Chapter VI…

Chapter VI

----What can they be doing, brother? said my father. --I think, replied my uncle Toby, --taking, as I told you, his pipe from his mouth, and striking the ashes out of it as he began his sentence; ----I think, replied he, --it would not be amiss, brother, if we rung the bell.

Pray, what’s all that racket over our heads, Obadiah? ----quoth my father; ----my brother and I can scarce hear ourselves speak.

Sir, answered Obadiah, making a bow towards his left shoulder, --my Mistress is taken very badly. --And where’s Susannah running down the garden there, as if they were going to ravish her? ----Sir, she is running the shortest cut into the town, replied Obadiah, to fetch the old midwife. --Then saddle a horse, quoth my father, and do you go directly for Dr. Slop, the man-midwife, with all our services, ----and let him know your mistress is fallen into labour----and that I desire he will return with you with all speed.

It is very strange, says my father, addressing himself to my uncle Toby, as Obadiah shut the door, ----as there is so expert an operator as Dr. Slop so near, --that my wife should persist to the very last in this obstinate humour of hers, in trusting the life of my child, who has had one misfortune already, to the ignorance of an old woman; ----and not only the life of my child, brother, ----but her own life, and with it the lives of all the children I might, peradventure, have begot out of her hereafter.

Mayhap, brother, replied my uncle Toby, my sister does it to save the expense: --A pudding’s end, --replied my father, ----the Doctor must be paid the same for inaction as action, ----if not better, --to keep him in temper.

----Then it can be out of nothing in the whole world, quoth my uncle Toby, in the simplicity of his heart, --but MODESTY. --My sister, I dare say, added he, does not care to let a man come so near her ****. I will not say whether my uncle Toby had completed the sentence or not; ----’tis for his advantage to suppose he had, ----as, I think, he could have added no ONE WORD which would have improved it.

If, on the contrary, my uncle Toby had not fully arrived at the period’s end, --then the world stands indebted to the sudden snapping of my father’s tobacco-pipe for one of the neatest examples of that ornamental figure in oratory, which Rhetoricians stile the Aposiopesis. ----Just Heaven! how does the Poco piu and the Poco meno of the Italian artists; --the insensible MORE OR LESS, determine the precise line of beauty in the sentence, as well as in the statute! How do the slight touches of the chisel, the pencil, the pen, the fiddle-stick, et cætera, --give the true swell, which gives the true pleasure! --O my countrymen; --be nice; --be cautious of your language; --and never, O! never let it be forgotten upon what small particles your eloquence and your fame depend.

----“My sister, mayhap,” quoth my uncle Toby, “does not choose to let a man come so near her ****.” Make this dash, --’tis an Aposiopesis. --Take the dash away, and write Backside, ----’tis Bawdy. --Scratch Backside out, and put Cover’d way in, ’tis a Metaphor; --and, I dare say, as fortification ran so much in my uncle Toby’s head, that if he had been left to have added one word to the sentence, ----that word was it.

But whether that was the case or not the case; --or whether the snapping of my father’s tobacco-pipe, so critically, happened through accident or anger, will be seen in due time.

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Chapter VII

Tho’ my father was a good natural philosopher, --yet he was something of a moral philosopher too; for which reason, when his tobacco-pipe snapp’d short in the middle, --he had nothing to do, as such, but to have taken hold of the two pieces, and thrown them gently upon the back of the fire. ----He did no such thing; ----he threw them with all the violence in the world; --and, to give the action still more emphasis, --he started upon both his legs to do it.

This looked something like heat; --and the manner of his reply to what my uncle Toby was saying, proved it was so.

--“Not choose,” quoth my father, (repeating my uncle Toby’s words) “to let a man come so near her!” ----By Heaven, brother Toby! you would try the patience of Job; --and I think I have the plagues of one already without it. ----Why? ----Where? ----Wherein? ----Wherefore? ----Upon what account? replied my uncle Toby, in the utmost astonishment. --To think, said my father, of a man living to your age, brother, and knowing so little about women! ----I know nothing at all about them, --replied my uncle Toby: And I think, continued he, that the shock I received the year after the demolition of Dunkirk, in my affair with widow Wadman; --which shock you know I should not have received, but from my total ignorance of the sex, --has given me just cause to say, That I neither know nor do pretend to know anything about ’em or their concerns either. --Methinks, brother, replied my father, you might, at least, know so much as the right end of a woman from the wrong.

It is said in Aristotle’s Master Piece, “That when a man doth think of anything which is past, ----he looketh down upon the ground; ----but that when he thinketh of something that is to come, he looketh up towards the heavens.”

My uncle Toby, I suppose, thought of neither, for he look’d horizontally. --Right end! quoth my uncle Toby, muttering the two words low to himself, and fixing his two eyes insensibly as he muttered them, upon a small crevice, formed by a bad joint in the chimney-piece ----Right end of a woman! ----I declare, quoth my uncle, I know no more which it is than the man in the moon; ----and if I was to think, continued my uncle Toby (keeping his eye still fixed upon the bad joint) this month together, I am sure I should not be able to find it out.

Then, brother Toby, replied my father, I will tell you.

Everything in this world, continued my father (filling a fresh pipe)--every thing in this world, my dear brother Toby, has two handles. ----Not always, quoth my uncle Toby. ----At least, replied my father, everyone has two hands, ----which comes to the same thing. ----Now, if a man was to sit down coolly, and consider within himself the make, the shape, the construction, come-at-ability, and convenience of all the parts which constitute the whole of that animal, called Woman, and compare them analogically ----I never understood rightly the meaning of that word, --quoth my uncle Toby.--

ANALOGY, replied my father, is the certain relation and agreement which different ----Here a devil of a rap at the door snapped my father’s definition (like his tobacco-pipe) in two, --and, at the same time, crushed the head of as notable and curious a dissertation as ever was engendered in the womb of speculation; --it was some months before my father could get an opportunity to be safely delivered of it: --And, at this hour, it is a thing full as problematical as the subject of the dissertation itself, --(considering the confusion and distresses of our domestick misadventures, which are now coming thick one upon the back of another) whether I shall be able to find a place for it in the third volume or not.

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Chapter VIII

It is about an hour and a half’s tolerable good reading since my uncle Toby rung the bell, when Obadiah was ordered to saddle a horse, and go for Dr. Slop, the man-midwife; --so that no one can say, with reason, that I have not allowed Obadiah time enough, poetically speaking, and considering the emergency too, both to go and come; ----though, morally and truly speaking, the man perhaps has scarce had time to get on his boots.

If the hypercritick will go upon this; and is resolved after all to take a pendulum, and measure the true distance betwixt the ringing of the bell, and the rap at the door; --and, after finding it to be no more than two minutes, thirteen seconds, and three fifths, --should take upon him to insult over me for such a breach in the unity, or rather probability of time; --I would remind him, that the idea of duration, and of its simple modes, is got merely from the train and succession of our ideas, ----and is the true scholastic pendulum, ----and by which, as a scholar, I will be tried in this matter, --abjuring and detesting the jurisdiction of all other pendulums whatever.

I would therefore desire him to consider that it is but poor eight miles from Shandy-Hall to Dr. Slop, the man-midwife’s house; --and that whilst Obadiah has been going those said miles and back, I have brought my uncle Toby from Namur, quite across all Flanders, into England: --That I have had him ill upon my hands near four years; --and have since travelled him and Corporal Trim in a chariot-and-four, a journey of near two hundred miles down into Yorkshire, ----all which put together, must have prepared the reader’s imagination for the entrance of Dr. Slop upon the stage, --as much, at least (I hope) as a dance, a song, or a concerto between the acts.

If my hypercritick is intractable, alledging, that two minutes and thirteen seconds are no more than two minutes and thirteen seconds, --when I have said all I can about them; and that this plea, though it might save me dramatically, will damn me biographically, rendering my book from this very moment, a professed ROMANCE, which, before, was a book apocryphal: ----If I am thus pressed --I then put an end to the whole objection and controversy about it all at once, ----by acquainting him, that Obadiah had not got above threescore yards from the stable-yard before he met with Dr. Slop; --and indeed he gave a dirty proof that he had met with him, and was within an ace of giving a tragical one too.

Imagine to yourself; --but this had better begin a new chapter.

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Chapter IX

Imagine to yourself a little squat, uncourtly figure of a Doctor Slop, of about four feet and a half perpendicular height, with a breadth of back, and a sesquipedality of belly, which might have done honour to a serjeant in the horse-guards.

Such were the out-lines of Dr. Slop’s figure, which, --if you have read Hogarth’s analysis of beauty, and if you have not, I wish you would; ----you must know, may as certainly be caricatured, and conveyed to the mind by three strokes as three hundred.

Imagine such a one, ----for such, I say, were the outlines of Dr. Slop’s figure, coming slowly along, foot by foot, waddling thro’ the dirt upon the vertebræ of a little diminutive pony, of a pretty colour----but of strength, ----alack! ----scarce able to have made an amble of it, under such a fardel, had the roads been in an ambling condition. ----They were not. ----Imagine to yourself, Obadiah mounted upon a strong monster of a coach-horse, pricked into a full gallop, and making all practicable speed the adverse way.

Pray, Sir, let me interest you a moment in this description.

Had Dr. Slop beheld Obadiah a mile off, posting in a narrow lane directly towards him, at that monstrous rate, --splashing and plunging like a devil thro’ thick and thin, as he approached, would not such a phænomenon, with such a vortex of mud and water moving along with it, round its axis, --have been a subject of juster apprehension to Dr. Slop in his situation, than the worst of Whiston’s comets? --To say nothing of the NUCLEUS; that is, of Obadiah and the coach-horse. --In my idea, the vortex alone of ’em was enough to have involved and carried, if not the doctor, at least the doctor’s pony, quite away with it. What then do you think must the terror and hydrophobia of Dr. Slop have been, when you read (which you are just going to do) that he was advancing thus warily along towards Shandy-Hall, and had approached to within sixty yards of it, and within five yards of a sudden turn, made by an acute angle of the garden-wall, --and in the dirtiest part of a dirty lane, --when Obadiah and his coach-horse turned the corner, rapid, furious, --pop, --full upon him! --Nothing, I think, in nature, can be supposed more terrible than such a rencounter, --so imprompt! so ill prepared to stand the shock of it as Dr. Slop was.

What could Dr. Slop do? ----he crossed himself + --Pugh! --but the doctor, Sir, was a Papist. --No matter; he had better have kept hold of the pummel --He had so; --nay, as it happened, he had better have done nothing at all; for in crossing himself he let go his whip, ----and in attempting to save his whip betwixt his knee and his saddle’s skirt, as it slipped, he lost his stirrup, ----in losing which he lost his seat; ----and in the multitude of all these losses (which, by the bye, shews what little advantage there is in crossing) the unfortunate doctor lost his presence of mind. So that without waiting for Obadiah’s onset, he left his pony to its destiny, tumbling off it diagonally, something in the stile and manner of a pack of wool, and without any other consequence from the fall, save that of being left (as it would have been) with the broadest part of him sunk about twelve inches deep in the mire.

Obadiah pull’d off his cap twice to Dr. Slop; --once as he was falling, --and then again when he saw him seated. ----Ill-timed complaisance; --had not the fellow better have stopped his horse, and got off and help’d him? --Sir, he did all that his situation would allow; --but the MOMENTUM of the coach-horse was so great, that Obadiah could not do it all at once; he rode in a circle three times round Dr. Slop, before he could fully accomplish it any how; --and at the last, when he did stop his beast, ’twas done with such an explosion of mud, that Obadiah had better have been a league off. In short, never was a Dr. Slop so beluted, and so transubstantiated, since that affair came into fashion.

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Chapter X

When Dr. Slop entered the back parlour, where my father and my uncle Toby were discoursing upon the nature of women, ----it was hard to determine whether Dr. Slop’s figure, or Dr. Slop’s presence, occasioned more surprize to them; for as the accident happened so near the house, as not to make it worth while for Obadiah to remount him, ----Obadiah had led him in as he was, unwiped, unappointed, unannealed, with all his stains and blotches on him. --He stood like Hamlet’s ghost, motionless and speechless, for a full minute and a half at the parlour-door (Obadiah still holding his hand) with all the majesty of mud. His hinder parts, upon which he had received his fall, totally besmeared, ----and in every other part of him, blotched over in such a manner with Obadiah’s explosion, that you would have sworn (without mental reservation) that every grain of it had taken effect.

Here was a fair opportunity for my uncle Toby to have triumphed over my father in his turn; --for no mortal, who had beheld Dr. Slop in that pickle, could have dissented from so much at least, of my uncle Toby’s opinion, “That mayhap his sister might not care to let such a Dr. Slop come so near her ****.” But it was the Argumentum ad hominem; and if my uncle Toby was not very expert at it, you may think, he might not care to use it. ----No; the reason was, --’twas not his nature to insult.

Dr. Slop’s presence at that time, was no less problematical than the mode of it; tho’ it is certain, one moment’s reflexion in my father might have solved it; for he had apprized Dr. Slop but the week before, that my mother was at her full reckoning; and as the doctor had heard nothing since, ’twas natural and very political too in him, to have taken a ride to Shandy-Hall, as he did, merely to see how matters went on.

But my father’s mind took unfortunately a wrong turn in the investigation; running, like the hypercritick’s, altogether upon the ringing of the bell and the rap upon the door, --measuring their distance, and keeping his mind so intent upon the operation as to have power to think of nothing else, ----common-place infirmity of the greatest mathematicians! working with might and main at the demonstration, and so wasting all their strength upon it, that they have none left in them to draw the corollary, to do good with.

The ringing of the bell, and the rap upon the door, struck likewise strong upon the sensorium of my uncle Toby, --but it excited a very different train of thoughts; --the two irreconcileable pulsations instantly brought Stevinus, the great engineer, along with them, into my uncle Toby’s mind. What business Stevinus had in this affair, --is the greatest problem of all: ----It shall be solved, --but not in the next chapter.

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Chapter XI

Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation. As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all; ----so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good-breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader’s understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.

For my own part, I am eternally paying him compliments of this kind, and do all that lies in my power to keep his imagination as busy as my own.

’Tis his turn now; --I have given an ample description of Dr. Slop’s sad overthrow, and of his sad appearance in the back-parlour; --his imagination must now go on with it for a while.

Let the reader imagine then, that Dr. Slop has told his tale--and in what words, and with what aggravations, his fancy chooses; --Let him suppose, that Obadiah has told his tale also, and with such rueful looks of affected concern, as he thinks best will contrast the two figures as they stand by each other. ----Let him imagine, that my father has stepped upstairs to see my mother. --And, to conclude this work of imagination--let him imagine the doctor washed, --rubbed down, and condoled, --felicitated, --got into a pair of Obadiah’s pumps, stepping forwards towards the door, upon the very point of entering upon action.

Truce! --truce, good Dr. Slop: --stay thy obstetrick hand; ----return it safe into thy bosom to keep it warm; ----little dost thou know what obstacles, ------little dost thou think what hidden causes, retard its operation! ----Hast thou, Dr. Slop, --hast thou been intrusted with the secret articles of the solemn treaty which has brought thee into this place? --Art thou aware that at this instant, a daughter of Lucina is put obstetrically over thy head? Alas! --’tis too true. --Besides, great son of Pilumnus! what canst thou do? --Thou hast come forth unarm’d; --thou hast left thy tire-tête, --thy new-invented forceps, --thy crotchet, --thy squirt, and all thy instruments of salvation and deliverance, behind thee, --By Heaven! at this moment they are hanging up in a green bays bag, betwixt thy two pistols, at the bed’s head! --Ring; --call; --send Obadiah back upon the coach-horse to bring them with all speed.

----Make great haste, Obadiah, quoth my father, and I’ll give thee a crown! --and quoth my uncle Toby, I’ll give him another.

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Chapter XII

Your sudden and unexpected arrival, quoth my uncle Toby, addressing himself to Dr. Slop (all three of them sitting down to the fire together, as my uncle Toby began to speak)--instantly brought the great Stevinus into my head, who, you must know, is a favourite author with me. --Then, added my father, making use of the argument Ad Crumenam, --I will lay twenty guineas to a single crown-piece (which will serve to give away to Obadiah when he gets back) that this same Stevinus was some engineer or other, --or has wrote something or other, either directly or indirectly, upon the science of fortification.

He has so, --replied my uncle Toby. --I knew it, said my father, though, for the soul of me, I cannot see what kind of connection there can be betwixt Dr. Slop’s sudden coming, and a discourse upon fortification; --yet I fear’d it. --Talk of what we will, brother, ----or let the occasion be never so foreign or unfit for the subject, --you are sure to bring it in. I would not, brother Toby, continued my father, ------I declare I would not have my head so full of curtins and hornworks. --That I dare say you would not, quoth Dr. Slop, interrupting him, and laughing most immoderately at his pun.

Dennis the critic could not detest and abhor a pun, or the insinuation of a pun, more cordially than my father; --he would grow testy upon it at any time; --but to be broke in upon by one, in a serious discourse, was as bad, he would say, as a fillip upon the nose; ----he saw no difference.

Sir, quoth my uncle Toby, addressing himself to Dr. Slop, --the curtins my brother Shandy mentions here, have nothing to do with bedsteads; --tho’, I know Du Cange says, “That bed-curtains, in all probability, have taken their name from them;” --nor have the hornworks he speaks of, anything in the world to do with the horn-works of cuckoldom: --But the Curtin, Sir, is the word we use in fortification, for that part of the wall or rampart which lies between the two bastions and joins them --Besiegers seldom offer to carry on their attacks directly against the curtin, for this reason, because they are so well flanked. (’Tis the case of other curtains, quoth Dr. Slop, laughing.) However, continued my uncle Toby, to make them sure, we generally choose to place ravelins before them, taking care only to extend them beyond the fossé or ditch: ----The common men, who know very little of fortification, confound the ravelin and the half-moon together, --tho’ they are very different things; --not in their figure or construction, for we make them exactly alike, in all points; --for they always consist of two faces, making a salient angle, with the gorges, not straight, but in form of a crescent: ----Where then lies the difference? (quoth my father, a little testily). --In their situations, answered my uncle Toby: --For when a ravelin, brother, stands before the curtin, it is a ravelin; and when a ravelin stands before a bastion, then the ravelin is not a ravelin; --it is a half-moon; --a half-moon likewise is a half-moon, and no more, so long as it stands before its bastion; ----but was it to change place, and get before the curtin, --’twould be no longer a half-moon; a half-moon, in that case, is not a half-moon; --’tis no more than a ravelin. ----I think, quoth my father, that the noble science of defence has its weak sides----as well as others.

--As for the horn-work (high! ho! sigh’d my father) which, continued my uncle Toby, my brother was speaking of, they are a very considerable part of an outwork; ----they are called by the French engineers, Ouvrage à corne, and we generally make them to cover such places as we suspect to be weaker than the rest; --’tis formed by two epaulments or demi-bastions--they are very pretty, --and if you will take a walk, I’ll engage to shew you one well worth your trouble. --I own, continued my uncle Toby, when we crown them, --they are much stronger, but then they are very expensive, and take up a great deal of ground, so that, in my opinion, they are most of use to cover or defend the head of a camp; otherwise the double tenaille --By the mother who bore us! ----brother Toby, quoth my father, not able to hold out any longer, ----you would provoke a saint; ----here have you got us, I know not how, not only souse into the middle of the old subject again: --But so full is your head of these confounded works, that though my wife is this moment in the pains of labour, and you hear her cry out, yet nothing will serve you but to carry off the man-midwife. ----Accoucheur, --if you please, quoth Dr. Slop. ----With all my heart, replied my father, I don’t care what they call you, --but I wish the whole science of fortification, with all its inventors, at the devil; --it has been the death of thousands, --and it will be mine in the end, --I would not, I would not, brother Toby, have my brains so full of saps, mines, blinds, gabions, pallisadoes, ravelins, half-moons, and such trumpery, to be proprietor of Namur, and of all the towns in Flanders with it.

My uncle Toby was a man patient of injuries; --not from want of courage, --I have told you in a former chapter, “that he was a man of courage:” --And will add here, that where just occasions presented, or called it forth, --I know no man under whose arm I would have sooner taken shelter; ----nor did this arise from any insensibility or obtuseness of his intellectual parts; --for he felt this insult of my father’s as feelingly as a man could do; --but he was of a peaceful, placid nature, --no jarring element in it, --all was mixed up so kindly within him; my uncle Toby had scarce a heart to retaliate upon a fly.

--Go--says he, one day at dinner, to an over-grown one which had buzzed about his nose, and tormented him cruelly all dinner-time, --and which after infinite attempts, he had caught at last, as it flew by him; --I’ll not hurt thee, says my uncle Toby, rising from his chair, and going across the room, with the fly in his hand, ----I’ll not hurt a hair of thy head: --Go, says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape; --go, poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee? ----This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.

I was but ten years old when this happened: but whether it was, that the action itself was more in unison to my nerves at that age of pity, which instantly set my whole frame into one vibration of most pleasurable sensation; --or how far the manner and expression of it might go towards it; --or in what degree, or by what secret magick, --a tone of voice and harmony of movement, attuned by mercy, might find a passage to my heart, I know not; --this I know, that the lesson of universal good-will then taught and imprinted by my uncle Toby, has never since been worn out of my mind: And tho’ I would not depreciate what the study of the Literæ humaniores, at the university, have done for me in that respect, or discredit the other helps of an expensive education bestowed upon me, both at home and abroad since; --yet I often think that I owe one half of my philanthropy to that one accidental impression.

[-->] This is to serve for parents and governors instead of a whole volume upon the subject.

I could not give the reader this stroke in my uncle Toby’s picture, by the instrument with which I drew the other parts of it, --that taking in no more than the mere HOBBY-HORSICAL likeness: ----this is a part of his moral character. My father, in this patient endurance of wrongs, which I mention, was very different, as the reader must long ago have noted; he had a much more acute and quick sensibility of nature, attended with a little soreness of temper; tho’ this never transported him to anything which looked like malignancy: --yet in the little rubs and vexations of life, ’twas apt to shew itself in a drollish and witty kind of peevishness: ----He was, however, frank and generous in his nature; ----at all times open to conviction; and in the little ebullitions of this subacid humour towards others, but particularly towards my uncle Toby, whom he truly loved: ----he would feel more pain, ten times told (except in the affair of my aunt Dinah, or where an hypothesis was concerned) than what he ever gave.

