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TRISTRAM SHANDY 
 
MORLETS UNIVERSAL LIBRARY. 
 
 1. Sheridan's Plays, 
 
 2. Playt from MoHire, By 
 
 English Dramatists. 
 
 3. Marlow/s Faustus and 
 
 Goethe's Faust. 
 
 4. Chronicle of the Cid, 
 
 5 . Rabelais' Garganhia and the 
 
 Heroic Deedi 0/ PantagrueL 
 
 6. MachiavelWs Prince, 
 
 7. Bacon's Essays, 
 
 8. Defois Journal of the 
 
 Plague Year. 
 
 9. Locke on Civil Government 
 
 and FilnteT^s **Patriarcha.'* 
 I a Butler's A nalogy ofRelig ion, 
 
 11. Dry den's Virgil. 
 
 12. Scotfs Demonology and 
 
 Witchcraft. 
 
 13. Heryick's Hesperides, 
 
 14. Coleridge's Table- Talk, 
 
 15. Boccaccio's Decameron, 
 
 16. Sternis Tristram Shandy. 
 
 17. Chapman's Homers Iliad. 
 
 18. MedicBval Tales, 
 
 19. Voltaire's Candide^ and 
 
 yohnson's Fa-sselas. 
 
 20. Jonson's Plays and Poems, 
 
 21. Hobbes's Leviathan. 
 
 22. Samuel Butler's Hudibras, 
 23 /^«fl!/ Commonwealths. 
 
 24. Cavendish's Life of PVolscy, 
 25 & 26. .Z><7« Quixote. I 
 
 27. Burlesque Plays and Poems, \ 
 
 28. Dante's Divine Comedy. j 
 
 Longfellow's Translation, I 
 
 29. Goldsmith's Vicar of Wake- \ 
 
 fields Plays, and Poems. 1 
 
 30. Fables and Proverbs from 
 
 the Sanskrit. {Hitopadesa.) 
 
 31. Lamb's Essays of EHa, 1 
 
 32. The History of Ihomas 
 
 Elhvood. \ 
 
 33. Emerson's Essays, <^-^c, 
 
 34. Southey's Life of Nelson. \ 
 ** Mijrvela of clear type and general 
 
 35. De Quincey*s Confessions 
 
 of an Opiutn-Eatety &*c. 
 
 36. Stories of Ireland, By Miss 
 
 Edgeworth. 
 
 37. Frere's Aristophanes: 
 
 AckarnianSy Knights ^ Birds, 
 
 38. Burke's Speeches and Letters. 
 
 39. Thomas h Kempis, 
 
 40. Popular Songs of Ireland, 
 
 41. Potter's Alschylus, 
 
 42. Goethe's Faust: Part II, 
 
 Anster's Translation. 
 
 43. Famous Pamphlets, 
 
 44. Ff-ancklin's Sophocles, 
 
 45. M, G, Lewis s Tales oj 
 
 Terror and Wonder. 
 
 46. Vestiges of the Natural 
 
 History of Creation, 
 
 47. Drayton's Barons^ Wars, 
 
 Nytnphidiay dr^c. 
 
 48. Cobbetfs Advice to Young 
 
 Men. 
 
 49. The Banquet of Dante, 
 
 50. Walker's Original, 
 
 51. Schiller's Poems and 
 
 Ballads. 
 
 52. Peele's Plays and Poems, 
 
 53. Harrington's Oceana, 
 
 54. Euripides : Alcestis and 
 
 other Plays, 
 
 55. Praed's Essays, 
 
 56. Traditional Idles, 
 
 Allan Cunningham. 
 
 57. Hooker's Ecclesiastical 
 
 Polity. Books I.-IV. 
 
 58. Euripides: The Bacchanals 
 
 and- other Plays, 
 
 59. Izaak Walton's Lives, 
 
 60. Aristotle's Politics. 
 
 61. Euripides: Hecuba ana 
 
 otiur Plays. 
 
 62. Rabelais — Sequel to Panta- 
 gmel. 
 
 63. A Miscellany, 
 
 neatness."— Z>«//y Telegraph. 
 
