The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman/Volume 6/Chapter 37
CHAP. XXXVII.
—' Twill come out of itself by the bye.—All I contend for it, 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, that 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 mystick 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 the 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 any thing in this world, more concupiscible than widow Wadman.