The characters of the two brothers, in this view of them, reflected light upon each other, and appeared with great advantage in this affair which arose about Stevinus.

I need not tell the reader, if he keeps a HOBBY-HORSE, ----that a man’s HOBBY-HORSE is as tender a part as he has about him; and that these unprovoked strokes at my uncle Toby’s could not be unfelt by him. ----No: ------as I said above, my uncle Toby did feel them, and very sensibly too.

Pray, Sir, what said he? --How did he behave? --O, Sir! --it was great: For as soon as my father had done insulting his HOBBY-HORSE, ------he turned his head without the least emotion, from Dr. Slop, to whom he was addressing his discourse, and looking up into my father’s face, with a countenance spread over with so much good-nature; ----so placid; ----so fraternal; ----so inexpressibly tender towards him: --it penetrated my father to his heart: He rose up hastily from his chair, and seizing hold of both my uncle Toby’s hands as he spoke: --Brother Toby, said he, --I beg thy pardon; ----forgive, I pray thee, this rash humour which my mother gave me. ----My dear, dear brother, answered my uncle Toby, rising up by my father’s help, say no more about it; --you are heartily welcome, had it been ten times as much, brother. But ’tis ungenerous, replied my father, to hurt any man; ----a brother worse; ----but to hurt a brother of such gentle manners, --so unprovoking, --and so unresenting; ----’tis base: ----By Heaven, ’tis cowardly. --You are heartily welcome, brother, quoth my uncle Toby, ------had it been fifty times as much. ----Besides, what have I to do, my dear Toby, cried my father, either with your amusements or your pleasures, unless it was in my power (which it is not) to increase their measure?

----Brother Shandy, answered my uncle Toby, looking wistfully in his face, ----you are much mistaken in this point: --for you do increase my pleasure very much, in begetting children for the Shandy family at your time of life. --But, by that, Sir, quoth Dr. Slop, Mr. Shandy increases his own. --Not a jot, quoth my father.

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Chapter XIII

My brother does it, quoth my uncle Toby, out of principle. ----In a family way, I suppose, quoth Dr. Slop. ----Pshaw! --said my father, --’tis not worth talking of.

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Chapter XIV

At the end of the last chapter, my father and my uncle Toby were left both standing, like Brutus and Cassius, at the close of the scene, making up their accounts.

As my father spoke the three last words, ----he sat down; --my uncle Toby exactly followed his example, only, that before he took his chair, he rung the bell, to order Corporal Trim, who was in waiting, to step home for Stevinus: --my uncle Toby’s house being no farther off than the opposite side of the way.

Some men would have dropped the subject of Stevinus; ----but my uncle Toby had no resentment in his heart, and he went on with the subject, to shew my father that he had none.

Your sudden appearance, Dr. Slop, quoth my uncle, resuming the discourse, instantly brought Stevinus into my head. (My father, you may be sure, did not offer to lay any more wagers upon Stevinus’s head.) ----Because, continued my uncle Toby, the celebrated sailing chariot, which belonged to Prince Maurice, and was of such wonderful contrivance and velocity, as to carry half a dozen people thirty German miles, in I don’t know how few minutes, ----was invented by Stevinus, that great mathematician and engineer.

You might have spared your servant the trouble, quoth Dr. Slop (as the fellow is lame) of going for Stevinus’s account of it, because in my return from Leyden thro’ the Hague, I walked as far as Schevling, which is two long miles, on purpose to take a view of it.

That’s nothing, replied my uncle Toby, to what the learned Peireskius did, who walked a matter of five hundred miles, reckoning from Paris to Schevling, and from Schevling to Paris back again, in order to see it, --and nothing else.

Some men cannot bear to be out-gone.

The more fool Peireskius, replied Dr. Slop. But mark, ’twas out of no contempt of Peireskius at all; ----but that Peireskius’s indefatigable labour in trudging so far on foot, out of love for the sciences, reduced the exploit of Dr. Slop, in that affair, to nothing: --the more fool Peireskius, said he again. --Why so? --replied my father, taking his brother’s part, not only to make reparation as fast as he could for the insult he had given him, which sat still upon my father’s mind; ----but partly, that my father began really to interest himself in the discourse. ----Why so? ----said he. Why is Peireskius, or any man else, to be abused for an appetite for that, or any other morsel of sound knowledge: For notwithstanding I know nothing of the chariot in question, continued he, the inventor of it must have had a very mechanical head; and tho’ I cannot guess upon what principles of philosophy he has atchieved it; --yet certainly his machine has been constructed upon solid ones, be they what they will, or it could not have answered at the rate my brother mentions.

It answered, replied my uncle Toby, as well, if not better; for, as Peireskius elegantly expresses it, speaking of the velocity of its motion, Tam citus erat, quam erat ventus; which, unless I have forgot my Latin, is, that it was as swift as the wind itself.

But pray, Dr. Slop, quoth my father, interrupting my uncle (tho’ not without begging pardon for it at the same time) upon what principles was this self-same chariot set a-going? --Upon very pretty principles to be sure, replied Dr. Slop: --And I have often wondered, continued he, evading the question, why none of our gentry, who live upon large plains like this of ours, --(especially they whose wives are not past child-bearing) attempt nothing of this kind; for it would not only be infinitely expeditious upon sudden calls, to which the sex is subject, --if the wind only served, --but would be excellent good husbandry to make use of the winds, which cost nothing, and which eat nothing, rather than horses, which (the devil take ’em) both cost and eat a great deal.

For that very reason, replied my father, “Because they cost nothing, and because they eat nothing,” --the scheme is bad; --it is the consumption of our products, as well as the manufactures of them, which gives bread to the hungry, circulates trade, --brings in money, and supports the value of our lands: --and tho’, I own, if I was a Prince, I would generously recompense the scientifick head which brought forth such contrivances; --yet I would as peremptorily suppress the use of them.

My father here had got into his element, ----and was going on as prosperously with his dissertation upon trade, as my uncle Toby had before, upon his of fortification; --but to the loss of much sound knowledge, the destinies in the morning had decreed that no dissertation of any kind should be spun by my father that day, ----for as he opened his mouth to begin the next sentence.

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Chapter XV

In popped Corporal Trim with Stevinus: --But ’twas too late, --all the discourse had been exhausted without him, and was running into a new channel. --You may take the book home again, Trim, said my uncle Toby, nodding to him.

But prithee, Corporal, quoth my father, drolling, --look first into it, and see if thou canst spy aught of a sailing chariot in it.

Corporal Trim, by being in the service, had learned to obey, --and not to remonstrate; --so taking the book to a side-table, and running over the leaves; An’ please your Honour, said Trim, I can see no such thing; --however, continued the Corporal, drolling a little in his turn, I’ll make sure work of it, an’ please your Honour; --so taking hold of the two covers of the book, one in each hand, and letting the leaves fall down, as he bent the covers back, he gave the book a good sound shake.

There is something falling out, however, said Trim, an’ please your Honour; --but it is not a chariot, or anything like one: --Prithee, Corporal, said my father, smiling, what is it then? --I think, answered Trim, stooping to take it up, ----’tis more like a sermon, ------for it begins with a text of scripture, and the chapter and verse; --and then goes on, not as a chariot, but like a sermon directly.

The company smiled.

I cannot conceive how it is possible, quoth my uncle Toby, for such a thing as a sermon to have got into my Stevinus.

I think ’tis a sermon, replied Trim; --but if it please your Honours, as it is a fair hand, I will read you a page; --for Trim, you must know, loved to hear himself read almost as well as talk.

I have ever a strong propensity, said my father, to look into things which cross my way, by such strange fatalities as these; --and as we have nothing better to do, at least till Obadiah gets back, I shall be obliged to you, brother, if Dr. Slop has no objection to it, to order the Corporal to give us a page or two of it, --if he is as able to do it, as he seems willing. An’ please your Honour, quoth Trim, I officiated two whole campaigns, in Flanders, as clerk to the chaplain of the regiment. ----He can read it, quoth my uncle Toby, as well as I can. ----Trim, I assure you, was the best scholar in my company, and should have had the next halberd, but for the poor fellow’s misfortune. Corporal Trim laid his hand upon his heart, and made an humble bow to his master; --then laying down his hat upon the floor, and taking up the sermon in his left hand, in order to have his right at liberty, ----he advanced, nothing doubting, into the middle of the room, where he could best see, and be best seen by his audience.

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Chapter XVI

--If you have any objection, --said my father, addressing himself to Dr. Slop. Not in the least, replied Dr. Slop; --for it does not appear on which side of the question it is wrote; ----it may be a composition of a divine of our church, as well as yours, --so that we run equal risques. ----’Tis wrote upon neither side, quoth Trim, for ’tis only upon Conscience, an’ please your Honours.

Trim’s reason put his audience into good-humour, --all but Dr. Slop, who turning his head about towards Trim, looked a little angry.

Begin, Trim, --and read distinctly, quoth my father. --I will, an’ please your Honour, replied the Corporal, making a bow, and bespeaking attention with a slight movement of his right hand.

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Chapter XVII

----But before the Corporal begins, I must first give you a description of his attitude; ----otherwise he will naturally stand represented, by your imagination, in an uneasy posture, --stiff, --perpendicular, --dividing the weight of his body equally upon both legs; ----his eye fixed, as if on duty; --his look determined, --clenching the sermon in his left hand, like his firelock. ----In a word, you would be apt to paint Trim, as if he was standing in his platoon ready for action. --His attitude was as unlike all this as you can conceive.

He stood before them with his body swayed, and bent forwards just so far, as to make an angle of 85 degrees and a half upon the plain of the horizon; --which sound orators, to whom I address this, know very well to be the true persuasive angle of incidence; --in any other angle you may talk and preach; --’tis certain; --and it is done every day; --but with what effect, --I leave the world to judge!

The necessity of this precise angle, of 85 degrees and a half to a mathematical exactness, ----does it not shew us, by the way, how the arts and sciences mutually befriend each other?

How the duce Corporal Trim, who knew not so much as an acute angle from an obtuse one, came to hit it so exactly; ----or whether it was chance or nature, or good sense or imitation, &c., shall be commented upon in that part of the cyclopædia of arts and sciences, where the instrumental parts of the eloquence of the senate, the pulpit, and the bar, the coffee-house, the bed-chamber, and fire-side, fall under consideration.

He stood, ----for I repeat it, to take the picture of him in at one view, with his body swayed, and somewhat bent forwards, --his right leg from under him, sustaining seven-eighths of his whole weight, ------the foot of his left leg, the defect of which was no disadvantage to his attitude, advanced a little, --not laterally, nor forwards, but in a line betwixt them; --his knee bent, but that not violently, --but so as to fall within the limits of the line of beauty; --and I add, of the line of science too; --for consider, it had one eighth part of his body to bear up; --so that in this case the position of the leg is determined, --because the foot could be no farther advanced, or the knee more bent, than what would allow him, mechanically to receive an eighth part of his whole weight under it, and to carry it too.

[-->] This I recommend to painters: --need I add, --to orators! --I think not; for unless they practise it, ------they must fall upon their noses.

So much for Corporal Trim’s body and legs. ----He held the sermon loosely, not carelessly, in his left hand, raised something above his stomach, and detached a little from his breast; ----his right arm falling negligently by his side, as nature and the laws of gravity ordered it, ----but with the palm of it open and turned towards his audience, ready to aid the sentiment in case it stood in need.

Corporal Trim’s eyes and the muscles of his face were in full harmony with the other parts of him; --he looked frank, --unconstrained, --something assured, --but not bordering upon assurance.

Let not the critic ask how Corporal Trim could come by all this. ----I’ve told him it should be explained; --but so he stood before my father, my uncle Toby, and Dr. Slop, --so swayed his body, so contrasted his limbs, and with such an oratorical sweep throughout the whole figure, ----a statuary might have modelled from it; ----nay, I doubt whether the oldest Fellow of a College, --or the Hebrew Professor himself, could have much mended it.

Trim made a bow, and read as follows:

The SERMON

HEBREWS xiii. 18

----_For we trust we have a good Conscience_

“Trust! ----Trust we have a good conscience!”

[Certainly, Trim, quoth my father, interrupting him, you give that sentence a very improper accent; for you curl up your nose, man, and read it with such a sneering tone, as if the Parson was going to abuse the Apostle.

He is, an’ please your Honour, replied Trim. Pugh! said my father, smiling.

Sir, quoth Dr. Slop, Trim is certainly in the right; for the writer (who I perceive is a Protestant) by the snappish manner in which he takes up the apostle, is certainly going to abuse him; --if this treatment of him has not done it already. But from whence, replied my father, have you concluded so soon, Dr. Slop, that the writer is of our church? --for aught I can see yet, --he may be of any church. ----Because, answered Dr. Slop, if he was of ours, --he durst no more take such a licence, --than a bear by his beard: --If, in our communion, Sir, a man was to insult an apostle, ----a saint, ----or even the paring of a saint’s nail, --he would have his eyes scratched out. --What, by the saint? quoth my uncle Toby. No, replied Dr. Slop, he would have an old house over his head. Pray is the Inquisition an ancient building, answered my uncle Toby, or is it a modern one? --I know nothing of architecture, replied Dr. Slop. --An’ please your Honours, quoth Trim, the Inquisition is the vilest ----Prithee spare thy description, Trim, I hate the very name of it, said my father. --No matter for that, answered Dr. Slop, --it has its uses; for tho’ I’m no great advocate for it, yet, in such a case as this, he would soon be taught better manners; and I can tell him, if he went on at that rate, would be flung into the Inquisition for his pains. God help him then, quoth my uncle Toby. Amen, added Trim; for Heaven above knows, I have a poor brother who has been fourteen years a captive in it. --I never heard one word of it before, said my uncle Toby, hastily: --How came he there, Trim? ----O, Sir! the story will make your heart bleed, --as it has made mine a thousand times; --but it is too long to be told now; --your Honour shall hear it from first to last some day when I am working beside you in our fortifications; --but the short of the story is this; --That my brother Tom went over a servant to Lisbon, --and then married a Jew’s widow, who kept a small shop, and sold sausages, which somehow or other, was the cause of his being taken in the middle of the night out of his bed, where he was lying with his wife and two small children, and carried directly to the Inquisition, where, God help him, continued Trim, fetching a sigh from the bottom of his heart, --the poor honest lad lies confined at this hour; he was as honest a soul, added Trim, (pulling out his handkerchief) as ever blood warmed.----

--The tears trickled down Trim’s cheeks faster than he could well wipe them away. --And dead silence in the room ensued for some minutes. --Certain proof of pity!

Come, Trim, quoth my father, after he saw the poor fellow’s grief had got a little vent, --read on, --and put this melancholy story out of thy head: --I grieve that I interrupted thee; but prithee begin the sermon again; --for if the first sentence in it is matter of abuse, as thou sayest, I have a great desire to know what kind of provocation the apostle has given.

Corporal Trim wiped his face, and returned his handkerchief into his pocket, and, making a bow as he did it, --he began again.]

The SERMON

HEBREWS xiii. 18

_----For we trust we have a good Conscience. --_

“Trust! trust we have a good conscience! Surely if there is any thing in this life which a man may depend upon, and to the knowledge of which he is capable of arriving upon the most indisputable evidence, it must be this very thing, --whether he has a good conscience or no.”

[I am positive I am right, quoth Dr. Slop.]

“If a man thinks at all, he cannot well be a stranger to the true state of this account; ----he must be privy to his own thoughts and desires; --he must remember his past pursuits, and know certainly the true springs and motives, which, in general, have governed the actions of his life.”

[I defy him, without an assistant, quoth Dr. Slop.]

“In other matters we may be deceived by false appearances; and, as the wise man complains, hardly do we guess aright at the things that are upon the earth, and with labour do we find the things that are before us. But here the mind has all the evidence and facts within herself; ----is conscious of the web she has wove; ----knows its texture and fineness, and the exact share which every passion has had in working upon the several designs which virtue or vice has planned before her.”

[The language is good, and I declare Trim reads very well, quoth my father.]

“Now, --as conscience is nothing else but the knowledge which the mind has within herself of this; and the judgment, either of approbation or censure, which it unavoidably makes upon the successive actions of our lives; ’tis plain you will say, from the very terms of the proposition, --whenever this inward testimony goes against a man, and he stands self-accused, that he must necessarily be a guilty man. --And, on the contrary, when the report is favourable on his side, and his heart condemns him not: --that it is not a matter of trust, as the apostle intimates, but a matter of certainty and fact, that the conscience is good, and that the man must be good also.”

[Then the apostle is altogether in the wrong, I suppose, quoth Dr. Slop, and the Protestant divine is in the right. Sir, have patience, replied my father, for I think it will presently appear that St. Paul and the Protestant divine are both of an opinion. --As nearly so, quoth Dr. Slop, as east is to west; --but this, continued he, lifting both hands, comes from the liberty of the press.

It is no more, at the worst, replied my uncle Toby, than the liberty of the pulpit; for it does not appear that the sermon is printed, or ever likely to be.

Go on, Trim, quoth my father.]

“At first sight this may seem to be a true state of the case: and I make no doubt but the knowledge of right and wrong is so truly impressed upon the mind of man, --that did no such thing ever happen, as that the conscience of a man, by long habits of sin, might (as the scripture assures it may) insensibly become hard; --and, like some tender parts of his body, by much stress and continual hard usage, lose by degrees that nice sense and perception with which God and nature endowed it: --Did this never happen; --or was it certain that self-love could never hang the least bias upon the judgment; --or that the little interests below could rise up and perplex the faculties of our upper regions, and encompass them about with clouds and thick darkness: ----Could no such thing as favour and affection enter this sacred Court: --Did WIT disdain to take a bribe in it; --or was ashamed to shew its face as an advocate for an unwarrantable enjoyment: Or, lastly, were we assured that INTEREST stood always unconcerned whilst the cause was hearing--and that Passion never got into the judgment-seat, and pronounced sentence in the stead of Reason, which is supposed always to preside and determine upon the case: --Was this truly so, as the objection must suppose; --no doubt then the religious and moral state of a man would be exactly what he himself esteemed it: --and the guilt or innocence of every man’s life could be known, in general, by no better measure, than the degrees of his own approbation and censure.

“I own, in one case, whenever a man’s conscience does accuse him (as it seldom errs on that side) that he is guilty; and unless in melancholy and hypocondriac cases, we may safely pronounce upon it, that there is always sufficient grounds for the accusation.

“But the converse of the proposition will not hold true; --namely, that whenever there is guilt, the conscience must accuse; and if it does not, that a man is therefore innocent. ----This is not fact ------So that the common consolation which some good christian or other is hourly administering to himself, --that he thanks God his mind does not misgive him; and that, consequently, he has a good conscience, because he hath a quiet one, --is fallacious; --and as current as the inference is, and as infallible as the rule appears at first sight, yet when you look nearer to it, and try the truth of this rule upon plain facts, ----you see it liable to so much error from a false application; ----the principle upon which it goes so often perverted; ----the whole force of it lost, and sometimes so vilely cast away, that it is painful to produce the common examples from human life, which confirm the account.

“A man shall be vicious and utterly debauched in his principles; --exceptionable in his conduct to the world; shall live shameless, in the open commission of a sin which no reason or pretence can justify, ----a sin by which, contrary to all the workings of humanity, he shall ruin for ever the deluded partner of his guilt; --rob her of her best dowry; and not only cover her own head with dishonour; --but involve a whole virtuous family in shame and sorrow for her sake. Surely, you will think conscience must lead such a man a troublesome life; he can have no rest night or day from its reproaches.

“Alas! CONSCIENCE had something else to do all this time, than break in upon him; as Elijah reproached the god Baal, ----this domestic god was either talking, or pursuing, or was in a journey, or peradventure he slept and could not be awoke.

“Perhaps HE was gone out in company with HONOUR to fight a duel: to pay off some debt at play; ----or dirty annuity, the bargain of his lust; Perhaps CONSCIENCE all this time was engaged at home, talking aloud against petty larceny, and executing vengeance upon some such puny crimes as his fortune and rank of life secured him against all temptation of committing; so that he lives as merrily” ----[If he was of our church, tho’, quoth Dr. Slop, he could not]-- “sleeps as soundly in his bed; --and at last meets death as unconcernedly; --perhaps much more so, than a much better man.”

[All this is impossible with us, quoth Dr. Slop, turning to my father, --the case could not happen in our church. --It happens in ours, however, replied my father, but too often. ----I own, quoth Dr. Slop, (struck a little with my father’s frank acknowledgment)--that a man in the Romish church may live as badly; --but then he cannot easily die so. ----’Tis little matter, replied my father, with an air of indifference, --how a rascal dies. --I mean, answered Dr. Slop, he would be denied the benefits of the last sacraments. --Pray how many have you in all, said my uncle Toby, ----for I always forget? ----Seven, answered Dr. Slop. ----Humph! --said my uncle Toby; tho’ not accented as a note of acquiescence, --but as an interjection of that particular species of surprize, when a man in looking into a drawer, finds more of a thing than he expected. ----Humph! replied my uncle Toby. Dr. Slop, who had an ear, understood my uncle Toby as well as if he had wrote a whole volume against the seven sacraments. ----Humph! replied Dr. Slop (stating my uncle Toby’s argument over again to him) ----Why, Sir, are there not seven cardinal virtues? ----Seven mortal sins? ----Seven golden candlesticks? ----Seven heavens? --’Tis more than I know, replied my uncle Toby. ------Are there not seven wonders of the world? ----Seven days of the creation? ----Seven planets? ----Seven plagues? ----That there are, quoth my father with a most affected gravity. But prithee, continued he, go on with the rest of thy characters, Trim.]

“Another is sordid, unmerciful,” (here Trim waved his right hand) “a strait-hearted, selfish wretch, incapable either of private friendship or public spirit. Take notice how he passes by the widow and orphan in their distress, and sees all the miseries incident to human life without a sigh or a prayer.” [An’ please your honours, cried Trim, I think this a viler man than the other.]

