His historian is Hume; and for morals and metaphysics
he goes to Paley and Dr. Reid, or Dugald Stewart, and is well content. For
the satires of Swift he has no relish. They discompose his ideas; and he
of all things detests to have his head set a spinning like a tetotum,
either by a book or by anything else. Bishop Berkeley once did this for
him to such a tune, that he showed a visible uneasiness at the mention of
the book ever after. In Tristram Shandy, however, he has a sort of
suppressed delight, which he hardly likes to acknowledge, the magnet of
attraction being, though he knows it not, in the characters of Uncle Toby,
Corporal Trim, and the Widow Wadman. His religious reading is confined to
"Blair's Sermons," and the "Whole Duty of Man," in which he always keeps a
little slip of double gilt-edged paper as a marker, without reflecting
that it is a sort of proof that he has never got through either. His
Pocket Bible always lies upon his toilet table. He knows a little of
Mathematics in general, a little of Algebra, and a little of Fluxions,
which is principally to be discovered from his having Emmerson, Simpson,
and Bonnycastle's works in his library. In classical learning he confesses
to having "forgotten" a good deal of Greek; but sports a Latin phrase upon
occasion, and is something of a critic in languages.
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