“Kingdoms and provinces, cities and towns,” continues Burton, “have their periods, and are consumed.”  “Kingdoms and provinces, and towns and cities,” exclaims Mr. Shandy, throwing the sentence, like the “born orator” his son considered him, into the rhetorical interrogative, “have they not their periods?” “Where,” he proceeds, “is Troy, and Mycenae, and Thebes, and Delos, and Persepolis, and Agrigentum?  What is become, brother Toby, of Nineveh and Babylon, of Cyzicum and Mytilene?  The fairest towns that ever the sun rose upon” (and all, with the curious exception of Mytilene, enumerated by Burton) “are now no more.”  And then the famous consolatory letter from Servius Sulpicius to Cicero on the death of Tullia is laid under contribution—­Burton’s rendering of the Latin being followed almost word for word.  “Returning out of Asia,” declaims Mr. Shandy, “when I sailed from Aegina towards Megara” (when can this have been? thought my Uncle Toby), “I began to view the country round about.  Aegina was behind me, Megara before,” &c., and so on, down to the final reflection of the philosopher, “Remember that thou art but a man;” at which point Sterne remarks coolly, “Now, my Uncle Toby knew not that this last paragraph was an extract of Servius Sulpicius’s consolatory letter to Tully”—­the thing to be really known being that the paragraph was, in fact, Servius Sulpicius filtered through Burton.  Again, and still quoting from the Anatomy of Melancholy, Mr. Shandy remarks how “the Thracians wept when a child was born, and feasted and made merry when a man went out of the world; and with reason.”  He then goes on to lay predatory hands on that fine, sad passage in Lucian, which Burton had quoted before him:  “Is it not better not to hunger at all, than to eat? not to thirst, than to take physic to cure it?” (why not “than to drink to satisfy thirst?” as Lucian wrote and Burton translated).  “Is it not better to be freed from cares and agues, love and melancholy, and the other hot and cold fits of life, than, like a galled traveller who comes weary to his inn, to be bound to begin his journey afresh?” Then, closing his Burton and opening his Bacon at the Essay on Death; he adds:  “There is no terror, brother Toby, in its (Death’s) looks but what it borrows from groans and convulsions, and” (here parody forces its way in) “the blowing of noses, and the wiping away of tears with the bottoms of curtains in a sick man’s bed-room;” and with one more theft from Burton, after Seneca:  “Consider, brother Toby, when we are, death is not; and when death is, we are not,” this extraordinary cento of plagiarisms concludes.