“Shall not conscience rise up and sting him on such occasions? ----No; thank God there is no occasion, I pay every man his own; --I have no fornication to answer to my conscience; --no faithless vows or promises to make up; --I have debauched no man’s wife or child; thank God, I am not as other men, adulterers, unjust, or even as this libertine, who stands before me.

“A third is crafty and designing in his nature. View his whole life; --’tis nothing but a cunning contexture of dark arts and unequitable subterfuges, basely to defeat the true intent of all laws, ----plain-dealing and the safe enjoyment of our several properties. ----You will see such a one working out a frame of little designs upon the ignorance and perplexities of the poor and needy man; --shall raise a fortune upon the inexperience of a youth, or the unsuspecting temper of his friend, who would have trusted him with his life.

“When old age comes on, and repentance calls him to look back upon this black account, and state it over again with his conscience --CONSCIENCE looks into the STATUTES AT LARGE; --finds no express law broken by what he has done; --perceives no penalty or forfeiture of goods and chattels incurred; --sees no scourge waving over his head, or prison opening his gates upon him: --What is there to affright his conscience? --Conscience has got safely entrenched behind the Letter of the Law; sits there invulnerable, fortified with #Cases# and #Reports# so strongly on all sides; --that it is not preaching can dispossess it of its hold.”

[Here Corporal Trim and my uncle Toby exchanged looks with each other. --Aye, aye, Trim! quoth my uncle Toby, shaking his head, ------these are but sorry fortifications, Trim. ------O! very poor work, answered Trim, to what your Honour and I make of it. ----The character of this last man, said Dr. Slop, interrupting Trim, is more detestable than all the rest; and seems to have been taken from some pettifogging Lawyer amongst you: --Amongst us, a man’s conscience could not possibly continue so long blinded, ----three times in a year, at least, he must go to confession. Will that restore it to sight? quoth my uncle Toby. ----Go on, Trim, quoth my father, or Obadiah will have got back before thou hast got to the end of thy sermon. ----’Tis a very short one, replied Trim. ----I wish it was longer, quoth my uncle Toby, for I like it hugely. --Trim went on.]

“A fourth man shall want even this refuge; --shall break through all their ceremony of slow chicane; ----scorns the doubtful workings of secret plots and cautious trains to bring about his purpose: ----See the bare-faced villain, how he cheats, lies, perjures, robs, murders! --Horrid! --But indeed much better was not to be expected, in the present case--the poor man was in the dark! ------his priest had got the keeping of his conscience; ----and all he would let him know of it, was, That he must believe in the Pope; --go to Mass; --cross himself; --tell his beads; --be a good Catholic, and that this, in all conscience, was enough to carry him to heaven. What; --if he perjures! --Why; --he had a mental reservation in it. --But if he is so wicked and abandoned a wretch as you represent him; --if he robs, --if he stabs, will not conscience, on every such act, receive a wound itself? --Aye, --but the man has carried it to confession; ----the wound digests there, and will do well enough, and in a short time be quite healed up by absolution. O Popery! what hast thou to answer for? ----when, not content with the too many natural and fatal ways, thro’ which the heart of man is every day thus treacherous to itself above all things; --thou hast wilfully set open the wide gate of deceit before the face of this unwary traveller, too apt, God knows, to go astray of himself; and confidently speak peace to himself, when there is no peace.

“Of this the common instances which I have drawn out of life, are too notorious to require much evidence. If any man doubts the reality of them, or thinks it impossible for a man to be such a bubble to himself, --I must refer him a moment to his own reflections, and will then venture to trust my appeal with his own heart.

“Let him consider in how different a degree of detestation, numbers of wicked actions stand there, tho’ equally bad and vicious in their own natures; --he will soon find, that such of them as strong inclination and custom have prompted him to commit, are generally dressed out and painted with all the false beauties which a soft and a flattering hand can give them; --and that the others, to which he feels no propensity, appear, at once, naked and deformed, surrounded with all the true circumstances of folly and dishonour.

“When David surprized Saul sleeping in the cave, and cut off the skirt of his robe--we read his heart smote him for what he had done: ----But in the matter of Uriah, where a faithful and gallant servant, whom he ought to have loved and honoured, fell to make way for his lust, --where conscience had so much greater reason to take the alarm, his heart smote him not. A whole year had almost passed from the first commission of that crime, to the time Nathan was sent to reprove him; and we read not once of the least sorrow or compunction of heart which he testified, during all that time, for what he had done.

“Thus conscience, this once able monitor, ----placed on high as a judge within us, and intended by our Maker as a just and equitable one too, --by an unhappy train of causes and impediments, takes often such imperfect cognizance of what passes, ----does its office so negligently, ----sometimes so corruptly--that it is not to be trusted alone; and therefore we find there is a necessity, an absolute necessity, of joining another principle with it, to aid, if not govern, its determinations.

“So that if you would form a just judgment of what is of infinite importance to you not to be misled in, --namely, in what degree of real merit you stand either as an honest man, an useful citizen, a faithful subject to your king, or a good servant to your God, ----call in religion and morality. --Look, What is written in the law of God? ----How readest thou? --Consult calm reason and the unchangeable obligations of justice and truth; ----what say they?

“Let CONSCIENCE determine the matter upon these reports; ----and then if thy heart condemns thee not, which is the case the apostle supposes, ----the rule will be infallible;” --[Here Dr. Slop fell asleep]-- “thou wilt have confidence towards God; ----that is, have just grounds to believe the judgment thou hast past upon thyself, is the judgment of God; and nothing else but an anticipation of that righteous sentence which will be pronounced upon thee hereafter by that Being, to whom thou art finally to give an account of thy actions.

“Blessed is the man, indeed, then, as the author of the book of Ecclesiasticus expresses it, who is not pricked with the multitude of his sins: Blessed is the man whose heart hath not condemned him; whether he be rich, or whether he be poor, if he have a good heart (a heart thus guided and informed) he shall at all times rejoice in a chearful countenance; his mind shall tell him more than seven watch-men that sit above upon a tower on high.” --[A tower has no strength, quoth my uncle Toby, unless ’tis flank’d.]-- “In the darkest doubts it shall conduct him safer than a thousand casuists, and give the state he lives in, a better security for his behaviour than all the causes and restrictions put together which law-makers are forced to multiply: --Forced, I say, as things stand; human laws not being a matter of original choice, but of pure necessity, brought in to fence against the mischievous effects of those consciences which are no law unto themselves; well intending, by the many provisions made, --that in all such corrupt and misguided cases, where principles and the checks of conscience will not make us upright, --to supply their force, and, by the terrors of gaols and halters, oblige us to it.”

[I see plainly, said my father, that this sermon has been composed to be preached at the Temple, ----or at some Assize. --I like the reasoning, --and am sorry that Dr. Slop has fallen asleep before the time of his conviction: --for it is now clear, that the Parson, as I thought at first, never insulted St. Paul in the least; --nor has there been, brother, the least difference between them. ----A great matter, if they had differed, replied my uncle Toby, --the best friends in the world may differ sometimes. ----True, --brother Toby, quoth my father, shaking hands with him, --we’ll fill our pipes, brother, and then Trim shall go on.

Well, ----what dost thou think of it? said my father speaking to Corporal Trim, as he reached his tobacco-box.

I think, answered the Corporal, that the seven watch-men upon the tower, who, I suppose, are all centinels there, --are more, an’ please your Honour, than were necessary; --and, to go on at that rate, would harrass a regiment all to pieces, which a commanding officer, who loves his men, will never do, if he can help it, because two centinels, added the Corporal, are as good as twenty. --I have been a commanding officer myself in the Corps de Garde a hundred times, continued Trim, rising an inch higher in his figure, as he spoke, --and all the time I had the honour to serve his Majesty King William, in relieving the most considerable posts, I never left more than two in my life. ----Very right, Trim, quoth my uncle Toby, --but you do not consider, Trim, that the towers, in Solomon’s days, were not such things as our bastions, flanked and defended by other works; --this, Trim, was an invention since Solomon’s death; nor had they horn-works, or ravelins before the curtin, in his time; ----or such a fossé as we make with a cuvette in the middle of it, and with covered ways and counterscarps pallisadoed along it, to guard against a Coup de main: --So that the seven men upon the tower were a party, I dare say, from the Corps de Garde, set there, not only to look out, but to defend it. --They could be no more, an’ please your Honour, than a Corporal’s Guard. --My father smiled inwardly, but not outwardly; --the subject being rather too serious, considering what had happened, to make a jest of. --So putting his pipe into his mouth, which he had just lighted, --he contented himself with ordering Trim to read on. He read on as follows:]

“To have the fear of God before our eyes, and, in our mutual dealings with each other, to govern our actions by the eternal measures of right and wrong: ----The first of these will comprehend the duties of religion; --the second, those of morality, which are so inseparably connected together, that you cannot divide these two tables, even in imagination (tho’ the attempt is often made in practice) without breaking and mutually destroying them both.

“I said the attempt is often made; and so it is; ----there being nothing more common than to see a man who has no sense at all of religion, and indeed has so much honesty as to pretend to none, who would take it as the bitterest affront, should you but hint at a suspicion of his moral character, ----or imagine he was not conscientiously just and scrupulous to the uttermost mite.

“When there is some appearance that it is so, --tho’ one is unwilling even to suspect the appearance of so amiable a virtue as moral honesty, yet were we to look into the grounds of it, in the present case, I am persuaded we should find little reason to envy such a one the honour of his motive.

“Let him declaim as pompously as he chooses upon the subject, it will be found to rest upon no better foundation than either his interest, his pride, his ease, or some such little and changeable passion as will give us but small dependence upon his actions in matters of great distress.

“I will illustrate this by an example.

“I know the banker I deal with, or the physician I usually call in” --[There is no need, cried Dr. Slop (waking), to call in any physician in this case]---- “to be neither of them men of much religion: I hear them make a jest of it every day, and treat all its sanctions with so much scorn, as to put the matter past doubt. Well; --notwithstanding this, I put my fortune into the hands of the one: --and what is dearer still to me, I trust my life to the honest skill of the other.

“Now let me examine what is my reason for this great confidence. Why, in the first place, I believe there is no probability that either of them will employ the power I put into their hands to my disadvantage; --I consider that honesty serves the purposes of this life: --I know their success in the world depends upon the fairness of their characters. --In a word, I’m persuaded that they cannot hurt me without hurting themselves more.

“But put it otherwise, namely, that interest lay, for once, on the other side; that a case should happen, wherein the one, without stain to his reputation, could secrete my fortune, and leave me naked in the world; --or that the other could send me out of it, and enjoy an estate by my death, without dishonour to himself or his art: --In this case, what hold have I of either of them? --Religion, the strongest of all motives, is out of the question; --Interest, the next most powerful motive in the world, is strongly against me: ------What have I left to cast into the opposite scale to balance this temptation? ------Alas! I have nothing, ----nothing but what is lighter than a bubble ------I must lie at the mercy of HONOUR, or some such capricious principle --Strait security for two of the most valuable blessings! --my property and myself.

“As, therefore, we can have no dependence upon morality without religion; --so, on the other hand, there is nothing better to be expected from religion without morality; nevertheless, ’tis no prodigy to see a man whose real moral character stands very low, who yet entertains the highest notion of himself in the light of a religious man.

“He shall not only be covetous, revengeful, implacable, --but even wanting in points of common honesty; yet inasmuch as he talks aloud against the infidelity of the age, ----is zealous for some points of religion, ----goes twice a day to church, --attends the sacraments, --and amuses himself with a few instrumental parts of religion, --shall cheat his conscience into a judgment, that, for this, he is a religious man, and has discharged truly his duty to God: And you will find such a man, through force of this delusion, generally looks down with spiritual pride upon every other man who has less affectation of piety, --though, perhaps, ten times more real honesty than himself.

“This likewise is a sore evil under the sun; and I believe, there is no one mistaken principle, which, for its time, has wrought more serious mischiefs. ------For a general proof of this, --examine the history of the Romish church;” --[Well, what can you make of that? cried Dr. Slop]-- “see what scenes of cruelty, murder, rapine, bloodshed,” ----[They may thank their own obstinacy, cried Dr. Slop]---- “have all been sanctified by a religion not strictly governed by morality.

“In how many kingdoms of the world” --[Here Trim kept waving his right hand from the sermon to the extent of his arm, returning it backwards and forwards to the conclusion of the paragraph.]

“In how many kingdoms of the world has the crusading sword of this misguided saint-errant, spared neither age nor merit, or sex, or condition? --and, as he fought under the banners of a religion which set him loose from justice and humanity, he shewed none; mercilessly trampled upon both, --heard neither the cries of the unfortunate, nor pitied their distresses.”

[I have been in many a battle, an’ please your Honour, quoth Trim, sighing, but never in so melancholy a one as this, --I would not have drawn a tricker in it against these poor souls, ----to have been made a general officer. ----Why? what do you understand of the affair? said Dr. Slop, looking towards Trim, with something more of contempt than the Corporal’s honest heart deserved. ----What do you know, friend, about this battle you talk of? --I know, replied Trim, that I never refused quarter in my life to any man who cried out for it; ----but to a woman or a child, continued Trim, before I would level my musket at them, I would lose my life a thousand times. ----Here’s a crown for thee, Trim, to drink with Obadiah to-night, quoth my uncle Toby, and I’ll give Obadiah another too. --God bless your Honour, replied Trim, ----I had rather these poor women and children had it. ----Thou art an honest fellow, quoth my uncle Toby. ----My father nodded his head, as much as to say, --and so he is.----

But prithee, Trim, said my father, make an end, --for I see thou hast but a leaf or two left.

Corporal Trim read on.]

“If the testimony of past centuries in this matter is not sufficient, --consider at this instant, how the votaries of that religion are every day thinking to do service and honour to God, by actions which are a dishonour and scandal to themselves.

“To be convinced of this, go with me for a moment into the prisons of the Inquisition.” --[God help my poor brother Tom.]-- “Behold Religion, with Mercy and Justice chained down under her feet, ----there sitting ghastly upon a black tribunal, propped up with racks and instruments of torment. Hark! --hark! what a piteous groan!” --[Here Trim’s face turned as pale as ashes.]---- “See the melancholy wretch who uttered it” --[Here the tears began to trickle down.]---- “just brought forth to undergo the anguish of a mock trial, and endure the utmost pains that a studied system of cruelty has been able to invent.” --[D--n them all, quoth Trim, his colour returning into his face as red as blood.]-- “Behold this helpless victim delivered up to his tormentors, --his body so wasted with sorrow and confinement.” ----[Oh! ’tis my brother, cried poor Trim in a most passionate exclamation, dropping the sermon upon the ground, and clapping his hands together --I fear ’tis poor Tom. My father’s and my uncle Toby’s heart yearned with sympathy for the poor fellow’s distress; even Slop himself acknowledged pity for him. ----Why, Trim, said my father, this is not a history, ----’tis a sermon thou art reading; prithee begin the sentence again.]---- “Behold this helpless victim delivered up to his tormentors, --his body so wasted with sorrow and confinement, you will see every nerve and muscle as it suffers.

“Observe the last movement of that horrid engine!” --[I would rather face a cannon, quoth Trim, stamping.]-- “See what convulsions it has thrown him into! ----Consider the nature of the posture in which he now lies stretched, --what exquisite tortures he endures by it!” --[I hope ’tis not in Portugal.]-- “’Tis all nature can bear! Good God! see how it keeps his weary soul hanging upon his trembling lips!” [I would not read another line of it, quoth Trim, for all this world; --I fear, an’ please your Honours, all this is in Portugal, where my poor brother Tom is. I tell thee, Trim, again, quoth my father, ’tis not an historical account, --’tis a description. --’Tis only a description, honest man, quoth Slop, there’s not a word of truth in it. ----That’s another story, replied my father. --However, as Trim reads it with so much concern, --’tis cruelty to force him to go on with it. --Give me hold of the sermon, Trim, --I’ll finish it for thee, and thou may’st go. I must stay and hear it, too, replied Trim, if your Honour will allow me; --tho’ I would not read it myself for a Colonel’s pay. ------Poor Trim! quoth my uncle Toby. My father went on.]--

“----Consider the nature of the posture in which he now lies stretched, --what exquisite torture he endures by it! --’Tis all nature can bear! Good God! See how it keeps his weary soul hanging upon his trembling lips, --willing to take its leave, ----but not suffered to depart! --Behold the unhappy wretch led back to his cell!” ----[Then, thank God, however, quoth Trim, they have not killed him.]-- “See him dragged out of it again to meet the flames, and the insults in his last agonies, which this principle, --this principle, that there can be religion without mercy, has prepared for him.” ----[Then, thank God, ----he is dead, quoth Trim, --he is out of his pain, --and they have done their worst at him. --O Sirs! --Hold your peace, Trim, said my father, going on with the sermon, lest Trim should incense Dr. Slop, --we shall never have done at this rate.]

“The surest way to try the merit of any disputed notion is, to trace down the consequences such a notion has produced, and compare them with the spirit of Christianity; ----’tis the short and decisive rule which our Saviour hath left us, for these and such like cases, and it is worth a thousand arguments----By their fruits ye shall know them.

“I will add no farther to the length of this sermon, than by two or three short and independent rules deducible from it.

“First, Whenever a man talks loudly against religion, always suspect that it is not his reason, but his passions, which have got the better of his CREED. A bad life and a good belief are disagreeable and troublesome neighbours, and where they separate, depend upon it, ’tis for no other cause but quietness’ sake.

“Secondly, When a man, thus represented, tells you in any particular instance, ----That such a thing goes against his conscience, ----always believe he means exactly the same thing, as when he tells you such a thing goes against his stomach; --a present want of appetite being generally the true cause of both.

“In a word, --trust that man in nothing, who has not a CONSCIENCE in everything.

“And, in your own case, remember this plain distinction, a mistake in which has ruined thousands, --that your conscience is not a law: --No, God and reason made the law, and have placed conscience within you to determine; ----not, like an Asiatic Cadi, according to the ebbs and flows of his own passions, --but like a British judge in this land of liberty and good sense, who makes no new law, but faithfully declares that law which he knows already written.”

FINIS

Thou hast read the sermon extremely well, Trim, quoth my father. --If he had spared his comments, replied Dr. Slop, ----he would have read it much better. I should have read it ten times better, Sir, answered Trim, but that my heart was so full. --That was the very reason, Trim, replied my father, which has made thee read the sermon as well as thou hast done; and if the clergy of our church, continued my father, addressing himself to Dr. Slop, would take part in what they deliver as deeply as this poor fellow has done, --as their compositions are fine; --[I deny it, quoth Dr. Slop]-- I maintain it, --that the eloquence of our pulpits, with such subjects to enflame it, would be a model for the whole world: ----But alas! continued my father, and I own it, Sir, with sorrow, that, like French politicians in this respect, what they gain in the cabinet they lose in the field. ----’Twere a pity, quoth my uncle, that this should be lost. I like the sermon well, replied my father, ----’tis dramatick, --and there is something in that way of writing, when skilfully managed, which catches the attention. ----We preach much in that way with us, said Dr. Slop. --I know that very well, said my father, ----but in a tone and manner which disgusted Dr. Slop, full as much as his assent, simply, could have pleased him. ----But in this, added Dr. Slop, a little piqued, --our sermons have greatly the advantage, that we never introduce any character into them below a patriarch or a patriarch’s wife, or a martyr or a saint. --There are some very bad characters in this, however, said my father, and I do not think the sermon a jot the worse for ’em. ----But pray, quoth my uncle Toby, --who’s can this be? --How could it get into my Stevinus? A man must be as great a conjurer as Stevinus, said my father, to resolve the second question: --The first, I think, is not so difficult; --for unless my judgment greatly deceives me, ----I know the author, for ’tis wrote, certainly, by the parson of the parish.

The similitude of the stile and manner of it, with those my father constantly had heard preached in his parish-church, was the ground of his conjecture, --proving it as strongly, as an argument à priori could prove such a thing to a philosophic mind, That it was Yorick’s and no one’s else: --It was proved to be so, à posteriori, the day after, when Yorick sent a servant to my uncle Toby’s house to enquire after it.

It seems that Yorick, who was inquisitive after all kinds of knowledge, had borrowed Stevinus of my uncle Toby, and had carelessly popped his sermon, as soon as he had made it, into the middle of Stevinus; and by an act of forgetfulness, to which he was ever subject, he had sent Stevinus home, and his sermon to keep him company.

Ill-fated sermon! Thou wast lost, after this recovery of thee, a second time, dropped thro’ an unsuspected fissure in thy master’s pocket, down into a treacherous and a tattered lining, --trod deep into the dirt by the left hind-foot of his Rosinante inhumanly stepping upon thee as thou falledst; --buried ten days in the mire, ----raised up out of it by a beggar, --sold for a halfpenny to a parish-clerk, ----transferred to his parson, ----lost for ever to thy own, the remainder of his days, ----nor restored to his restless MANES till this very moment, that I tell the world the story.

Can the reader believe, that this sermon of Yorick’s was preached at an assize, in the cathedral of York, before a thousand witnesses, ready to give oath of it, by a certain prebendary of that church, and actually printed by him when he had done, ----and within so short a space as two years and three months after Yorick’s death? --Yorick indeed, was never better served in his life; ------but it was a little hard to maltreat him after, and plunder him after he was laid in his grave.

However, as the gentleman who did it was in perfect charity with Yorick, --and, in conscious justice, printed but a few copies to give away; --and that I am told he could moreover have made as good a one himself, had he thought fit, --I declare I would not have published this anecdote to the world; ----nor do I publish it with an intent to hurt his character and advancement in the church; ----I leave that to others; --but I find myself impelled by two reasons, which I cannot withstand.

The first is, That in doing justice, I may give rest to Yorick’s ghost; ----which--as the country-people, and some others, believe, ----still walks.

The second reason is, That, by laying open this story to the world, I gain an opportunity of informing it, --That in case the character of parson Yorick, and this sample of his sermons, is liked, ----there are now in the possession of the Shandy family, as many as will make a handsome volume, at the world’s service, ----and much good may they do it.

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Chapter XVIII

Obadiah gained the two crowns without dispute; for he came in jingling, with all the instruments in the green bays bag we spoke of, slung across his body, just as Corporal Trim went out of the room.

