloth'd at the same time; and if he dresses like a gentleman, every one of them stands presented to his imagination, genteelized along with him--so that he has nothing to do, but take his pen, and write like himself.
For this cause, when your honours and reverences would know whether I writ clean and fit to be read, you will be able to judge full as well by looking into my Laundress's bill, as my book: there is one single month in which Ican make it appear, that I dirtied one and thirty shirts with clean writing; and after all, was more abus'd, cursed, criticis'd, and confounded, and had more mystic heads shaken at me, for what I had wrote in that one month, than in all the other months of that year put together.
--But their honours and reverences had not seen my bills.
