“Make them like unto a wheel”

“Make them like unto a wheel” becomes a comic argument about whether motion is a curse or the very substance of life. Tristram turns the phrase into a dispute between Bishop Hall, who associates ceaseless travel with unquietness, and the thin narrator, who celebrates movement as joy; their opposed readings lead to different imagined wheels and disclose how bodily temperament colors judgment. The passage also belongs to a journey repeatedly interrupted by routes, tolls, and uncertain observation, so its defense of motion is energetic but never uncomplicated.

The Phrase and Its Dispute

The phrase is introduced as a biblical imprecation against enemies: as Bishop Hall interprets it, David wishes them no worse fate than to be kept perpetually rolling about. Hall’s account makes the wheel an emblem of restless travel and unhappiness. The more movement, he argues, the more unquietness; rest, by comparison, approaches heaven. The joke depends on turning an image of punishment into a question about the grand tour and its restless appetite for going somewhere else.

Tristram openly reverses the valuation. He is thin where Hall is corpulent, and believes that motion brings life and joy, while standing still—or advancing too slowly—means death. His response is not a detached rebuttal: he calls for the horses, the wheels to be greased, and the mail to be tied on, as if argument must immediately become departure. The rush of the injunctions makes his preference palpable, but also gives the passage a comic excess: the defense of motion is itself delivered in a flurry.

Two Wheels, Two Temperaments

The bodily contrast becomes a piece of comic interpretation. Hall’s wheel, Tristram says, should be a post-chaise wheel, suited to an unending circuit of travel; whether such wheels existed in Palestine in David’s time is beside the joke. Tristram assigns himself the opposite wheel, a cart-wheel in a hilly country, groaning through a revolution only once in an age. The images translate abstract disagreement into different speeds: the bishop’s perpetual movement and the narrator’s deliberately sluggish rotation.

That reversal keeps the passage from settling into a simple celebration of speed. Tristram proclaims himself an advocate of motion, yet his own counter-image turns slowly, almost stubbornly. The difference is less a consistent travel doctrine than an argument about how disposition governs interpretation. What counts as punishment or pleasure depends on the body imagining the wheel and on the pace it can bear.

The Body as a Measure of Judgment

Tristram extends the dispute into a claim about thought. He praises the Pythagoreans for the idea of getting out of the body in order to think well, then immediately observes that no one thinks rightly while still in it: congenial humours and bodily constitution draw people toward different conclusions. Hall’s corpulence and Tristram’s thinness thus become more than incidental descriptions. They supply the passage’s comic explanation for why the same image can signify misery to one man and vitality to another.

The argument ends by making reason inseparable from sense. Heaven itself, Tristram suggests, is measured by present appetites and bodily concoctions. That claim complicates his confident opposition to Hall: the narrator’s preference for motion is no more wholly disembodied or universally authoritative than the bishop’s preference for rest. The wheel exposes not simply a right answer, but the bodily terms through which an answer is formed.

Travel in Practice

Elsewhere in the journey, the ideal of uninterrupted progress meets the inconvenience of actual travel. Between Calais and Paris, three roads compete for a traveler’s choice, and the arguments of local deputies can consume half a day before a route is settled. The alternative roads promise different attractions: the road by Lisle and Arras is longer but more interesting and instructive, while the Amiens route offers Chantilly. Movement therefore begins with a delay over which kind of movement is worthwhile.

The journey also makes pace dependent on small, recurring interruptions. A traveler who hopes to sleep through the road is roused at each stage to pay three livres and fifteen sous, count the money, settle discrepancies, and consult a small-print book of post-roads. The sequence turns travel’s forward motion into a rhythm of stops and renewed attention. Against that lived friction, Tristram’s wish not to lose a moment sounds both exhilarating and knowingly comic: the road will not permit motion to be pure, uninterrupted freedom.

Observation and the Limits of the Travel Gaze

The same journey complicates what travel can teach. Tristram admits that he knows little of Calais: he arrived at dusk and left in darkness, with only a barber’s remarks to supplement what he had seen. Yet he boasts that by combining scraps of information and drawing one thing from another he could produce a long, precise-seeming chapter on the town. The claim exposes how a travel account can make inference and convention look like firsthand knowledge. The appearance of detail need not prove that the traveler has actually observed what he describes.

His account of Paris similarly qualifies the grand tour’s promise of comprehensive experience. The familiar claim that those who have seen Paris have seen everything, he suggests, must refer to seeing it by daylight. Candlelight makes the city’s celebrated hotels and their many attractions uncertain and difficult to apprehend; the traveler’s access, not merely the city itself, determines what can be known. The wheel’s motion carries a person from place to place, but motion alone cannot guarantee clear sight or reliable understanding.

Significance

The phrase gathers these tensions into one image. A wheel can represent perpetual travel, imposed restlessness, bodily joy, or nearly arrested progress; its meaning shifts with the person interpreting it. By making that shift explicit, Tristram links physical constitution to judgment and makes the narrator’s own enthusiasm part of the subject rather than a neutral verdict.

The episode’s comic force also comes from the gap between the grand tour’s promise of movement and the journey’s actual conditions: choices consume time, stage payments break into sleep, and darkness restricts observation. Tristram continues to champion motion, but the surrounding travel narrative prevents that principle from becoming a simple triumph. Movement may be life and joy to him, yet the road remains a chain of practical delays, and arrival does not by itself amount to knowledge.