It is now proper, I think, quoth Dr. Slop (clearing up his looks), as we are in a condition to be of some service to Mrs. Shandy, to send upstairs to know how she goes on.

I have ordered, answered my father, the old midwife to come down to us upon the least difficulty; --for you must know, Dr. Slop, continued my father, with a perplexed kind of a smile upon his countenance, that by express treaty, solemnly ratified between me and my wife, you are no more than an auxiliary in this affair, --and not so much as that, --unless the lean old mother of a midwife above stairs cannot do without you. --Women have their particular fancies, and in points of this nature, continued my father, where they bear the whole burden, and suffer so much acute pain for the advantage of our families, and the good of the species, --they claim a right of deciding, en Souveraines, in whose hands, and in what fashion, they choose to undergo it.

They are in the right of it, ----quoth my uncle Toby. But, Sir, replied Dr. Slop, not taking notice of my uncle Toby’s opinion, but turning to my father, --they had better govern in other points; ----and a father of a family, who wishes its perpetuity, in my opinion, had better exchange this prerogative with them, and give up some other rights in lieu of it. ----I know not, quoth my father, answering a little too testily, to be quite dispassionate in what he said, --I know not, quoth he, what we have left to give up, in lieu of who shall bring our children into the world, unless that, --of who shall beget them. ------One would almost give up anything, replied Dr. Slop. --I beg your pardon, ----answered my uncle Toby. --Sir, replied Dr. Slop, it would astonish you to know what improvements we have made of late years in all branches of obstetrical knowledge, but particularly in that one single point of the safe and expeditious extraction of the fœtus, ----which has received such lights, that, for my part (holding up his hands) I declare I wonder how the world has ----I wish, quoth my uncle Toby, you had seen what prodigious armies we had in Flanders.

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Chapter XIX

I have dropped the curtain over this scene for a minute, ----to remind you of one thing, ----and to inform you of another.

What I have to inform you, comes, I own, a little out of its due course; ----for it should have been told a hundred and fifty pages ago, but that I foresaw then ’twould come in pat hereafter, and be of more advantage here than elsewhere. --Writers had need look before them, to keep up the spirit and connection of what they have in hand.

When these two things are done, --the curtain shall be drawn up again, and my uncle Toby, my father, and Dr. Slop, shall go on with their discourse, without any more interruption.

First, then, the matter which I have to remind you of, is this; ----that from the specimens of singularity in my father’s notions in the point of christian-names, and that other previous point thereto, --you was led, I think, into an opinion (and I am sure I said as much), that my father was a gentleman altogether as odd and whimsical in fifty other opinions. In truth, there was not a stage in the life of man, from the very first act of his begetting, ----down to the lean and slippered pantaloon in his second childishness, but he had some favourite notion to himself, springing out of it, as sceptical, and as far out of the highway of thinking, as these two which have been explained.

--Mr. Shandy, my father, Sir, would see nothing in the light in which others placed it; --he placed things in his own light; --he would weigh nothing in common scales; --no, he was too refined a researcher to lie open to so gross an imposition. --To come at the exact weight of things in the scientific steel-yard, the fulcrum, he would say, should be almost invisible, to avoid all friction from popular tenets; --without this the minutiæ of philosophy, which would always turn the balance, will have no weight at all. Knowledge, like matter, he would affirm, was divisible in infinitum; ----that the grains and scruples were as much a part of it, as the gravitation of the whole world. --In a word, he would say, error was error, --no matter where it fell, ----whether in a fraction, --or a pound, --’twas alike fatal to truth, and she was kept down at the bottom of her well, as inevitably by a mistake in the dust of a butterfly’s wings, ----as in the disk of the sun, the moon, and all the stars of heaven put together.

He would often lament that it was for want of considering this properly, and of applying it skilfully to civil matters, as well as to speculative truths, that so many things in this world were out of joint; ----that the political arch was giving way; ----and that the very foundations of our excellent constitution, in church and state, were so sapped as estimators had reported.

You cry out, he would say, we are a ruined, undone people. Why? he would ask, making use of the sorites or syllogism of Zeno and Chrysippus, without knowing it belonged to them. --Why? why are we a ruined people? --Because we are corrupted. --Whence is it, dear Sir, that we are corrupted? ----Because we are needy; ----our poverty, and not our wills, consent. ----And wherefore, he would add, are we needy? --From the neglect, he would answer, of our pence and our halfpence: --Our bank notes, Sir, our guineas, --nay, our shillings take care of themselves.

’Tis the same, he would say, throughout the whole circle of the sciences; --the great, the established points of them, are not to be broke in upon. --The laws of nature will defend themselves; --but error----(he would add, looking earnestly at my mother)----error, Sir, creeps in thro’ the minute holes and small crevices which human nature leaves unguarded.

This turn of thinking in my father, is what I had to remind you of: --The point you are to be informed of, and which I have reserved for this place, is as follows.

Amongst the many and excellent reasons, with which my father had urged my mother to accept of Dr. Slop’s assistance preferably to that of the old woman, ----there was one of a very singular nature; which, when he had done arguing the manner with her as a Christian, and came to argue it over again with her as a philosopher, he had put his whole strength to, depending indeed upon it as his sheet-anchor. ----It failed him; tho’ from no defect in the argument itself; but that, do what he could, he was not able for his soul to make her comprehend the drift of it. ----Cursed luck! ----said he to himself, one afternoon, as he walked out of the room, after he had been stating it for an hour and a half to her, to no manner of purpose; --cursed luck! said he, biting his lip as he shut the door, ----for a man to be master of one of the finest chains of reasoning in nature, --and have a wife at the same time with such a headpiece, that he cannot hang up a single inference within side of it, to save his soul from destruction.

This argument, though it was entirely lost upon my mother, ----had more weight with him, than all his other arguments joined together: --I will therefore endeavour to do it justice, --and set it forth with all the perspicuity I am master of.

My father set out upon the strength of these two following axioms:

First, That an ounce of a man’s own wit, was worth a ton of other people’s; and,

Secondly (Which by the bye, was the ground-work of the first axiom, ----tho’ it comes last), That every man’s wit must come from every man’s own soul, ----and no other body’s.

Now, as it was plain to my father, that all souls were by nature equal, ----and that the great difference between the most acute and the most obtuse understanding----was from no original sharpness or bluntness of one thinking substance above or below another, ----but arose merely from the lucky or unlucky organisation of the body, in that part where the soul principally took up her residence, ----he had made it the subject of his enquiry to find out the identical place.

Now, from the best accounts he had been able to get of this matter, he was satisfied it could not be where Des Cartes had fixed it, upon the top of the pineal gland of the brain; which, as he philosophized, formed a cushion for her about the size of a marrow pea; tho’, to speak the truth, as so many nerves did terminate all in that one place, --’twas no bad conjecture; ----and my father had certainly fallen with that great philosopher plumb into the centre of the mistake, had it not been for my uncle Toby, who rescued him out of it, by a story he told him of a Walloon officer at the battle of Landen, who had one part of his brain shot away by a musket-ball, --and another part of it taken out after by a French surgeon; and after all, recovered, and did his duty very well without it.

If death, said my father, reasoning with himself, is nothing but the separation of the soul from the body; and if it is true that people can walk about and do their business without brains, --then certes the soul does not inhabit there. Q. E. D.

As for that certain, very thin, subtle and very fragrant juice which Coglionissimo Borri, the great Milanese physician affirms, in a letter to Bartholine, to have discovered in the cellulæ of the occipital parts of the cerebellum, and which he likewise affirms to be the principal seat of the reasonable soul (for, you must know, in these latter and more enlightened ages, there are two souls in every man living, --the one, according to the great Metheglingius, being called the Animus, the other, the Anima;)--as for the opinion, I say, of Borri, --my father could never subscribe to it by any means; the very idea of so noble, so refined, so immaterial, and so exalted a being as the Anima, or even the Animus, taking up her residence, and sitting dabbling, like a tadpole all day long, both summer and winter, in a puddle, ----or in a liquid of any kind, how thick or thin soever, he would say, shocked his imagination; he would scarce give the doctrine a hearing.

What, therefore, seemed the least liable to objections of any, was that the chief sensorium, or head-quarters of the soul, and to which place all intelligences were referred, and from whence all her mandates were issued, --was in, or near, the cerebellum, --or rather somewhere about the medulla oblongata, wherein it was generally agreed by Dutch anatomists, that all the minute nerves from all the organs of the seven senses concentered, like streets and winding alleys, into a square.

So far there was nothing singular in my father’s opinion, --he had the best of philosophers, of all ages and climates, to go along with him. ----But here he took a road of his own, setting up another Shandean hypothesis upon these corner-stones they had laid for him; ----and which said hypothesis equally stood its ground; whether the subtilty and fineness of the soul depended upon the temperature and clearness of the said liquor, or of the finer network and texture in the cerebellum itself; which opinion he favoured.

He maintained, that next to the due care to be taken in the act of propagation of each individual, which required all the thought in the world, as it laid the foundation of this incomprehensible contexture, in which wit, memory, fancy, eloquence, and what is usually meant by the name of good natural parts, do consist; --that next to this and his christian-name, which were the two original and most efficacious causes of all; ----that the third cause, or rather what logicians call the Causa sine quâ non, and without which all that was done was of no manner of significance, ----was the preservation of this delicate and fine-spun web, from the havock which was generally made in it by the violent compression and crush which the head was made to undergo, by the nonsensical method of bringing us into the world by that foremost.

----This requires explanation.

My father, who dipped into all kinds of books, upon looking into Lithopædus Senonesis de Partu difficili,[2.1] published by Adrianus Smelvgot, had found out, that the lax and pliable state of a child’s head in parturition, the bones of the cranium having no sutures at that time, was such, ----that by force of the woman’s efforts, which, in strong labour-pains, was equal, upon an average, to the weight of 470 pounds averdupois acting perpendicularly upon it; --it so happened, that in 49 instances out of 50, the said head was compressed and moulded into the shape of an oblong conical piece of dough, such as a pastry-cook generally rolls up in order to make a pye of. --Good God! cried my father, what havock and destruction must this make in the infinitely fine and tender texture of the cerebellum! --Or if there is such a juice as Borri pretends, --is it not enough to make the clearest liquid in the world both feculent and mothery?

But how great was his apprehension, when he farther understood, that this force acting upon the very vertex of the head, not only injured the brain itself, or cerebrum, --but that it necessarily squeezed and propelled the cerebrum towards the cerebellum, which was the immediate seat of the understanding! ----Angels and ministers of grace defend us! cried my father, ----can any soul withstand this shock? --No wonder the intellectual web is so rent and tattered as we see it; and that so many of our best heads are no better than a puzzled skein of silk, ----all perplexity, ----all confusion within-side.

But when my father read on, and was let into the secret, that when a child was turned topsy-turvy, which was easy for an operator to do, and was extracted by the feet; --that instead of the cerebrum being propelled towards the cerebellum, the cerebellum, on the contrary, was propelled simply towards the cerebrum, where it could do no manner of hurt: ----By heavens! cried he, the world is in conspiracy to drive out what little wit God has given us, ----and the professors of the obstetric art are lifted into the same conspiracy. --What is it to me which end of my son comes foremost into the world, provided all goes right after, and his cerebellum escapes uncrushed?

It is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has conceived it, that it assimilates every thing to itself, as proper nourishment; and, from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows the stronger by every thing you see, hear, read, or understand. This is of great use.

When my father was gone with this about a month, there was scarce a phænomenon of stupidity or of genius, which he could not readily solve by it; --it accounted for the eldest son being the greatest blockhead in the family. ----Poor devil, he would say, --he made way for the capacity of his younger brothers. ----It unriddled the observations of drivellers and monstrous heads, ----shewing à priori, it could not be otherwise, ----unless **** I don’t know what. It wonderfully explained and accounted for the acumen of the Asiatic genius, and that sprightlier turn, and a more penetrating intuition of minds, in warmer climates; not from the loose and common-place solution of a clearer sky, and a more perpetual sunshine, &c. --which for aught he knew, might as well rarefy and dilute the faculties of the soul into nothing, by one extreme, --as they are condensed in colder climates by the other; ----but he traced the affair up to its spring-head; --shewed that, in warmer climates, nature had laid a lighter tax upon the fairest parts of the creation; --their pleasures more; --the necessity of their pains less, insomuch that the pressure and resistance upon the vertex was so slight, that the whole organisation of the cerebellum was preserved; ----nay, he did not believe, in natural births, that so much as a single thread of the net-work was broke or displaced, ----so that the soul might just act as she liked.

When my father had got so far, ------what a blaze of light did the accounts of the Cæsarian section, and of the towering geniuses who had come safe into the world by it, cast upon this hypothesis? Here you see, he would say, there was no injury done to the sensorium; --no pressure of the head against the pelvis; ----no propulsion of the cerebrum towards the cerebellum, either by the os pubis on this side, or the os coxygis on that; ------and pray, what were the happy consequences? Why, Sir, your Julius Cæsar, who gave the operation a name; --and your Hermes Trismegistus, who was born so before ever the operation had a name; ----your Scipio Africanus; your Manlius Torquatus; our Edward the Sixth, --who, had he lived, would have done the same honour to the hypothesis: ----These, and many more who figured high in the annals of fame, --all came side-way, Sir, into the world.

The incision of the abdomen and uterus ran for six weeks together in my father’s head; ----he had read, and was satisfied, that wounds in the epigastrium, and those in the matrix, were not mortal; --so that the belly of the mother might be opened extremely well to give a passage to the child. --He mentioned the thing one afternoon to my mother, ------merely as a matter of fact; but seeing her turn as pale as ashes at the very mention of it, as much as the operation flattered his hopes, --he thought it as well to say no more of it, ----contenting himself with admiring, --what he thought was to no purpose to propose.

This was my father Mr. Shandy’s hypothesis; concerning which I have only to add, that my brother Bobby did as great honour to it (whatever he did to the family) as any one of the great heroes we spoke of: For happening not only to be christened, as I told you, but to be born too, when my father was at Epsom, ----being moreover my mother’s first child, --coming into the world with his head foremost, --and turning out afterwards a lad of wonderful slow parts, ----my father spelt all these together into his opinion: and as he had failed at one end, --he was determined to try the other.

This was not to be expected from one of the sisterhood, who are not easily to be put out of their way, ----and was therefore one of my father’s great reasons in favour of a man of science, whom he could better deal with.

Of all men in the world, Dr. Slop was the fittest for my father’s purpose; ----for though this new-invented forceps was the armour he had proved, and what he maintained to be the safest instrument of deliverance, yet, it seems, he had scattered a word or two in his book, in favour of the very thing which ran in my father’s fancy; ----tho’ not with a view to the soul’s good in extracting by the feet, as was my father’s system, --but for reasons merely obstetrical.

This will account for the coalition betwixt my father and Dr. Slop, in the ensuing discourse, which went a little hard against my uncle Toby. ----In what manner a plain man, with nothing but common sense, could bear up against two such allies in science, --is hard to conceive. --You may conjecture upon it, if you please, ----and whilst your imagination is in motion, you may encourage it to go on, and discover by what causes and effects in nature it could come to pass, that my uncle Toby got his modesty by the wound he received upon his groin. --You may raise a system to account for the loss of my nose by marriage-articles, --and shew the world how it could happen, that I should have the misfortune to be called TRISTAM, in opposition to my father’s hypothesis, and the wish of the whole family, Godfathers and Godmothers not excepted. --These, with fifty other points left yet unravelled, you may endeavour to solve if you have time; ----but I tell you beforehand it will be in vain, for not the sage Alquife, the magician in Don Belianis of Greece, nor the no less famous Urganda, the sorceress his wife, (were they alive), could pretend to come within a league of the truth.

The reader will be content to wait for a full explanation of these matters till the next year, ----when a series of things will be laid open which he little expects.

[Footnote 2.1: The author is here twice mistaken; for Lithopædus should be wrote thus, Lithopædii Senonensis Icon. The second mistake is, that this Lithopædus is not an author, but a drawing of a petrified child. The account of this, published by Athosius 1580, may be seen at the end of Cordæus’s works in Spachius. Mr. Tristram Shandy has been led into this error, either from seeing Lithopædus’s name of late in a catalogue of learned writers in Dr. ----, or by mistaking Lithopædus for Trinecavellius, ----from the too great similitude of the names.]

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Book III

Multitudinis imperitæ non formido judicia; meis tamen, rogo, parcant opusculis------in quibus fuit propositi semper, a jocis ad seria, a seriis vicissim ad jocos transire.

--JOAN. SARESBERIENSIS, Episcopus Lugdun.

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Chapter I

----“I WISH, Dr. Slop,” quoth my uncle Toby, (repeating his wish for Dr. Slop a second time, and with a degree of more zeal and earnestness in his manner of wishing, than he had wished at first[3.1])---- “I wish, Dr. Slop,” quoth my uncle Toby, “you had seen what prodigious armies we had in Flanders.”

My uncle Toby’s wish did Dr. Slop a disservice which his heart never intended any man, --Sir, it confounded him----and thereby putting his ideas first into confusion, and then to flight, he could not rally them again for the soul of him.

In all disputes, ----male or female, ----whether for honour, for profit, or for love, --it makes no difference in the case; --nothing is more dangerous, Madam, than a wish coming sideways in this unexpected manner upon a man: the safest way in general to take off the force of the wish, is for the party wish’d at, instantly to get upon his legs--and wish the wisher something in return, of pretty near the same value, ----so balancing the account upon the spot, you stand as you were--nay sometimes gain the advantage of the attack by it.

This will be fully illustrated to the world in my chapter of wishes.--

Dr. Slop did not understand the nature of this defence; --he was puzzled with it, and it put an entire stop to the dispute for four minutes and a half; --five had been fatal to it: --my father saw the danger--the dispute was one of the most interesting disputes in the world, “Whether the child of his prayers and endeavours should be born without a head or with one:” --he waited to the last moment, to allow Dr. Slop, in whose behalf the wish was made, his right of returning it; but perceiving, I say, that he was confounded, and continued looking with that perplexed vacuity of eye which puzzled souls generally stare with--first in my uncle Toby’s face--then in his--then up--then down--then east--east and by east, and so on, ----coasting it along by the plinth of the wainscot till he had got to the opposite point of the compass, ----and that he had actually begun to count the brass nails upon the arm of his chair, --my father thought there was no time to be lost with my uncle Toby, so took up the discourse as follows.

[Footnote 3.1: Vide page 105.] [[end of ch. II.XVIII]]

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Chapter II

“--What prodigious armies you had in Flanders!”----

Brother Toby, replied my father, taking his wig from off his head with his right hand, and with his left pulling out a striped India handkerchief from his right coat pocket, in order to rub his head, as he argued the point with my uncle Toby.----

----Now, in this I think my father was much to blame; and I will give you my reasons for it.

Matters of no more seeming consequence in themselves than, “Whether my father should have taken off his wig with his right hand or with his left,” ----have divided the greatest kingdoms, and made the crowns of the monarchs who governed them, to totter upon their heads. ----But need I tell you, Sir, that the circumstances with which every thing in this world is begirt, give every thing in this world its size and shape! --and by tightening it, or relaxing it, this way or that, make the thing to be, what it is--great--little--good--bad--indifferent or not indifferent, just as the case happens?

As my father’s India handkerchief was in his right coat pocket, he should by no means have suffered his right hand to have got engaged: on the contrary, instead of taking off his wig with it, as he did, he ought to have committed that entirely to the left; and then, when the natural exigency my father was under of rubbing his head, called out for his handkerchief, he would have had nothing in the world to have done, but to have put his right hand into his right coat pocket and taken it out; ----which he might have done without any violence, or the least ungraceful twist in any one tendon or muscle of his whole body

In this case, (unless, indeed, my father had been resolved to make a fool of himself by holding the wig stiff in his left hand----or by making some nonsensical angle or other at his elbow-joint, or arm-pit)--his whole attitude had been easy--natural--unforced: Reynolds himself, as great and gracefully as he paints, might have painted him as he sat.

Now as my father managed this matter, --consider what a devil of a figure my father made of himself.

In the latter end of Queen Anne’s reign, and in the beginning of the reign of King George the first-- “Coat pockets were cut very low down in the skirt.” --I need say no more--the father of mischief, had he been hammering at it a month, could not have contrived a worse fashion for one in my father’s situation.

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Chapter III

It was not an easy matter in any king’s reign (unless you were as lean a subject as myself) to have forced your hand diagonally, quite across your whole body, so as to gain the bottom of your opposite coat pocket. ----In the year one thousand seven hundred and eighteen, when this happened, it was extremely difficult; so that when my uncle Toby discovered the transverse zig-zaggery of my father’s approaches towards it, it instantly brought into his mind those he had done duty in, before the gate of St. Nicolas; ----the idea of which drew off his attention so entirely from the subject in debate, that he had got his right hand to the bell to ring up Trim to go and fetch his map of Namur, and his compasses and sector along with it, to measure the returning angles of the traverses of that attack, --but particularly of that one, where he received his wound upon his groin.

My father knit his brows, and as he knit them, all the blood in his body seemed to rush up into his face----my uncle Toby dismounted immediately.

----I did not apprehend your uncle Toby was o’ horseback.------

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Chapter IV

A man’s body and his mind, with the utmost reverence to both I speak it, are exactly like a jerkin, and a jerkin’s lining; --rumple the one, --you rumple the other. There is one certain exception however in this case, and that is, when you are so fortunate a fellow, as to have had your jerkin made of gum-taffeta, and the body-lining to it of a sarcenet, or thin persian.

Zeno, Cleanthes, Diogenes Babylonius, Dionysius, Heracleotes, Antipater, Panætius, and Posidonius amongst the Greeks; ----Cato and Varro and Seneca amongst the Romans; ----Pantæonus and Clemens Alexandrinus and Montaigne amongst the Christians; and a score and a half of good, honest, unthinking Shandean people as ever lived, whose names I can’t recollect, --all pretended that their jerkins were made after this fashion, --you might have rumpled and crumpled, and doubled and creased, and fretted and fridged the outside of them all to pieces; ----in short, you might have played the very devil with them, and at the same time, not one of the insides of them would have been one button the worse, for all you had done to them.

I believe in my conscience that mine is made up somewhat after this sort: ----for never poor jerkin has been tickled off at such a rate as it has been these last nine months together, ----and yet I declare, the lining to it, ------as far as I am a judge of the matter, ----is not a three-penny piece the worse; --pell-mell, helter-skelter, ding-dong, cut and thrust, back stroke and fore stroke, side way and long way, have they been trimming it for me: --had there been the least gumminess in my lining, --by heaven! it had all of it long ago been frayed and fretted to a thread.

------You Messrs. the Monthly reviewers! ------how could you cut and slash my jerkin as you did? ----how did you know but you would cut my lining too?

Heartily and from my soul, to the protection of that Being who will injure none of us, do I recommend you and your affairs, --so God bless you; --only next month, if any one of you should gnash his teeth, and storm and rage at me, as some of you did last MAY (in which I remember the weather was very hot)--don’t be exasperated, if I pass it by again with good temper, --being determined as long as I live or write (which in my case means the same thing) never to give the honest gentleman a worse word or a worse wish than my uncle Toby gave the fly which buzz’d about his nose all dinner-time, ------“Go, --go, poor devil,” quoth he, --“get thee gone, --why should I hurt thee? This world is surely wide enough to hold both thee and me.”

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Chapter V

Any man, Madam, reasoning upwards, and observing the prodigious suffusion of blood in my father’s countenance, --by means of which (as all the blood in his body seemed to rush into his face, as I told you) he must have reddened, pictorically and scientifically speaking, six whole tints and a half, if not a full octave above his natural colour: --any man, Madam, but my uncle Toby, who had observed this, together with the violent knitting of my father’s brows, and the extravagant contortion of his body during the whole affair, --would have concluded my father in a rage; and taking that for granted, --had he been a lover of such kind of concord as arises from two such instruments being put in exact tune, --he would instantly have skrew’d up his, to the same pitch; --and then the devil and all had broke loose--the whole piece, Madam, must have been played off like the sixth of Avison Scarlatti--con furia, --like mad. --Grant me patience! ----What has con furia, ----con strepito, ----or any other hurly burly whatever to do with harmony?

Any man, I say, Madam, but my uncle Toby, the benignity of whose heart interpreted every motion of the body in the kindest sense the motion would admit of, would have concluded my father angry, and blamed him too. My uncle Toby blamed nothing but the taylor who cut the pocket-hole; ----so sitting still till my father had got his handkerchief out of it, and looking all the time up in his face with inexpressible good-will----my father, at length, went on as follows.

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Chapter VI

“What prodigious armies you had in Flanders!” ----Brother Toby, quoth my father, I do believe thee to be as honest a man, and with as good and as upright a heart as ever God created; --nor is it thy fault, if all the children which have been, may, can, shall, will, or ought to be begotten, come with their heads foremost into the world: ----but believe me, dear Toby, the accidents which unavoidably waylay them, not only in the article of our begetting ’em----though these, in my opinion, are well worth considering, ----but the dangers and difficulties our children are beset with, after they are got forth into the world, are enow--little need is there to expose them to unnecessary ones in their passage to it. ----Are these dangers, quoth my uncle Toby, laying his hand upon my father’s knee, and looking up seriously in his face for an answer, ----are these dangers greater now o’ days, brother, than in times past? Brother Toby, answered my father, if a child was but fairly begot, and born alive, and healthy, and the mother did well after it, --our forefathers never looked farther. ----My uncle Toby instantly withdrew his hand from off my father’s knee, reclined his body gently back in his chair, raised his head till he could just see the cornice of the room, and then directing the buccinatory muscles along his cheeks, and the orbicular muscles around his lips to do their duty--he whistled Lillabullero.

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Chapter VII

Whilst my uncle Toby was whistling Lillabullero to my father, --Dr. Slop was stamping, and cursing and damning at Obadiah at a most dreadful rate, ------it would have done your heart good, and cured you, Sir, for ever of the vile sin of swearing, to have heard him; I am determined therefore to relate the whole affair to you.

When Dr. Slop’s maid delivered the green bays bag with her master’s instruments in it, to Obadiah, she very sensibly exhorted him to put his head and one arm through the strings, and ride with it slung across his body: so undoing the bow-knot, to lengthen the strings for him, without any more ado, she helped him on with it. However, as this, in some measure, unguarded the mouth of the bag, lest anything should bolt out in galloping back, at the speed Obadiah threatened, they consulted to take it off again: and in the great care and caution of their hearts, they had taken the two strings and tied them close (pursing up the mouth of the bag first) with half a dozen hard knots, each of which Obadiah, to make all safe, had twitched and drawn together with all the strength of his body.

This answered all that Obadiah and the maid intended; but was no remedy against some evils which neither he or she foresaw. The instruments, it seems, as tight as the bag was tied above, had so much room to play in it, towards the bottom (the shape of the bag being conical) that Obadiah could not make a trot of it, but with such a terrible jingle, what with the tire tête, forceps, and squirt, as would have been enough, had Hymen been taking a jaunt that way, to have frightened him out of the country; but when Obadiah accelerated his motion, and from a plain trot assayed to prick his coach-horse into a full gallop----by Heaven! Sir, the jingle was incredible.

As Obadiah had a wife and three children----the turpitude of fornication, and the many other political ill consequences of this jingling, never once entered his brain, ----he had however his objection, which came home to himself, and weighed with him, as it has oft-times done with the greatest patriots. ----“The poor fellow, Sir, was not able to hear himself whistle.”

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Chapter VIII

As Obadiah loved wind-music preferably to all the instrumental music he carried with him, --he very considerately set his imagination to work, to contrive and to invent by what means he should put himself in a condition of enjoying it.

In all distresses (except musical) where small cords are wanted, nothing is so apt to enter a man’s head as his hat-band: ----the philosophy of this is so near the surface ----I scorn to enter into it.

As Obadiah’s was a mix’d case----mark, Sirs, ----I say, a mixed case; for it was obstetrical, ----_scrip_tical, squirtical, papistical----and as far as the coach-horse was concerned in it, ----caballistical----and only partly musical; --Obadiah made no scruple of availing himself of the first expedient which offered; so taking hold of the bag and instruments, and griping them hard together with one hand, and with the finger and thumb of the other putting the end of the hat-band betwixt his teeth, and then slipping his hand down to the middle of it, --he tied and cross-tied them all fast together from one end to the other (as you would cord a trunk) with such a multiplicity of roundabouts and intricate cross turns, with a hard knot at every intersection or point where the strings met, --that Dr. Slop must have had three-fifths of Job’s patience at least to have unloosed them. --I think in my conscience, that had NATURE been in one of her nimble moods, and in humour for such a contest----and she and Dr. Slop both fairly started together----there is no man living who had seen the bag with all that Obadiah had done to it, ----and known likewise the great speed the Goddess can make when she thinks proper, who would have had the least doubt remaining in his mind--which of the two would have carried off the prize. My mother, Madam, had been delivered sooner than the green bag infallibly----at least by twenty knots. ----Sport of small accidents, Tristram Shandy! that thou art, and ever will be! had that trial been for thee, and it was fifty to one but it had, ----thy affairs had not been so depress’d--(at least by the depression of thy nose) as they have been; nor had the fortunes of thy house and the occasions of making them, which have so often presented themselves in the course of thy life, to thee, been so often, so vexatiously, so tamely, so irrecoverably abandoned--as thou hast been forced to leave them; ----but ’tis over, ----all but the account of ’em, which cannot be given to the curious till I am got out into the world.

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Chapter IX

Great wits jump: for the moment Dr. Slop cast his eyes upon his bag (which he had not done till the dispute with my uncle Toby about midwifery put him in mind of it)--the very same thought occurred. --’Tis God’s mercy, quoth he (to himself) that Mrs. Shandy has had so bad a time of it, ----else she might have been brought to bed seven times told, before one half of these knots could have got untied. ----But here you must distinguish--the thought floated only in Dr. Slop’s mind, without sail or ballast to it, as a simple proposition; millions of which, as your worship knows, are every day swimming quietly in the middle of the thin juice of a man’s understanding, without being carried backwards or forwards, till some little gusts of passion or interest drive them to one side.

A sudden trampling in the room above, near my mother’s bed, did the proposition the very service I am speaking of. By all that’s unfortunate, quoth Dr. Slop, unless I make haste, the thing will actually befall me as it is.

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Chapter X

In the case of knots, --by which, in the first place, I would not be understood to mean slip-knots--because in the course of my life and opinions--my opinions concerning them will come in more properly when I mention the catastrophe of my great uncle Mr. Hammond Shandy, --a little man, --but of high fancy: --he rushed into the duke of Monmouth’s affair: ----nor, secondly, in this place, do I mean that particular species of knots called bow-knots; --there is so little address, or skill, or patience required in the unloosing them, that they are below my giving any opinion at all about them. --But by the knots I am speaking of, may it please your reverences to believe, that I mean good, honest, devilish tight, hard knots, made bona fide, as Obadiah made his; ----in which there is no quibbling provision made by the duplication and return of the two ends of the strings thro’ the annulus or noose made by the second implication of them--to get them slipp’d and undone by. --I hope you apprehend me.

In the case of these knots then, and of the several obstructions, which, may it please your reverences, such knots cast in our way in getting through life----every hasty man can whip out his penknife and cut through them. ----’Tis wrong. Believe me, Sirs, the most virtuous way, and which both reason and conscience dictate----is to take our teeth or our fingers to them. ----Dr. Slop had lost his teeth--his favourite instrument, by extracting in a wrong direction, or by some misapplication of it, unfortunately slipping, he had formerly, in a hard labour, knock’d out three of the best of them with the handle of it: ------he tried his fingers--alas; the nails of his fingers and thumbs were cut close. ----The duce take it! I can make nothing of it either way, cried Dr. Slop. ----The trampling overhead near my mother’s bedside increased. --Pox take the fellow! I shall never get the knots untied as long as I live. ----My mother gave a groan. ----Lend me your penknife ----I must e’en cut the knots at last----pugh! ----psha! --Lord! I have cut my thumb quite across to the very bone----curse the fellow--if there was not another man-midwife within fifty miles ----I am undone for this bout --I wish the scoundrel hang’d --I wish he was shot ----I wish all the devils in hell had him for a blockhead!------

My father had a great respect for Obadiah, and could not bear to hear him disposed of in such a manner--he had moreover some little respect for himself--and could as ill bear with the indignity offered to himself in it.

Had Dr. Slop cut any part about him, but his thumb----my father had pass’d it by--his prudence had triumphed: as it was, he was determined to have his revenge.

Small curses, Dr. Slop, upon great occasions, quoth my father (condoling with him first upon the accident), are but so much waste of our strength and soul’s health to no manner of purpose. --I own it, replied Dr. Slop. --They are like sparrow-shot, quoth my uncle Toby (suspending his whistling), fired against a bastion. ----They serve, continued my father, to stir the humours----but carry off none of their acrimony: --for my own part, I seldom swear or curse at all --I hold it bad----but if I fall into it by surprize, I generally retain so much presence of mind (right, quoth my uncle Toby) as to make it answer my purpose----that is, I swear on till I find myself easy. A wise and a just man however would always endeavour to proportion the vent given to these humours, not only to the degree of them stirring within himself--but to the size and ill intent of the offence upon which they are to fall. --“Injuries come only from the heart,” --quoth my uncle Toby. For this reason, continued my father, with the most Cervantick gravity, I have the greatest veneration in the world for that gentleman, who, in distrust of his own discretion in this point, sat down and composed (that is at his leisure) fit forms of swearing suitable to all cases, from the lowest to the highest provocation which could possibly happen to him----which forms being well considered by him, and such moreover as he could stand to, he kept them ever by him on the chimney-piece, within his reach, ready for use. --I never apprehended, replied Dr. Slop, that such a thing was ever thought of----much less executed. I beg your pardon, answered my father; I was reading, though not using, one of them to my brother Toby this morning, whilst he pour’d out the tea--’tis here upon the shelf over my head; --but if I remember right, ’tis too violent for a cut of the thumb. --Not at all, quoth Dr. Slop--the devil take the fellow. ----Then, answered my father, ’Tis much at your service, Dr. Slop--on condition you will read it aloud; ----so rising up and reaching down a form of excommunication of the church of Rome, a copy of which, my father (who was curious in his collections) had procured out of the leger-book of the church of Rochester, writ by ERNULPHUS the bishop----with a most affected seriousness of look and voice, which might have cajoled ERNULPHUS himself--he put it into Dr. Slop’s hands. ----Dr. Slop wrapt his thumb up in the corner of his handkerchief, and with a wry face, though without any suspicion, read aloud, as follows------my uncle Toby whistling Lillabullero as loud as he could all the time.

Textus de Ecclesiâ Roffensi, per Ernulfum Episcopum.

[Transcriber’s Note:

The following section was printed on facing pages, Latin and English. For this e-text it has been broken into alternating paragraphs. The letters inserted between Latin lines are alternative endings determined by the number and gender of the person(s) being excommunicated.]

CAP. XI

EXCOMMUNICATIO[3.2]

Ex auctoritate Dei omnipotentis, Patris, et Filij, et Spiritus Sancti, et sanctorum canonum, sanctæque et intemeratæ Virginis Dei genetricis Mariæ,--

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Chapter XI

“By the authority of God Almighty, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and of the holy canons, and of the undefiled Virgin Mary, mother and patroness of our Saviour.” I think there is no necessity, quoth Dr. Slop, dropping the paper down to his knee, and addressing himself to my father----as you have read it over, Sir, so lately, to read it aloud----and as Captain Shandy seems to have no great inclination to hear it ------I may as well read it to myself. That’s contrary to treaty, replied my father: ------besides, there is something so whimsical, especially in the latter part of it, I should grieve to lose the pleasure of a second reading. Dr. Slop did not altogether like it, ------but my uncle Toby offering at that instant to give over whistling, and read it himself to them; ------Dr. Slop thought he might as well read it under the cover of my uncle Toby’s whistling------as suffer my uncle Toby to read it alone; ----so raising up the paper to his face, and holding it quite parallel to it, in order to hide his chagrin------he read it aloud as follows--------my uncle Toby whistling Lillabullero, though not quite so loud as before.

------Atque omnium cœlestium virtutum, angelorum, archangelorum, thronorum, dominationum, potestatuum, cherubin ac seraphin, & sanctorum patriarchum, prophetarum, & omnium apostolorum & evangelistarum, & sanctorum innocentum, qui in conspectu Agni soli digni inventi sunt canticum cantare novum, et sanctorum martyrum et sanctorum confessorum, et sanctarum virginum, atque omnium simul sanctorum et electorum vel os Dei, ----Excommunicamus, et anathematizamus hunc s vel os s furem, vel hunc malefactorem, N. N. et a liminibus sanctæ Dei vel i n ecclesiæ sequestramus, et æternis suppliciis excruciandus, mancipetur, cum Dathan et Abiram, et cum his qui dixerunt Domino Deo, Recede à nobis, scientiam viarum tuarum nolumus: et vel eorum sicut aquâ ignis extinguitur, sic extinguatur lucerna ejus in n n secula seculorum nisi resipuerit, et ad satisfactionem venerit. Amen.

“By the authority of God Almighty, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and of the undefiled Virgin Mary, mother and patroness of our Saviour, and of all the celestial virtues, angels, archangels, thrones, dominions, powers, cherubins and seraphins, and of all the holy patriarchs, prophets, and of all the apostles and evangelists, and of the holy innocents, who in the sight of the Holy Lamb, are found worthy to sing the new song of the holy martyrs and holy confessors, and of the holy virgins, and of all the saints, together with the holy and elect of God, ----May he” (Obadiah) “be damn’d” (for tying these knots)---- “We excommunicate, and anathematize him, and from the thresholds of the holy church of God Almighty we sequester him, that he may be tormented, disposed, and delivered over with Dathan and Abiram, and with those who say unto the Lord God, Depart from us, we desire none of thy ways. And as fire is quenched with water, so let the light of him be put out for evermore, unless it shall repent him” (Obadiah, of the knots which he has tied) “and make satisfaction” (for them) “Amen.”

os Maledicat illum Deus Pater qui hominem creavit. Maledicat os os illum Dei Filius qui pro homine passus est. Maledicat illum os Spiritus Sanctus qui in baptismo effusus est. Maledicat illum sancta crux, quam Christus pro nostrâ salute hostem triumphans ascendit.

“May the Father who created man, curse him. ----May the Son who suffered for us, curse him. ----May the Holy Ghost, who was given to us in baptism, curse him (Obadiah) ----May the holy cross which Christ, for our salvation triumphing over his enemies, ascended, curse him.

os Maledicat illum sancta Dei genetrix et perpetua Virgo Maria. os Maledicat illum sanctus Michael, animarum susceptor sacrarum. os Maledicant illum omnes angeli et archangeli, principatus et potestates, omnisque militia cœlestis.

“May the holy and eternal Virgin Mary, mother of God, curse him. ------May St. Michael, the advocate of holy souls, curse him. ----May all the angels and archangels, principalities and powers, and all the heavenly armies, curse him.” [Our armies swore terribly in Flanders, cried my uncle Toby, ------but nothing to this. ------For my own part I could not have a heart to curse my dog so.]

os Maledicat illum patriarcharum et prophetarum laudabilis os numerus. Maledicat illum sanctus Johannes Præcusor et Baptista Christi, et sanctus Petrus, et sanctus Paulus, atque sanctus Andreas, omnesque Christi apostoli, simul et cæteri discipuli, quatuor quoque evangelistæ, qui sua prædicatione os mundum universum converterunt. Maledicat illum cuneus martyrum et confessorum mirificus, qui Deo bonis operibus placitus inventus est.

“May St. John, the Præcursor, and St. John the Baptist, and St. Peter and St. Paul, and St. Andrew, and all other Christ’s apostles, together curse him. And may the rest of his disciples and four evangelists, who by their preaching converted the universal world, and may the holy and wonderful company of martyrs and confessors who by their holy works are found pleasing to God Almighty, curse him” (Obadiah).

os Maledicant illum sacrarum virginum chori, quæ mundi vana causa honoris Christi respuenda contempserunt. Maledicant os illum omnes sancti qui ab initio mundi usque in finem seculi Deo dilecti inveniuntur.

os Maledicant illum cœli et terra, et omnia sancta in eis manentia.

“May the holy choir of the holy virgins, who for the honour of Christ have despised the things of the world, damn him ----May all the saints, who from the beginning of the world to everlasting ages are found to be beloved of God, damn him ------May the heavens and earth, and all the holy things remaining therein, damn him” (Obadiah) “or her” (or whoever else had a hand in tying these knots).

i n n Maledictus sit ubicunque fuerit, sive in domo, sive in agro, sive in viâ, sive in semitâ, sive in silvâ, sive in aquâ, sive in ecclesiâ.

i n Maledictus sit vivendo, moriendo, ---------------------------- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ manducando, bibendo, esuriendo, sitiendo, jejunando, dormitando, dormiendo, vigilando, ambulando, stando, sedendo, jacendo, operando, quiescendo, mingendo, cacando, flebotomando.

“May he (Obadiah) be damn’d wherever he be----whether in the house or the stables, the garden or the field, or the highway, or in the path, or in the wood, or in the water, or in the church. ----May he be cursed in living, in dying.” [Here my uncle Toby, taking the advantage of a minim in the second bar of his tune, kept whistling one continued note to the end of the sentence. ----Dr. Slop, with his division of curses moving under him, like a running bass all the way.] “May he be cursed in eating, and drinking, in being hungry, in being thirsty, in fasting, in sleeping, in slumbering, in walking, in standing, in sitting, in lying, in working, in resting, in pissing, in shitting, and in blood-letting!”

i n Maledictus sit in totis viribus corporis,

“May he” (Obadiah) “be cursed in all the faculties of his body!

i n Maledictus sit intus et exterius.

i n i n i Maledictus sit in capillis; maledictus sit in cerebro. Maledictus n sit in vertice, in temporibus, in fronte, in auriculis, in superciliis, in oculis, in genis, in maxillis, in naribus, in dentibus, mordacibus, sive molaribus, in labiis, in guttere, in humeris, in harnis, in brachiis, in manubus, in digitis, in pectore, in corde, et in omnibus interioribus stomacho tenus, in renibus, in inguinibus, in femore, in genitalibus, in coxis, in genubus, in cruribus, in pedibus, et in inguibus.

“May he be cursed inwardly and outwardly! ------May he be cursed in the hair of his head! ----May he be cursed in his brains, and in his vertex” (that is a sad curse, quoth my father), “in his temples, in his forehead, in his ears, in his eye-brows, in his cheeks, in his jaw-bones, in his nostrils, in his fore-teeth and grinders, in his lips, in his throat, in his shoulders, in his wrists, in his arms, in his hands, in his fingers!

“May he be damn’d in his mouth, in his breast, in his heart and purtenance, down to the very stomach!

“May he be cursed in his reins, and in his groin” (God in heaven forbid! quoth my uncle Toby), “in his thighs, in his genitals” (my father shook his head), “and in his hips, and in his knees, his legs, and feet, and toe-nails!

Maledictus sit in totis compagibus membrorum, a vertice capitis, usque ad plantam pedis--non sit in eo sanitas.

“May he be cursed in all the joints and articulations of his members, from the top of his head to the sole of his foot! May there be no soundness in him!

Maledicat illum Christus Filius Dei vivi toto suæ majestatis imperio.----

“May the Son of the living God, with all the glory of his Majesty” ----[Here my uncle Toby, throwing back his head, gave a monstrous, long, loud Whew--w--w--------something betwixt the interjectional whistle of Hay-day! and the word itself.------

----By the golden beard of Jupiter--and of Juno (if her majesty wore one) and by the beards of the rest of your heathen worships, which by the bye was no small number, since what with the beards of your celestial gods, and gods aerial and aquatick--to say nothing of the beards of town-gods and country-gods, or of the celestial goddesses your wives, or of the infernal goddesses your whores and concubines (that is in case they wore them)------all which beards, as Varro tells me, upon his word and honour, when mustered up together, made no less than thirty thousand effective beards upon the Pagan establishment; ----every beard of which claimed the rights and privileges of being stroken and sworn by--by all these beards together then ----I vow and protest, that of the two bad cassocks I am worth in the world, I would have given the better of them, as freely as ever Cid Hamet offered his----to have stood by, and heard my uncle Toby’s accompanyment.]

----et insurgat adversus illum cœlum cum omnibus virtutibus quæ in eo moventur ad damnandum eum, nisi penituerit et ad satisfactionem venerit. Amen. Fiat, fiat. Amen.

----“curse him!” continued Dr. Slop, --“and may heaven, with all the powers which move therein, rise up against him, curse and damn him” (Obadiah) “unless he repent and make satisfaction! Amen. So be it, --so be it. Amen.”

I declare, quoth my uncle Toby, my heart would not let me curse the devil himself with so much bitterness. --He is the father of curses, replied Dr. Slop. ----So am not I, replied my uncle. ----But he is cursed, and damn’d already, to all eternity, replied Dr. Slop.

I am sorry for it, quoth my uncle Toby.

Dr. Slop drew up his mouth, and was just beginning to return my uncle Toby the compliment of his Whu--u--u--or interjectional whistle----when the door hastily opening in the next chapter but one----put an end to the affair.

[Footnote 3.2: As the genuineness of the consultation of the Sorbonne upon the question of baptism, was doubted by some, and denied by others----’twas thought proper to print the original of this excommunication; for the copy of which Mr. Shandy returns thanks to the chapter clerk of the dean and chapter of Rochester.]

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Chapter XII

Now don’t let us give ourselves a parcel of airs, and pretend that the oaths we make free with in this land of liberty of ours are our own; and because we have the spirit to swear them, ----imagine that we have had the wit to invent them too.

I’ll undertake this moment to prove it to any man in the world, except to a connoisseur: ----though I declare I object only to a connoisseur in swearing, ----as I would do to a connoisseur in painting, &c., &c., the whole set of ’em are so hung round and befetish’d with the bobs and trinkets of criticism, ----or to drop my metaphor, which by the bye is a pity, ----for I have fetch’d it as far as from the coast of Guiney; --their heads, Sir, are stuck so full of rules and compasses, and have that eternal propensity to apply them upon all occasions, that a work of genius had better go to the devil at once, than stand to be prick’d and tortured to death by ’em.

--And how did Garrick speak the soliloquy last night? --Oh, against all rule, my lord, --most ungrammatically! betwixt the substantive and the adjective, which should agree together in number, case, and gender, he made a breach thus, --stopping, as if the point wanted settling; --and betwixt the nominative case, which your lordship knows should govern the verb, he suspended his voice in the epilogue a dozen times three seconds and three-fifths by a stop-watch, my lord, each time, --Admirable grammarian! ----But in suspending his voice----was the sense suspended likewise? Did no expression of attitude or countenance fill up the chasm? ----Was the eye silent? Did you narrowly look? ------I look’d only at the stop-watch, my lord. --Excellent observer!

And what of this new book the whole world makes such a rout about? ----Oh! ’tis out of all plumb, my lord, ----quite an irregular thing! --not one of the angles at the four corners was a right angle. --I had my rule and compasses, &c., my lord, in my pocket. --Excellent critick!

----And for the epick poem your lordship bid me look at----upon taking the length, breadth, height, and depth of it, and trying them at home upon an exact scale of Bossu’s----’tis out, my lord, in every one of its dimensions. --Admirable connoisseur!

----And did you step in, to take a look at the grand picture in your way back? --’Tis a melancholy daub! my lord; not one principle of the pyramid in any one group! ----and what a price! ----for there is nothing of the colouring of Titian--the expression of Rubens--the grace of Raphael--the purity of Dominichino--the corregiescity of Corregio--the learning of Poussin--the airs of Guido--the taste of the Carrachis--or the grand contour of Angela. --Grant me patience, just Heaven! --Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world--though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst----the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!

I would go fifty miles on foot, for I have not a horse worth riding on, to kiss the hand of that man whose generous heart will give up the reins of his imagination into his author’s hands----be pleased he knows not why, and cares not wherefore.

Great Apollo! if thou art in a giving humour--give me --I ask no more, but one stroke of native humour, with a single spark of thy own fire along with it----and send Mercury, with the rules and compasses, if he can be spared, with my compliments to--no matter.

Now to any one else I will undertake to prove, that all the oaths and imprecations which we have been puffing off upon the world for these two hundred and fifty years last past as originals----except St. Paul’s thumb----God’s flesh and God’s fish, which were oaths monarchical, and, considering who made them, not much amiss; and as kings’ oaths, ’tis not much matter whether they were fish or flesh; --else I say, there is not an oath, or at least a curse amongst them, which has not been copied over and over again out of Ernulphus a thousand times: but, like all other copies, how infinitely short of the force and spirit of the original! --It is thought to be no bad oath----and by itself passes very well-- “G--d damn you.” --Set it beside Ernulphus’s---- “God Almighty the Father damn you --God the Son damn you --God the Holy Ghost damn you”--you see ’tis nothing. --There is an orientality in his, we cannot rise up to: besides, he is more copious in his invention--possess’d more of the excellencies of a swearer----had such a thorough knowledge of the human frame, its membranes, nerves, ligaments, knittings of the joints, and articulations, ----that when Ernulphus cursed--no part escaped him. --’Tis true there is something of a hardness in his manner----and, as in Michael Angelo, a want of grace----but then there is such a greatness of gusto!

My father, who generally look’d upon everything in a light very different from all mankind, would, after all, never allow this to be an original. ----He considered rather, Ernulphus’s anathema, as an institute of swearing, in which, as he suspected, upon the decline of swearing in some milder pontificate, Ernulphus, by order of the succeeding pope, had with great learning and diligence collected together all the laws of it; --for the same reason that Justinian, in the decline of the empire, had ordered his chancellor Tribonian to collect the Roman or civil laws all together into one code or digest----lest, through the rust of time----and the fatality of all things committed to oral tradition--they should be lost to the world for ever.

For this reason my father would oft-times affirm, there was not an oath, from the great and tremendous oath of William the Conqueror (By the splendour of God) down to the lowest oath of a scavenger (Damn your eyes) which was not to be found in Ernulphus. --In short, he would add --I defy a man to swear out of it.

The hypothesis is, like most of my father’s, singular and ingenious too; ----nor have I any objection to it, but that it overturns my own.

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Chapter XIII

----Bless my soul! --my poor mistress is ready to faint----and her pains are gone--and the drops are done--and the bottle of julap is broke----and the nurse has cut her arm--(and I, my thumb, cried Dr. Slop,) and the child is where it was, continued Susannah, --and the midwife has fallen backwards upon the edge of the fender, and bruised her hip as black as your hat. --I’ll look at it, quoth Dr. Slop. --There is no need of that, replied Susannah, --you had better look at my mistress--but the midwife would gladly first give you an account how things are, so desires you would go up stairs and speak to her this moment.

Human nature is the same in all professions.

The midwife had just before been put over Dr. Slop’s head --He had not digested it, --No, replied Dr. Slop, ’twould be full as proper, if the midwife came down to me. --I like subordination, quoth my uncle Toby, --and but for it, after the reduction of Lisle, I know not what might have become of the garrison of Ghent, in the mutiny for bread, in the year Ten. --Nor, replied Dr. Slop, (parodying my uncle Toby’s hobby-horsical reflection; though full as hobby-horsical himself)------do I know, Captain Shandy, what might have become of the garrison above stairs, in the mutiny and confusion I find all things are in at present, but for the subordination of fingers and thumbs to ******------the application of which, Sir, under this accident of mine, comes in so à propos, that without it, the cut upon my thumb might have been felt by the Shandy family, as long as the Shandy family had a name.

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Chapter XIV

Let us go back to the ******----in the last chapter.

It is a singular stroke of eloquence (at least it was so, when eloquence flourished at Athens and Rome, and would be so now, did orators wear mantles) not to mention the name of a thing, when you had the thing about you in petto, ready to produce, pop, in the place you want it. A scar, an axe, a sword, a pink’d doublet, a rusty helmet, a pound and a half of pot-ashes in an urn, or a three-halfpenny pickle pot--but above all, a tender infant royally accoutred. --Tho’ if it was too young, and the oration as long as Tully’s second Philippick--it must certainly have beshit the orator’s mantle. --And then again, if too old, --it must have been unwieldy and incommodious to his action--so as to make him lose by his child almost as much as he could gain by it. --Otherwise, when a state orator has hit the precise age to a minute----hid his BAMBINO in his mantle so cunningly that no mortal could smell it----and produced it so critically, that no soul could say, it came in by head and shoulders --Oh Sirs! it has done wonders --It has open’d the sluices, and turn’d the brains, and shook the principles, and unhinged the politicks of half a nation.

These feats however are not to be done, except in those states and times, I say, where orators wore mantles----and pretty large ones too, my brethren, with some twenty or five-and-twenty yards of good purple, superfine, marketable cloth in them--with large flowing folds and doubles, and in a great style of design. --All which plainly shews, may it please your worships, that the decay of eloquence, and the little good service it does at present, both within and without doors, is owing to nothing else in the world, but short coats, and the disuse of trunk-hose. ----We can conceal nothing under ours, Madam, worth shewing.

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Chapter XV

Dr. Slop was within an ace of being an exception to all this argumentation: for happening to have his green bays bag upon his knees, when he began to parody my uncle Toby--’twas as good as the best mantle in the world to him: for which purpose, when he foresaw the sentence would end in his new-invented forceps, he thrust his hand into the bag in order to have them ready to clap in, when your reverences took so much notice of the ***, which had he managed----my uncle Toby had certainly been overthrown: the sentence and the argument in that case jumping closely in one point, so like the two lines which form the salient angle of a ravelin, ----Dr. Slop would never have given them up; --and my uncle Toby would as soon have thought of flying, as taking them by force: but Dr. Slop fumbled so vilely in pulling them out, it took off the whole effect, and what was a ten times worse evil (for they seldom come alone in this life) in pulling out his forceps, his forceps unfortunately drew out the squirt along with it.

When a proposition can be taken in two senses--’tis a law in disputation, That the respondent may reply to which of the two he pleases, or finds most convenient for him. ----This threw the advantage of the argument quite on my uncle Toby’s side. ----“Good God!” cried my uncle Toby, “are children brought into the world with a squirt?”

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Chapter XVI

--Upon my honour, Sir, you have tore every bit of skin quite off the back of both my hands with your forceps, cried my uncle Toby--and you have crush’d all my knuckles into the bargain with them to a jelly. ’Tis your own fault, said Dr. Slop----you should have clinch’d your two fists together into the form of a child’s head as I told you, and sat firm. I did so, answered my uncle Toby. ----Then the points of my forceps have not been sufficiently arm’d, or the rivet wants closing--or else the cut in my thumb has made me a little aukward--or possibly--’Tis well, quoth my father, interrupting the detail of possibilities--that the experiment was not first made upon my child’s head-piece. ------It would not have been a cherry-stone the worse, answered Dr. Slop. --I maintain it, said my uncle Toby, it would have broke the cerebellum (unless indeed the skull had been as hard as a granado) and turn’d it all into a perfect posset. ------Pshaw! replied Dr. Slop, a child’s head is naturally as soft as the pap of an apple; --the sutures give way--and besides, I could have extracted by the feet after. --Not you, said she. ----I rather wish you would begin that way, quoth my father.

Pray do, added my uncle Toby.

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Chapter XVII

----And pray, good woman, after all, will you take upon you to say, it may not be the child’s hip, as well as the child’s head? ------’Tis most certainly the head, replied the midwife. Because, continued Dr. Slop (turning to my father) as positive as these old ladies generally are--’tis a point very difficult to know--and yet of the greatest consequence to be known; ----because, Sir, if the hip is mistaken for the head--there is a possibility (if it is a boy) that the forceps * * * * * *

----What the possibility was, Dr. Slop whispered very low to my father, and then to my uncle Toby. ----There is no such danger, continued he, with the head. --No, in truth, quoth my father--but when your possibility has taken place at the hip--you may as well take off the head too.

----It is morally impossible the reader should understand this----’tis enough Dr. Slop understood it; ----so taking the green bays bag in his hand, with the help of Obadiah’s pumps, he tripp’d pretty nimbly, for a man of his size, across the room to the door------and from the door was shewn the way, by the good old midwife, to my mother’s apartments.

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Chapter XVIII

It is two hours, and ten minutes--and no more--cried my father, looking at his watch, since Dr. Slop and Obadiah arrived--and I know not how it happens, brother Toby--but to my imagination it seems almost an age.

----Here--pray, Sir, take hold of my cap--nay, take the bell along with it, and my pantoufles too.

Now, Sir, they are all at your service; and I freely make you a present of ’em, on condition you give me all your attention to this chapter.

Though my father said, “he knew not how it happen’d,” --yet he knew very well how it happen’d; ----and at the instant he spoke it, was pre-determined in his mind to give my uncle Toby a clear account of the matter by a metaphysical dissertation upon the subject of duration and its simple modes, in order to shew my uncle Toby by what mechanism and mensurations in the brain it came to pass, that the rapid succession of their ideas, and the eternal scampering of the discourse from one thing to another, since Dr. Slop had come into the room, had lengthened out so short a period to so inconceivable an extent. ----“I know not how it happens--cried my father, --but it seems an age.”

----’Tis owing entirely, quoth my uncle Toby, to the succession of our ideas.

My father, who had an itch, in common with all philosophers, of reasoning upon everything which happened, and accounting for it too--proposed infinite pleasure to himself in this, of the succession of ideas, and had not the least apprehension of having it snatch’d out of his hands by my uncle Toby, who (honest man!) generally took everything as it happened; ----and who, of all things in the world, troubled his brain the least with abstruse thinking; --the ideas of time and space--or how we came by those ideas--or of what stuff they were made----or whether they were born with us--or we picked them up afterwards as we went along--or whether we did it in frocks----or not till we had got into breeches--with a thousand other inquiries and disputes about INFINITY, PRESCIENCE, LIBERTY, NECESSITY, and so forth, upon whose desperate and unconquerable theories so many fine heads have been turned and cracked----never did my uncle Toby’s the least injury at all; my father knew it--and was no less surprized than he was disappointed, with my uncle’s fortuitous solution.

Do you understand the theory of that affair? replied my father.

Not I, quoth my uncle.

--But you have some ideas, said my father, of what you talk about?--

No more than my horse, replied my uncle Toby.

Gracious heaven! cried my father, looking upwards, and clasping his two hands together----there is a worth in thy honest ignorance, brother Toby----’twere almost a pity to exchange it for a knowledge. --But I’ll tell thee.----

To understand what time is aright, without which we never can comprehend infinity, insomuch as one is a portion of the other----we ought seriously to sit down and consider what idea it is we have of duration, so as to give a satisfactory account how we came by it. ----What is that to anybody? quoth my uncle Toby. [3.3]For if you will turn your eyes inwards upon your mind, continued my father, and observe attentively, you will perceive, brother, that whilst you and I are talking together, and thinking, and smoking our pipes, or whilst we receive successively ideas in our minds, we know that we do exist, and so we estimate the existence, or the continuation of the existence of ourselves, or anything else, commensurate to the succession of any ideas in our minds, the duration of ourselves, or any such other thing co-existing with our thinking----and so according to that preconceived ------You puzzle me to death, cried my uncle Toby.

------’Tis owing to this, replied my father, that in our computations of time, we are so used to minutes, hours, weeks, and months----and of clocks (I wish there was not a clock in the kingdom) to measure out their several portions to us, and to those who belong to us----that ’twill be well, if in time to come, the succession of our ideas be of any use or service to us at all.

Now, whether we observe it or no, continued my father, in every sound man’s head, there is a regular succession of ideas of one sort or other, which follow each other in train just like ------A train of artillery? said my uncle Toby ----A train of a fiddle-stick! --quoth my father--which follow and succeed one another in our minds at certain distances, just like the images in the inside of a lanthorn turned round by the heat of a candle. --I declare, quoth my uncle Toby, mine are more like a smoak-jack. ------Then, brother Toby, I have nothing more to say to you upon that subject, said my father.

[Footnote 3.3: Vide Locke.]

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Chapter XIX

----What a conjecture was here lost! ----My father in one of his best explanatory moods--in eager pursuit of a metaphysical point into the very regions, where clouds and thick darkness would soon have encompassed it about; --my uncle Toby in one of the finest dispositions for it in the world; --his head like a smoak-jack; ----the funnel unswept, and the ideas whirling round and round about in it, all obfuscated and darkened over with fuliginous matter! --By the tomb-stone of Lucian----if it is in being----if not, why then by his ashes! by the ashes of my dear Rabelais, and dearer Cervantes!------my father and my uncle Toby’s discourse upon TIME and ETERNITY----was a discourse devoutly to be wished for! and the petulancy of my father’s humour, in putting a stop to it as he did, was a robbery of the Ontologic Treasury of such a jewel, as no coalition of great occasions and great men are ever likely to restore to it again.

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Chapter XX

Tho’ my father persisted in not going on with the discourse--yet he could not get my uncle Toby’s smoak-jack out of his head--piqued as he was at first with it; --there was something in the comparison at the bottom, which hit his fancy; for which purpose, resting his elbow upon the table, and reclining the right side of his head upon the palm of his hand----but looking first stedfastly in the fire----he began to commune with himself, and philosophize about it: but his spirits being wore out with the fatigues of investigating new tracts, and the constant exertion of his faculties upon that variety of subjects which had taken their turn in the discourse------the idea of the smoak-jack soon turned all his ideas upside down--so that he fell asleep almost before he knew what he was about.

As for my uncle Toby, his smoak-jack had not made a dozen revolutions, before he fell asleep also. ----Peace be with them both! ----Dr. Slop is engaged with the midwife and my mother above stairs. ----Trim is busy in turning an old pair of jackboots into a couple of mortars, to be employed in the siege of Messina next summer--and is this instant boring the touch-holes with the point of a hot poker. ----All my heroes are off my hands; --’tis the first time I have had a moment to spare--and I’ll make use of it, and write my preface.

THE AUTHOR’S PREFACE

No, I’ll not say a word about it----here it is; --in publishing it --I have appealed to the world----and to the world I leave it; --it must speak for itself.

All I know of the matter is--when I sat down, my intent was to write a good book; and as far as the tenuity of my understanding would hold out--a wise, aye, and a discreet--taking care only, as I went along, to put into it all the wit and the judgment (be it more or less) which the great Author and Bestower of them had thought fit originally to give me------so that, as your worships see--’tis just as God pleases.

Now, Agelastes (speaking dispraisingly) sayeth, That there may be some wit in it, for aught he knows----but no judgment at all. And Triptolemus and Phutatorius agreeing thereto, ask, How is it possible there should? for that wit and judgment in this world never go together; inasmuch as they are two operations differing from each other as wide as east from west ------So, says Locke----so are farting and hickuping, say I. But in answer to this, Didius the great church lawyer, in his code de fartendi et illustrandi fallaciis, doth maintain and make fully appear, That an illustration is no argument----nor do I maintain the wiping of a looking-glass clean to be a syllogism; ----but you all, may it please your worships, see the better for it------so that the main good these things do is only to clarify the understanding, previous to the application of the argument itself, in order to free it from any little motes, or specks of opacular matter, which, if left swimming therein, might hinder a conception and spoil all.

Now, my dear anti-Shandeans, and thrice able criticks, and fellow-labourers (for to you I write this Preface)------and to you, most subtle statesmen and discreet doctors (do--pull off your beards) renowned for gravity and wisdom; ----Monopolus, my politician-- Didius, my counsel; Kysarcius, my friend; --Phutatorius, my guide; ----Gastripheres, the preserver of my life; Somnolentius, the balm and repose of it----not forgetting all others, as well sleeping as waking, ecclesiastical as civil, whom for brevity, but out of no resentment to you, I lump all together. ------Believe me, right worthy,

My most zealous wish and fervent prayer in your behalf, and in my own too, in case the thing is not done already for us----is, that the great gifts and endowments both of wit and judgment, with everything which usually goes along with them------such as memory, fancy, genius, eloquence, quick parts, and what not, may this precious moment, without stint or measure, let or hindrance, be poured down warm as each of us could bear it--scum and sediment and all (for I would not have a drop lost) into the several receptacles, cells, cellules, domiciles, dormitories, refectories, and spare places of our brains------in such sort, that they might continue to be injected and tunn’d into, according to the true intent and meaning of my wish, until every vessel of them, both great and small, be so replenish’d, saturated, and filled up therewith, that no more, would it save a man’s life, could possibly be got either in or out.

Bless us! --what noble work we should make! ----how should I tickle it off! ----and what spirits should I find myself in, to be writing away for such readers! ----and you--just heaven! ----with what raptures would you sit and read--but oh! --’tis too much ----I am sick ----I faint away deliciously at the thoughts of it--’tis more than nature can bear! --lay hold of me ----I am giddy --I am stone blind --I’m dying --I am gone. --Help! Help! Help! --But hold --I grow something better again, for I am beginning to foresee, when this is over, that as we shall all of us continue to be great wits--we should never agree amongst ourselves, one day to an end: ----there would be so much satire and sarcasm----scoffing and flouting, with raillying and reparteeing of it--thrusting and parrying in one corner or another----there would be nothing but mischief among us ----Chaste stars! what biting and scratching, and what a racket and a clatter we should make, what with breaking of heads, rapping of knuckles, and hitting of sore places--there would be no such thing as living for us.

But then again, as we should all of us be men of great judgment, we should make up matters as fast as ever they went wrong; and though we should abominate each other ten times worse than so many devils or devilesses, we should nevertheless, my dear creatures, be all courtesy and kindness, milk and honey--’twould be a second land of promise--a paradise upon earth, if there was such a thing to be had--so that upon the whole we should have done well enough.

All I fret and fume at, and what most distresses my invention at present, is how to bring the point itself to bear; for as your worships well know, that of these heavenly emanations of wit and judgment, which I have so bountifully wished both for your worships and myself--there is but a certain quantum stored up for us all, for the use and behoof of the whole race of mankind; and such small modicums of ’em are only sent forth into this wide world, circulating here and there in one bye corner or another--and in such narrow streams, and at such prodigious intervals from each other, that one would wonder how it holds out, or could be sufficient for the wants and emergencies of so many great estates, and populous empires.

Indeed there is one thing to be considered, that in Nova Zembla, North Lapland, and in all those cold and dreary tracts of the globe, which lie more directly under the arctick and antarctick circles, where the whole province of a man’s concernments lies for near nine months together within the narrow compass of his cave--where the spirits are compressed almost to nothing--and where the passions of a man, with everything which belongs to them, are as frigid as the zone itself--there the least quantity of judgment imaginable does the business--and of wit----there is a total and an absolute saving--for as not one spark is wanted--so not one spark is given. Angels and ministers of grace defend us! what a dismal thing would it have been to have governed a kingdom, to have fought a battle, or made a treaty, or run a match, or wrote a book, or got a child, or held a provincial chapter there, with so plentiful a lack of wit and judgment about us! For mercy’s sake, let us think no more about it, but travel on as fast as we can southwards into Norway--crossing over Swedeland, if you please, through the small triangular province of Angermania to the lake of Bothnia; coasting along it through east and west Bothnia, down to Carelia, and so on, through all those states and provinces which border upon the far side of the Gulf of Finland, and the north-east of the Baltick, up to Petersbourg, and just stepping into Ingria; --then stretching over directly from thence through the north parts of the Russian empire--leaving Siberia a little upon the left hand, till we got into the very heart of Russian and Asiatick Tartary.

Now throughout this long tour which I have led you, you observe the good people are better off by far, than in the polar countries which we have just left: --for if you hold your hand over your eyes, and look very attentively, you may perceive some small glimmerings (as it were) of wit, with a comfortable provision of good plain household judgment, which, taking the quality and quantity of it together, they make a very good shift with------and had they more of either the one or the other, it would destroy the proper balance betwixt them, and I am satisfied moreover they would want occasions to put them to use.

Now, Sir, if I conduct you home again into this warmer and more luxuriant island, where you perceive the spring-tide of our blood and humours runs high------where we have more ambition, and pride, and envy, and lechery, and other whoreson passions upon our hands to govern and subject to reason------the height of our wit, and the depth of our judgment, you see, are exactly proportioned to the length and breadth of our necessities------and accordingly we have them sent down amongst us in such a flowing kind of descent and creditable plenty, that no one thinks he has any cause to complain.

It must however be confessed on this head, that, as our air blows hot and cold--wet and dry, ten times in a day, we have them in no regular and settled way; --so that sometimes for near half a century together, there shall be very little wit or judgment either to be seen or heard of amongst us: ----the small channels of them shall seem quite dried up----then all of a sudden the sluices shall break out, and take a fit of running again like fury----you would think they would never stop: ----and then it is, that in writing, and fighting, and twenty other gallant things, we drive all the world before us.

It is by these observations, and a wary reasoning by analogy in that kind of argumentative process, which Suidas calls dialectick induction------that I draw and set up this position as most true and veritable;

That of these two luminaries so much of their irradiations are suffered from time to time to shine down upon us, as he, whose infinite wisdom which dispenses everything in exact weight and measure, knows will just serve to light us on our way in this night of our obscurity; so that your reverences and worships now find out, nor is it a moment longer in my power to conceal it from you, That the fervent wish in your behalf with which I set out, was no more than the first insinuating How d’ye of a caressing prefacer, stifling his reader, as a lover sometimes does a coy mistress, into silence. For alas! could this effusion of light have been as easily procured, as the exordium wished it --I tremble to think how many thousands for it, of benighted travellers (in the learned sciences at least) must have groped and blundered on in the dark, all the nights of their lives----running their heads against posts, and knocking out their brains without ever getting to their journies end; ----some falling with their noses perpendicularly into sinks----others horizontally with their tails into kennels. Here one half of a learned profession tilting full but against the other half of it, and then tumbling and rolling one over the other in the dirt like hogs. --Here the brethren of another profession, who should have run in opposition to each other, flying on the contrary like a flock of wild geese, all in a row the same way. --What confusion! --what mistakes! ----fiddlers and painters judging by their eyes and ears--admirable! --trusting to the passions excited--in an air sung, or a story painted to the heart----instead of measuring them by a quadrant.

In the fore-ground of this picture, a statesman turning the political wheel, like a brute, the wrong way round----against the stream of corruption--by Heaven! ----instead of with it.

In this corner, a son of the divine Esculapius, writing a book against predestination; perhaps worse--feeling his patient’s pulse, instead of his apothecary’s----a brother of the Faculty in the back-ground upon his knees in tears--drawing the curtains of a mangled victim to beg his forgiveness; --offering a fee--instead of taking one.

In that spacious HALL, a coalition of the gown, from all the bars of it, driving a damn’d, dirty, vexatious cause before them, with all their might and main, the wrong way! ----kicking it out of the great doors, instead of in----and with such fury in their looks, and such a degree of inveteracy in their manner of kicking it, as if the laws had been originally made for the peace and preservation of mankind: ----perhaps a more enormous mistake committed by them still------a litigated point fairly hung up; ------for instance, Whether John o’Nokes his nose could stand in Tom o’Stiles his face, without a trespass, or not--rashly determined by them in five-and-twenty minutes, which, with the cautious pros and cons required in so intricate a proceeding, might have taken up as many months----and if carried on upon a military plan, as your honours know an ACTION should be, with all the stratagems practicable therein, ------such as feints, ----forced marches, ----surprizes----ambuscades----mask-batteries, and a thousand other strokes of generalship, which consist in catching at all advantages on both sides------might reasonably have lasted them as many years, finding food and raiment all that term for a centumvirate of the profession.

As for the Clergy ------No----if I say a word against them, I’ll be shot. ----I have no desire; --and besides, if I had --I durst not for my soul touch upon the subject----with such weak nerves and spirits, and in the condition I am in at present, ’twould be as much as my life was worth, to deject and contrist myself with so bad and melancholy an account--and therefore ’tis safer to draw a curtain across, and hasten from it, as fast as I can, to the main and principal point I have undertaken to clear up----and that is, How it comes to pass, that your men of least wit are reported to be men of most judgment. ----But mark --I say, reported to be--for it is no more, my dear Sirs, than a report, and which, like twenty others taken up every day upon trust, I maintain to be a vile and a malicious report into the bargain.

This by the help of the observation already premised, and I hope already weighed and perpended by your reverences and worships, I shall forthwith make appear.

I hate set dissertations----and above all things in the world, ’tis one of the silliest things in one of them, to darken your hypothesis by placing a number of tall, opake words, one before another, in a right line, betwixt your own and your reader’s conception--when in all likelihood, if you had looked about, you might have seen something standing, or hanging up, which would have cleared the point at once-- “for what hindrance, hurt, or harm doth the laudable desire of knowledge bring to any man, if even from a sot, a pot, a fool, a stool, a winter-mittain, a truckle for a pully, the lid of a goldsmith’s crucible, an oil bottle, an old slipper, or a cane chair?” --I am this moment sitting upon one. Will you give me leave to illustrate this affair of wit and judgment, by the two knobs on the top of the back of it? --they are fastened on, you see, with two pegs stuck slightly into two gimlet-holes, and will place what I have to say in so clear a light, as to let you see through the drift and meaning of my whole preface, as plainly as if every point and particle of it was made up of sun-beams.

I enter now directly upon the point.

--Here stands wit--and there stands judgment, close beside it, just like the two knobs I’m speaking of, upon the back of this self-same chair on which I am sitting.

--You see, they are the highest and most ornamental parts of its frame--as wit and judgment are of ours--and like them too, indubitably both made and fitted to go together, in order, as we say in all such cases of duplicated embellishments--------to answer one another.

Now for the sake of an experiment, and for the clearer illustrating this matter--let us for a moment take off one of these two curious ornaments (I care not which) from the point or pinnacle of the chair it now stands on--nay, don’t laugh at it, --but did you ever see, in the whole course of your lives, such a ridiculous business as this has made of it? --Why, ’tis as miserable a sight as a sow with one ear; and there is just as much sense and symmetry in the one as in the other: ----do----pray, get off your seats only to take a view of it. ----Now would any man who valued his character a straw, have turned a piece of work out of his hand in such a condition? --nay, lay your hands upon your hearts, and answer this plain question, Whether this one single knob, which now stands here like a blockhead by itself, can serve any purpose upon earth, but to put one in mind of the want of the other? --and let me farther ask, in case the chair was your own, if you would not in your consciences think, rather than be as it is, that it would be ten times better without any knob at all?

Now these two knobs------or top ornaments of the mind of man, which crown the whole entablature----being, as I said, wit and judgment, which of all others, as I have proved it, are the most needful----the most priz’d--the most calamitous to be without, and consequently the hardest to come at--for all these reasons put together, there is not a mortal among us, so destitute of a love of good fame or feeding----or so ignorant of what will do him good therein--who does not wish and stedfastly resolve in his own mind, to be, or to be thought at least, master of the one or the other, and indeed of both of them, if the thing seems any way feasible, or likely to be brought to pass.

Now your graver gentry having little or no kind of chance in aiming at the one--unless they laid hold of the other, ----pray what do you think would become of them? ----Why, Sirs, in spite of all their gravities, they must e’en have been contented to have gone with their insides naked----this was not to be borne, but by an effort of philosophy not to be supposed in the case we are upon----so that no one could well have been angry with them, had they been satisfied with what little they could have snatched up and secreted under their cloaks and great perriwigs, had they not raised a hue and cry at the same time against the lawful owners.

I need not tell your worships, that this was done with so much cunning and artifice----that the great Locke, who was seldom outwitted by false sounds------was nevertheless bubbled here. The cry, it seems, was so deep and solemn a one, and what with the help of great wigs, grave faces, and other implements of deceit, was rendered so general a one against the poor wits in this matter, that the philosopher himself was deceived by it--it was his glory to free the world from the lumber of a thousand vulgar errors; ----but this was not of the number; so that instead of sitting down coolly, as such a philosopher should have done, to have examined the matter of fact before he philosophised upon it----on the contrary he took the fact for granted, and so joined in with the cry, and halloo’d it as boisterously as the rest.

This has been made the Magna Charta of stupidity ever since----but your reverences plainly see, it has been obtained in such a manner, that the title to it is not worth a groat: ----which by the bye is one of the many and vile impositions which gravity and grave folks have to answer for hereafter.

As for great wigs, upon which I may be thought to have spoken my mind too freely ------I beg leave to qualify whatever has been unguardedly said to their dispraise or prejudice, by one general declaration ----That I have no abhorrence whatever, nor do I detest and abjure either great wigs or long beards, any farther than when I see they are bespoke and let grow on purpose to carry on this self-same imposture--for any purpose----peace be with them! --[-->] mark only ----I write not for them.

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Chapter XXI

Every day for at least ten years together did my father resolve to have it mended--’tis not mended yet; --no family but ours would have borne with it an hour----and what is most astonishing, there was not a subject in the world upon which my father was so eloquent, as upon that of door-hinges. ----And yet at the same time, he was certainly one of the greatest bubbles to them, I think, that history can produce: his rhetorick and conduct were at perpetual handy-cuffs. --Never did the parlour-door open--but his philosophy or his principles fell a victim to it; ----three drops of oil with a feather, and a smart stroke of a hammer, had saved his honour for ever.

----Inconsistent soul that man is! ----languishing under wounds, which he has the power to heal! --his whole life a contradiction to his knowledge! --his reason, that precious gift of God to him--(instead of pouring in oil) serving but to sharpen his sensibilities--to multiply his pains, and render him more melancholy and uneasy under them --Poor unhappy creature, that he should do so! ----Are not the necessary causes of misery in this life enow, but he must add voluntary ones to his stock of sorrow; --struggle against evils which cannot be avoided, and submit to others, which a tenth part of the trouble they create him would remove from his heart for ever?

By all that is good and virtuous, if there are three drops of oil to be got, and a hammer to be found within ten miles of Shandy Hall------the parlour door hinge shall be mended this reign.

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Chapter XXII

When Corporal Trim had brought his two mortars to bear, he was delighted with his handy-work above measure; and knowing what a pleasure it would be to his master to see them, he was not able to resist the desire he had of carrying them directly into his parlour.

Now next to the moral lesson I had in view in mentioning the affair of hinges, I had a speculative consideration arising out of it, and it is this.

Had the parlour door opened and turn’d upon its hinges, as a door should do--

Or for example, as cleverly as our government has been turning upon its hinges----(that is, in case things have all along gone well with your worship, --otherwise I give up my simile)--in this case, I say, there had been no danger either to master or man, in Corporal Trim’s peeping in: the moment he had beheld my father and my uncle Toby fast asleep--the respectfulness of his carriage was such, he would have retired as silent as death, and left them both in their arm-chairs, dreaming as happy as he had found them: but the thing was, morally speaking, so very impracticable, that for the many years in which this hinge was suffered to be out of order, and amongst the hourly grievances my father submitted to upon its account--this was one; that he never folded his arms to take his nap after dinner, but the thoughts of being unavoidably awakened by the first person who should open the door, was always uppermost in his imagination, and so incessantly stepp’d in betwixt him and the first balmy presage of his repose, as to rob him, as he often declared, of the whole sweets of it.

“When things move upon bad hinges, an’ please your lordships, how can it be otherwise?”

Pray what’s the matter? Who is there? cried my father, waking, the moment the door began to creak. ----I wish the smith would give a peep at that confounded hinge. ----’Tis nothing, an’ please your honour, said Trim, but two mortars I am bringing in. --They shan’t make a clatter with them here, cried my father hastily. --If Dr. Slop has any drugs to pound, let him do it in the kitchen. --May it please your honour, cried Trim, they are two mortar-pieces for a siege next summer, which I have been making out of a pair of jack-boots, which Obadiah told me your honour had left off wearing. --By Heaven! cried my father, springing out of his chair, as he swore ----I have not one appointment belonging to me, which I set so much store by as I do by these jack-boots----they were our great grandfather’s, brother Toby--they were hereditary. Then I fear, quoth my uncle Toby, Trim has cut off the entail. --I have only cut off the tops, an’ please your honour, cried Trim ----I hate perpetuities as much as any man alive, cried my father----but these jack-boots, continued he (smiling, though very angry at the same time) have been in the family, brother, ever since the civil wars; ----Sir Roger Shandy wore them at the battle of Marston-Moor. --I declare I would not have taken ten pounds for them. ----I’ll pay you the money, brother Shandy, quoth my uncle Toby, looking at the two mortars with infinite pleasure, and putting his hand into his breeches pocket as he viewed them ----I’ll pay you the ten pounds this moment with all my heart and soul.----

Brother Toby, replied my father, altering his tone, you care not what money you dissipate and throw away, provided, continued he, ’tis but upon a SIEGE. ----Have I not one hundred and twenty pounds a year, besides my half pay? cried my uncle Toby. --What is that--replied my father hastily--to ten pounds for a pair of jack-boots? --twelve guineas for your pontoons? --half as much for your Dutch draw-bridge? --to say nothing of the train of little brass artillery you bespoke last week, with twenty other preparations for the siege of Messina: believe me, dear brother Toby, continued my father, taking him kindly by the hand--these military operations of yours are above your strength; --you mean well, brother----but they carry you into greater expences than you were first aware of; --and take my word, dear Toby, they will in the end quite ruin your fortune, and make a beggar of you. --What signifies it if they do, brother, replied my uncle Toby, so long as we know ’tis for the good of the nation?----

My father could not help smiling for his soul--his anger at the worst was never more than a spark; --and the zeal and simplicity of Trim--and the generous (though hobby-horsical) gallantry of my uncle Toby, brought him into perfect good humour with them in an instant.

Generous souls! --God prosper you both, and your mortar-pieces too! quoth my father to himself.

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Chapter XXIII

All is quiet and hush, cried my father, at least above stairs --I hear not one foot stirring. --Prithee, Trim, who’s in the kitchen? There is no one soul in the kitchen, answered Trim, making a low bow as he spoke, except Dr. Slop. --Confusion! cried my father (getting up upon his legs a second time)--not one single thing was gone right this day! had I faith in astrology, brother (which, by the bye, my father had), I would have sworn some retrograde planet was hanging over this unfortunate house of mine, and turning every individual thing in it out of its place. ----Why, I thought Dr. Slop had been above stairs with my wife, and so said you. ----What can the fellow be puzzling about in the kitchen! --He is busy, an’ please your honour, replied Trim, in making a bridge. ----’Tis very obliging in him, quoth my uncle Toby: ------pray, give my humble service to Dr. Slop, Trim, and tell him I thank him heartily.

You must know, my uncle Toby mistook the bridge--as widely as my father mistook the mortars; ----but to understand how my uncle Toby could mistake the bridge --I fear I must give you an exact account of the road which led to it; --or to drop my metaphor (for there is nothing more dishonest in an historian than the use of one)----in order to conceive the probability of this error in my uncle Toby aright, I must give you some account of an adventure of Trim’s, though much against my will, I say much against my will, only because the story, in one sense, is certainly out of its place here; for by right it should come in, either amongst the anecdotes of my uncle Toby’s amours with widow Wadman, in which corporal Trim was no mean actor--or else in the middle of his and my uncle Toby’s campaigns on the bowling-green--for it will do very well in either place; --but then if I reserve it for either of those parts of my story ----I ruin the story I’m upon; ----and if I tell it here --I anticipate matters, and ruin it there.

--What would your worships have me to do in this case?

--Tell it, Mr. Shandy, by all means. --You are a fool, Tristram, if you do.

O ye powers! (for powers ye are, and great ones too)--which enable mortal man to tell a story worth the hearing------that kindly shew him, where he is to begin it--and where he is to end it----what he is to put into it----and what he is to leave out--how much of it he is to cast into a shade--and whereabouts he is to throw his light! --Ye, who preside over this vast empire of biographical freebooters, and see how many scrapes and plunges your subjects hourly fall into; ----will you do one thing?

I beg and beseech you (in case you will do nothing better for us) that wherever in any part of your dominions it so falls out, that three several roads meet in one point, as they have done just here----that at least you set up a guide-post in the centre of them, in mere charity, to direct an uncertain devil which of the three he is to take.

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Chapter XXIV

Tho’ the shock my uncle Toby received the year after the demolition of Dunkirk, in his affair with widow Wadman, had fixed him in a resolution never more to think of the sex--or of aught which belonged to it; --yet corporal Trim had made no such bargain with himself. Indeed in my uncle Toby’s case there was a strange and unaccountable concurrence of circumstances, which insensibly drew him in, to lay siege to that fair and strong citadel. ----In Trim’s case there was a concurrence of nothing in the world, but of him and Bridget in the kitchen; --though in truth, the love and veneration he bore his master was such, and so fond was he of imitating him in all he did, that had my uncle Toby employed his time and genius in tagging of points ----I am persuaded the honest corporal would have laid down his arms, and followed his example with pleasure. When therefore my uncle Toby sat down before the mistress--corporal Trim incontinently took ground before the maid.

Now, my dear friend Garrick, whom I have so much cause to esteem and honour--(why, or wherefore, ’tis no matter)--can it escape your penetration --I defy it--that so many playwrights, and opificers of chit-chat have ever since been working upon Trim’s and my uncle Toby’s pattern. ----I care not what Aristotle, or Pacuvius, or Bossu, or Ricaboni say--(though I never read one of them)----there is not a greater difference between a single-horse chair and madam Pompadour’s vis-à-vis; than betwixt a single amour, and an amour thus nobly doubled, and going upon all four, prancing throughout a grand drama ----Sir, a simple, single, silly affair of that kind--is quite lost in five acts; --but that is neither here nor there.

After a series of attacks and repulses in a course of nine months on my uncle Toby’s quarter, a most minute account of every particular of which shall be given in its proper place, my uncle Toby, honest man! found it necessary to draw off his forces and raise the siege somewhat indignantly.

Corporal Trim, as I said, had made no such bargain either with himself----or with any one else----the fidelity however of his heart not suffering him to go into a house which his master had forsaken with disgust----he contented himself with turning his part of the siege into a blockade; --that is, he kept others off; --for though he never after went to the house, yet he never met Bridget in the village, but he would either nod or wink, or smile, or look kindly at her--or (as circumstances directed) he would shake her by the hand--or ask her lovingly how she did--or would give her a ribbon--and now-and-then, though never but when it could be done with decorum, would give Bridget a--

Precisely in this situation, did these things stand for five years; that is, from the demolition of Dunkirk in the year 13, to the latter end of my uncle Toby’s campaign in the year 18, which was about six or seven weeks before the time I’m speaking of. ----When Trim, as his custom was, after he had put my uncle Toby to bed, going down one moonshiny night to see that everything was right at his fortifications----in the lane separated from the bowling-green with flowering shrubs and holly--he espied his Bridget.

As the corporal thought there was nothing in the world so well worth shewing as the glorious works which he and my uncle Toby had made, Trim courteously and gallantly took her by the hand, and led her in: this was not done so privately, but that the foul-mouth’d trumpet of Fame carried it from ear to ear, till at length it reach’d my father’s, with this untoward circumstance along with it, that my uncle Toby’s curious drawbridge, constructed and painted after the Dutch fashion, and which went quite across the ditch--was broke down, and somehow or other crushed all to pieces that very night.

My father, as you have observed, had no great esteem for my uncle Toby’s hobby-horse, he thought it the most ridiculous horse that ever gentleman mounted; and indeed unless my uncle Toby vexed him about it, could never think of it once, without smiling at it----so that it could never get lame or happen any mischance, but it tickled my father’s imagination beyond measure; but this being an accident much more to his humour than any one which had yet befall’n it, it proved an inexhaustible fund of entertainment to him. ----Well----but dear Toby! my father would say, do tell me seriously how this affair of the bridge happened. ----How can you tease me so much about it? my uncle Toby would reply --I have told it you twenty times, word for word as Trim told it me. --Prithee, how was it then, corporal? my father would cry, turning to Trim. --It was a mere misfortune, an’ please your honour; ----I was shewing Mrs. Bridget our fortifications, and in going too near the edge of the fosse, I unfortunately slipp’d in ----Very well, Trim! my father would cry----(smiling mysteriously, and giving a nod--but without interrupting him)----and being link’d fast, an’ please your honour, arm in arm with Mrs. Bridget, I dragg’d her after me, by means of which she fell backwards soss against the bridge----and Trim’s foot (my uncle Toby would cry, taking the story out of his mouth) getting into the cuvette, he tumbled full against the bridge too. --It was a thousand to one, my uncle Toby would add, that the poor fellow did not break his leg. ------Ay truly, my father would say---- a limb is soon broke, brother Toby, in such encounters. ----And so, an’ please your honour, the bridge, which your honour knows was a very slight one, was broke down betwixt us, and splintered all to pieces.

At other times, but especially when my uncle Toby was so unfortunate as to say a syllable about cannons, bombs, or petards--my father would exhaust all the stores of his eloquence (which indeed were very great) in a panegyric upon the BATTERING-RAMS of the ancients--the VINEA which Alexander made use of at the siege of Troy. --He would tell my uncle Toby of the CATAPULTÆ of the Syrians, which threw such monstrous stones so many hundred feet, and shook the strongest bulwarks from their very foundation: --he would go on and describe the wonderful mechanism of the BALLISTA which Marcellinus makes so much rout about! --the terrible effects of the PYROBOLI, which cast fire; ----the danger of the TEREBRA and SCORPIO, which cast javelins. ----But what are these, would he say, to the destructive machinery of corporal Trim? ----Believe me, brother Toby, no bridge, or bastion, or sally-port, that ever was constructed in this world, can hold out against such artillery.

My uncle Toby would never attempt any defence against the force of this ridicule, but that of redoubling the vehemence of smoaking his pipe; in doing which, he raised so dense a vapour one night after supper, that it set my father, who was a little phthisical, into a suffocating fit of violent coughing: my uncle Toby leap’d up without feeling the pain upon his groin--and, with infinite pity, stood beside his brother’s chair, tapping his back with one hand, and holding his head with the other, and from time to time wiping his eyes with a clean cambrick handkerchief, which he pulled out of his pocket. ----The affectionate and endearing manner in which my uncle Toby did these little offices--cut my father thro’ his reins, for the pain he had just been giving him. ----May my brains be knock’d out with a battering-ram or a catapulta, I care not which, quoth my father to himself--if ever I insult this worthy soul more!

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Chapter XXV

The draw-bridge being held irreparable, Trim was ordered directly to set about another------but not upon the same model: for cardinal Alberoni’s intrigues at that time being discovered, and my uncle Toby rightly foreseeing that a flame would inevitably break out betwixt Spain and the Empire, and that the operations of the ensuing campaign must in all likelihood be either in Naples or Sicily----he determined upon an Italian bridge--(my uncle Toby, by the bye, was not far out of his conjectures)----but my father, who was infinitely the better politician, and took the lead as far of my uncle Toby in the cabinet, as my uncle Toby took it of him in the field------convinced him, that if the king of Spain and the Emperor went together by the ears, England and France and Holland must, by force of their pre-engagements, all enter the lists too; ----and if so, he would say, the combatants, brother Toby, as sure as we are alive, will fall to it again, pell-mell, upon the old prizefighting stage of Flanders; --then what will you do with your Italian bridge?

--We will go on with it then upon the old model, cried my uncle Toby.

When Corporal Trim had about half finished it in that style----my uncle Toby found out a capital defect in it, which he had never thoroughly considered before. It turned, it seems, upon hinges at both ends of it, opening in the middle, one half of which turning to one side of the fosse, and the other to the other; the advantage of which was this, that by dividing the weight of the bridge into two equal portions, it impowered my uncle Toby to raise it up or let it down with the end of his crutch, and with one hand, which, as his garrison was weak, was as much as he could well spare--but the disadvantages of such a construction were insurmountable; ----for by this means, he would say, I leave one half of my bridge in my enemy’s possession----and pray of what use is the other?

The natural remedy for this was, no doubt, to have his bridge fast only at one end with hinges, so that the whole might be lifted up together, and stand bolt upright------but that was rejected for the reason given above.

For a whole week after he was determined in his mind to have one of that particular construction which is made to draw back horizontally, to hinder a passage; and to thrust forwards again to gain a passage--of which sorts your worship might have seen three famous ones at Spires before its destruction--and one now at Brisac, if I mistake not; --but my father advising my uncle Toby, with great earnestness, to have nothing more to do with thrusting bridges--and my uncle foreseeing moreover that it would but perpetuate the memory of the Corporal’s misfortune--he changed his mind for that of the marquis d’Hôpital’s invention, which the younger Bernouilli has so well and learnedly described, as your worships may see------Act. Erud. Lips. an. 1695--to these a lead weight is an eternal balance, and keeps watch as well as a couple of centinels, inasmuch as the construction of them was a curve line approximating to a cycloid------if not a cycloid itself.

My uncle Toby understood the nature of a parabola as well as any man in England--but was not quite such a master of the cycloid; ----he talked however about it every day----the bridge went not forwards. ----We’ll ask somebody about it, cried my uncle Toby to Trim.

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Chapter XXVI

When Trim came in and told my father, that Dr. Slop was in the kitchen, and busy in making a bridge--my uncle Toby----the affair of the jack-boots having just then raised a train of military ideas in his brain----took it instantly for granted that Dr. Slop was making a model of the marquis d’Hôpital’s bridge. ----’Tis very obliging in him, quoth my uncle Toby; --pray give my humble service to Dr. Slop, Trim, and tell him I thank him heartily.

Had my uncle Toby’s head been a Savoyard’s box, and my father peeping in all the time at one end of it----it could not have given him a more distinct conception of the operations of my uncle Toby’s imagination, than what he had; so, notwithstanding the catapulta and battering-ram, and his bitter imprecation about them, he was just beginning to triumph----

When Trim’s answer, in an instant, tore the laurel from his brows, and twisted it to pieces.

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Chapter XXVII

----This unfortunate draw-bridge of yours, quoth my father ----God bless your honour, cried Trim, ’tis a bridge for master’s nose. ----In bringing him into the world with his vile instruments, he has crushed his nose, Susannah says, as flat as a pancake to his face, and he is making a false bridge with a piece of cotton and a thin piece of whalebone out of Susannah’s stays, to raise it up.

----Lead me, brother Toby, cried my father, to my room this instant.

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Chapter XXVIII

From the first moment I sat down to write my life for the amusement of the world, and my opinions for its instruction, has a cloud insensibly been gathering over my father. ----A tide of little evils and distresses has been setting in against him. --Not one thing, as he observed himself, has gone right: and now is the storm thicken’d and going to break, and pour down full upon his head.

I enter upon this part of my story in the most pensive and melancholy frame of mind that ever sympathetic breast was touched with. ----My nerves relax as I tell it. ----Every line I write, I feel an abatement of the quickness of my pulse, and of that careless alacrity with it, which every day of my life prompts me to say and write a thousand things I should not. ----And this moment that I last dipp’d my pen into my ink, I could not help taking notice what a cautious air of sad composure and solemnity there appear’d in my manner of doing it. ----Lord! how different from the rash jerks and hair-brain’d squirts thou art wont, Tristram, to transact it with in other humours--dropping thy pen----spurting thy ink about thy table and thy books--as if thy pen and thy ink, thy books and furniture cost thee nothing!

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Chapter XXIX

----I won’t go about to argue the point with you--’tis so----and I am persuaded of it, madam, as much as can be, “That both man and woman bear pain or sorrow (and, for aught I know, pleasure too) best in a horizontal position.”

The moment my father got up into his chamber, he threw himself prostrate across the bed in the wildest disorder imaginable, but at the same time in the most lamentable attitude of a man borne down with sorrows, that ever the eye of pity dropp’d a tear for. ----The palm of his right hand, as he fell upon the bed, receiving his forehead, and covering the greatest part of both his eyes, gently sunk down with his head (his elbow giving way backwards) till his nose touch’d the quilt; ----his left arm hung insensible over the side of the bed, his knuckles reclining upon the handle of the chamber-pot, which peep’d out beyond the valance--his right leg (his left being drawn up towards his body) hung half over the side of the bed, the edge of it pressing upon his shin-bone --He felt it not. A fix’d, inflexible sorrow took possession of every line of his face. --He sigh’d once----heaved his breast often--but uttered not a word.

An old set-stitch’d chair, valanced and fringed around with party-coloured worsted bobs, stood at the bed’s head, opposite to the side where my father’s head reclined. --My uncle Toby sat him down in it.

Before an affliction is digested--consolation ever comes too soon; --and after it is digested--it comes too late: so that you see, madam, there is but a mark between these two, as fine almost as a hair, for a comforter to take aim at: my uncle Toby was always either on this side, or on that of it, and would often say, he believed in his heart he could as soon hit the longitude; for this reason, when he sat down in the chair, he drew the curtain a little forwards, and having a tear at every one’s service----he pull’d out a cambrick handkerchief----gave a low sigh----but held his peace.

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Chapter XXX

----“All is not gain that is got into the purse.” --So that notwithstanding my father had the happiness of reading the oddest books in the universe, and had moreover, in himself, the oddest way of thinking that ever man in it was bless’d with, yet it had this drawback upon him after all------that it laid him open to some of the oddest and most whimsical distresses; of which this particular one, which he sunk under at present, is as strong an example as can be given.

No doubt, the breaking down of the bridge of a child’s nose, by the edge of a pair of forceps--however scientifically applied--would vex any man in the world, who was at so much pains in begetting a child, as my father was--yet it will not account for the extravagance of his affliction, nor will it justify the unchristian manner he abandoned and surrendered him self up to.

To explain this, I must leave him upon the bed for half an hour--and my uncle Toby in his old fringed chair sitting beside him.

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Chapter XXXI

----I think it a very unreasonable demand--cried my great-grandfather, twisting up the paper, and throwing it upon the table. ----By this account, madam, you have but two thousand pounds fortune, and not a shilling more--and you insist upon having three hundred pounds a year jointure for it.------

--“Because,” replied my great-grandmother, “you have little or no nose, Sir.”--

Now before I venture to make use of the word Nose a second time--to avoid all confusion in what will be said upon it, in this interesting part of my story, it may not be amiss to explain my own meaning, and define, with all possible exactness and precision, what I would willingly be understood to mean by the term: being of opinion, that ’tis owing to the negligence and perverseness of writers in despising this precaution, and to nothing else----that all the polemical writings in divinity are not as clear and demonstrative as those upon a Will o’ the Wisp, or any other sound part of philosophy, and natural pursuit; in order to which, what have you to do, before you set out, unless you intend to go puzzling on to the day of judgment----but to give the world a good definition, and stand to it, of the main word you have most occasion for----changing it, Sir, as you would a guinea, into small coin? --which done--let the father of confusion puzzle you, if he can; or put a different idea either into your head, or your reader’s head, if he knows how.

In books of strict morality and close reasoning, such as this I am engaged in--the neglect is inexcusable; and Heaven is witness, how the world has revenged itself upon me for leaving so many openings to equivocal strictures--and for depending so much as I have done, all along, upon the cleanliness of my readers’ imaginations.

----Here are two senses, cried Eugenius, as we walk’d along, pointing with the forefinger of his right hand to the word Crevice, in the one hundred and seventy-eighth page of the first volume of this book of books; ------here are two senses--quoth he --And here are two roads, replied I, turning short upon him----a dirty and a clean one----which shall we take? --The clean, by all means, replied Eugenius. Eugenius, said I, stepping before him, and laying my hand upon his breast----to define--is to distrust. ----Thus I triumph’d over Eugenius; but I triumph’d over him as I always do, like a fool. ----’Tis my comfort, however, I am not an obstinate one: therefore

I define a nose as follows--intreating only beforehand, and beseeching my readers, both male and female, of what age, complexion, and condition soever, for the love of God and their own souls, to guard against the temptations and suggestions of the devil, and suffer him by no art or wile to put any other ideas into their minds, than what I put into my definition --For by the word Nose, throughout all this long chapter of noses, and in every other part of my work, where the word Nose occurs --I declare, by that word I mean a nose, and nothing more, or less.

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Chapter XXXII

----“Because,” quoth my great-grandmother, repeating the words again-- “you have little or no nose, Sir.”------

S’death! cried my great-grandfather, clapping his hand upon his nose, --’tis not so small as that comes to; ----’tis a full inch longer than my father’s. --Now, my great-grandfather’s nose was for all the world like unto the noses of all the men, women, and children, whom Pantagruel found dwelling upon the island of ENNASIN. ------By the way, if you would know the strange way of getting a-kin amongst so flat-nosed a people----you must read the book; ----find it out yourself, you never can.----

--’Twas shaped, Sir, like an ace of clubs.

--’Tis a full inch, continued my grandfather, pressing up the ridge of his nose with his finger and thumb; and repeating his assertion----’tis a full inch longer, madam, than my father’s ----You must mean your uncle’s, replied my great-grandmother.

------My great-grandfather was convinced. --He untwisted the paper, and signed the article.

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Chapter XXXIII

----What an unconscionable jointure, my dear, do we pay out of this small estate of ours, quoth my grandmother to my grandfather.

My father, replied my grandfather, had no more nose, my dear, saving the mark, than there is upon the back of my hand.

--Now, you must know, that my great-grandmother outlived my grandfather twelve years; so that my father had the jointure to pay, a hundred and fifty pounds half-yearly--(on Michaelmas and Lady-day), --during all that time.

No man discharged pecuniary obligations with a better grace than my father. ------And as far as a hundred pounds went, he would fling it upon the table, guinea by guinea, with that spirited jerk of an honest welcome, which generous souls, and generous souls only, are able to fling down money: but as soon as ever he enter’d upon the odd fifty--he generally gave a loud Hem! rubb’d the side of his nose leisurely with the flat part of his fore finger----inserted his hand cautiously betwixt his head and the cawl of his wig--look’d at both sides of every guinea as he parted with it----and seldom could get to the end of the fifty pounds, without pulling out his handkerchief, and wiping his temples.

Defend me, gracious Heaven! from those persecuting spirits who make no allowances for these workings within us. --Never --O never may I lay down in their tents, who cannot relax the engine, and feel pity for the force of education, and the prevalence of opinions long derived from ancestors!

For three generations at least this tenet in favour of long noses had gradually been taking root in our family. ------TRADITION was all along on its side, and INTEREST was every half-year stepping in to strengthen it; so that the whimsicality of my father’s brain was far from having the whole honour of this, as it had of almost all his other strange notions. --For in a great measure he might be said to have suck’d this in with his mother’s milk. He did his part however. ----If education planted the mistake (in case it was one) my father watered it, and ripened it to perfection.

He would often declare, in speaking his thoughts upon the subject, that he did not conceive how the greatest family in England could stand it out against an uninterrupted succession of six or seven short noses. --And for the contrary reason, he would generally add, That it must be one of the greatest problems in civil life, where the same number of long and jolly noses, following one another in a direct line, did not raise and hoist it up into the best vacancies in the kingdom. ------He would often boast that the Shandy family rank’d very high in King Harry the VIIIth’s time, but owed its rise to no state engine--he would say--but to that only; ----but that, like other families, he would add----it had felt the turn of the wheel, and had never recovered the blow of my great-grandfather’s nose. ----It was an ace of clubs indeed, he would cry, shaking his head--and as vile a one for an unfortunate family as ever turn’d up trumps.

------Fair and softly, gentle reader! ------where is thy fancy carrying thee? ----If there is truth in man, by my great-grandfather’s nose, I mean the external organ of smelling, or that part of man which stands prominent in his face----and which painters say, in good jolly noses and well-proportioned faces, should comprehend a full third----that is, measured downwards from the setting on of the hair.----

----What a life of it has an author, at this pass!

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Chapter XXXIV

It is a singular blessing, that nature has form’d the mind of man with the same happy backwardness and renitency against conviction, which is observed in old dogs-- “of not learning new tricks.”

What a shuttlecock of a fellow would the greatest philosopher that ever existed be whisk’d into at once, did he read such books, and observe such facts, and think such thoughts, as would eternally be making him change sides!

Now, my father, as I told you last year, detested all this --He pick’d up an opinion, Sir, as a man in a state of nature picks up an apple. --It becomes his own--and if he is a man of spirit, he would lose his life rather than give it up.

I am aware that Didius, the great civilian, will contest this point; and cry out against me, Whence comes this man’s right to this apple? ex confesso, he will say--things were in a state of nature --The apple, as much Frank’s apple as John’s. Pray, Mr. Shandy, what patent has he to shew for it? and how did it begin to be his? was it, when he set his heart upon it? or when he gathered it? or when he chew’d it? or when he roasted it? or when he peel’d, or when he brought it home? or when he digested? --or when he----? ----For ’tis plain, Sir, if the first picking up of the apple, made it not his--that no subsequent act could.

Brother Didius, Tribonius will answer--(now Tribonius the civilian and church lawyer’s beard being three inches and a half and three eighths longer than Didius his beard --I’m glad he takes up the cudgels for me, so I give myself no farther trouble about the answer). --Brother Didius, Tribonius will say, it is a decreed case, as you may find it in the fragments of Gregorius and Hermogines’s codes, and in all the codes from Justinian’s down to the codes of Louis and Des Eaux --That the sweat of a man’s brows, and the exsudations of a man’s brains, are as much a man’s own property as the breeches upon his backside; --which said exsudations, &c., being dropp’d upon the said apple by the labour of finding it, and picking it up; and being moreover indissolubly wasted, and as indissolubly annex’d, by the picker up, to the thing pick’d up, carried home, roasted, peel’d, eaten, digested, and so on; ----’tis evident that the gatherer of the apple, in so doing, has mix’d up something which was his own, with the apple which was not his own, by which means he has acquired a property; --or, in other words, the apple is John’s apple.

By the same learned chain of reasoning my father stood up for all his opinions; he had spared no pains in picking them up, and the more they lay out of the common way, the better still was his title. ----No mortal claimed them; they had cost him moreover as much labour in cooking and digesting as in the case above, so that they might well and truly be said to be of his own goods and chattles. --Accordingly he held fast by ’em, both by teeth and claws--would fly to whatever he could lay his hands on--and, in a word, would intrench and fortify them round with as many circumvallations and breast-works, as my uncle Toby would a citadel.

There was one plaguy rub in the way of this----the scarcity of materials to make anything of a defence with, in case of a smart attack; inasmuch as few men of great genius had exercised their parts in writing books upon the subject of great noses: by the trotting of my lean horse, the thing is incredible! and I am quite lost in my understanding, when I am considering what a treasure of precious time and talents together has been wasted upon worse subjects--and how many millions of books in all languages, and in all possible types and bindings, have been fabricated upon points not half so much tending to the unity and peace-making of the world. What was to be had, however, he set the greater store by; and though my father would oft-times sport with my uncle Toby’s library--which, by the bye, was ridiculous enough--yet at the very same time he did it, he collected every book and treatise which had been systematically wrote upon noses, with as much care as my honest uncle Toby had done those upon military architecture. ----’Tis true, a much less table would have held them--but that was not thy transgression, my dear uncle.--

Here----but why here----rather than in any other part of my story ----I am not able to tell: ------but here it is------my heart stops me to pay to thee, my dear uncle Toby, once for all, the tribute I owe thy goodness. ----Here let me thrust my chair aside, and kneel down upon the ground, whilst I am pouring forth the warmest sentiment of love for thee, and veneration for the excellency of thy character, that ever virtue and nature kindled in a nephew’s bosom. ----Peace and comfort rest for evermore upon thy head! --Thou enviedst no man’s comforts----insultedst no man’s opinions ----Thou blackenedst no man’s character--devouredst no man’s bread: gently, with faithful Trim behind thee, didst thou amble round the little circle of thy pleasures, jostling no creature in thy way: --for each one’s sorrow thou hadst a tear, --for each man’s need, thou hadst a shilling.

Whilst I am worth one, to pay a weeder--thy path from thy door to thy bowling-green shall never be grown up. ----Whilst there is a rood and a half of land in the Shandy family, thy fortifications, my dear uncle Toby, shall never be demolish’d.

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Chapter XXXV

My father’s collection was not great, but to make amends, it was curious; and consequently he was some time in making it; he had the great good fortune however, to set off well, in getting Bruscambille’s prologue upon long noses, almost for nothing--for he gave no more for Bruscambille than three half-crowns; owing indeed to the strong fancy which the stall-man saw my father had for the book the moment he laid his hands upon it. ----There are not three Bruscambilles in Christendom--said the stall-man, except what are chain’d up in the libraries of the curious. My father flung down the money as quick as lightning----took Bruscambille into his bosom----hied home from Piccadilly to Coleman-street with it, as he would have hied home with a treasure, without taking his hand once off from Bruscambille all the way.

To those who do not yet know of which gender Bruscambille is------inasmuch as a prologue upon long noses might easily be done by either------’twill be no objection against the simile--to say, That when my father got home, he solaced himself with Bruscambille after the manner in which, ’tis ten to one, your worship solaced yourself with your first mistress------that is, from morning even unto night: which, by the bye, how delightful soever it may prove to the inamorato--is of little or no entertainment at all to by-standers. ----Take notice, I go no farther with the simile--my father’s eye was greater than his appetite--his zeal greater than his knowledge--he cool’d--his affections became divided----he got hold of Prignitz--purchased Scroderus, Andrea Paræus, Bouchet’s Evening Conferences, and above all, the great and learned Hafen Slawkenbergius; of which, as I shall have much to say by and by --I will say nothing now.

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Chapter XXXVI

Of all the tracts my father was at the pains to procure and study in support of his hypothesis, there was not any one wherein he felt a more cruel disappointment at first, than in the celebrated dialogue between Pamphagus and Cocles, written by the chaste pen of the great and venerable Erasmus, upon the various uses and seasonable applications of long noses. ------Now don’t let Satan, my dear girl, in this chapter, take advantage of any one spot of rising ground to get astride of your imagination, if you can any ways help it; or if he is so nimble as to slip on--let me beg of you, like an unback’d filly, to frisk it, to squirt it, to jump it, to rear it, to bound it--and to kick it, with long kicks and short kicks, till, like Tickletoby’s mare, you break a strap or a crupper and throw his worship into the dirt. --You need not kill him.--

--And pray who was Tickletoby’s mare? --’tis just as discreditable and unscholarlike a question, Sir, as to have asked what year (ab. urb. con.) the second Punic war broke out. --Who was Tickletoby’s mare? ----Read, read, read, read, my unlearned reader! read--or by the knowledge of the great saint Paraleipomenon --I tell you before-hand, you had better throw down the book at once; for without much reading, by which your reverence knows I mean much knowledge, you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motly emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unravel the many opinions, transactions, and truths which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one.

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