THE 
 
 LIFE AND OPINIONS 
 
 ', OF 
 
 TRISTRAM SHANDY 
 
 GENTLEMAN 
 
 BY 
 
 LAURENCE STERNE 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HENRY MORLE\ 
 
 LL.D., LATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AT 
 UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON 
 
 LONDON: GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS, Ltd. 
 NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON AND CO. 
 
nEPlAClU 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Laurence Sterne was born in Clonmel Barracks on the 24th of November 17x3. lie 
 died in Bond Street lodgings on the i8th of March 1768, in the fifty-fifth year of an un- 
 healthy life. Roger Sterne, his father, died a lieutenant in the army ; but Laurence was 
 bred to the Church, that being a profession in which his family could look for patronage 
 enough to secure his maintenance ; for his great-grandfather was Richard Sterne, who 
 died Archbishop of York at the age of 87, thirty years before Laurence Was born. Sterne's 
 ^ grandfather, the eldest of the Archbishop's thirteen children, was Simon Sterne, who had 
 .' married Mary Jaques, heiress of Elvington, five miles from York. He became the fatlier 
 of seven children, and died ten years before Laurence's birth. His eldest son was 
 , Richard, who, on his father's death, succeeded to Elvington, and became head of thfc 
 family. Simon's second son was Jaques, who took orders, and lived to become an Arch- 
 deacon. He died in 1759. His seventh child was Roger Sterne, Laurence's father. 
 
 In that year of Queen Anne's reign when Steele and Addison were producing TAe 
 spectator^ Roger Sterne, then an ensign, whose daily pay was three shillings and two- 
 » pence-halfpenny, married Agnes, widow of a Captain Hebert, and daughter of Mr. 
 Nuttall, an Irish army sutler. Their first child, Mary, was born at Lisle, in July 1712. Their 
 second child, Laurence, was born, as before said, in Clonmel Barracks, on the 24th of 
 November 1713. That being the year of the Peace of Utrecht, all regiments which had 
 been raised since the Peace of Ryswick in 1697, excepting two, were broken. The 34th 
 Foot, to which Ensign Roger Sterne belonged, was thus broken, and Roger Sterne went 
 to his family in Yorkshire. Laurence Sterne wrote afterwards of his father, for his 
 daughter Lydia, " My father was a little smart man — active to the last degree in all 
 exercises — most patient of fatigue and disappointments, of which it pleased God to give 
 him full measure. He was in temper somewhat rapid and hasty, but of a kindly, sweet 
 disposition, void of all designs, and so innocent in his own intentions that he suspected no 
 one ; so that you might have cheated him ten times in a day, if nine had not been suf- 
 ficient for your purpose." 
 
 After a few months the 34th Foot was established again, and Ensign Sterne, with his 
 wife and her two infant children, joined his regiment at Dublin in the winter of 1714, at 
 the beginning of the reign of George the First. The regiment moved presently to Exeter, 
 where a third child was born ; he was named Joram. After about a year in barracks at 
 Exeter, the regiment returned to Dubhn. Ensign Sterne and his family had lived in bar- 
 racks until now, when they furnished a house and remained in it for three years, till 1719, 
 when Laurence was six years old, Roger Sterne was then ordered with his regiment to 
 join the Vigo expedition. Joram died of small-pox, and a girl, Anne, was bom. Mother 
 and children remained in the Isle of Wight till the father's return, then went to Wicklow 
 Barracks, where, in 1720, another son was bom ; he was named Devisher, For six 
 months the family now lived with a relation of Mrs. Sterne's, who was Vicar of Anamoe, 
 seven miles from Wicklow. In 1721 they were moved to Dublin, and spent a year in 
 barracks there, where the child Anne died. They moved next to MuUingar, and then to 
 Wicklow again, where the child Devisher, who had been left at a farmhouse, died ; and 
 in 1723 another child was born, and was named Susan, and died. In 1724 another was 
 born, who was named Catherine, and lived. 
 
 The surviving children of the family were the two eldest and the youngest— Mary, 
 Laurence, Catherine. Mary married a merchant of Dublin, who ill-used her, became 
 bankrupt, and, says Sterne, " left my poor sister to shift for herself, which she was able 
 to do but for a few mouths, for she went to a friend's house in the country, and died of a 
 broken heart." But Catherine survived her brother Laurence. 
 
 In 1725, Roger Sterne obtained leave of absence to take his son Laurence, then aged 
 eleven or twelve, to a school at Halifax, where the child would be under the care of his 
 uncle Richard, the head of the family and heir of Alvington, who was then living at 
 Woodhouse, also his property, about a mile and a half out of Halifax. The boy never 
 again saw his father, Roger Sterne was at the siege of Gibraltar in 1727, and then went 
 to Jamaica, where he died of yellow fever in March 1731, when Laurence, between 
 se / -nteen and eighteen years old, was ready to leave the Halifax Free Grammar School, 
 ^i .,j.A.h he had been placed. Recollectigas of bis childhood, and kind memories of hu^ 
 
 M130688'- 
 
6* :/:'."• :..: :- 'if^TRODuCTioist. 
 
 father, gave real tendempss afterwards to many a tovich in " Tristram Shandy *' thai 
 played about Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim. They may be felt also in passages of the 
 story of Le Fevre, although that is said to have included recollections of the son of a 
 Le Fevre, who was among the exiles from France after the Revocation of the Edict of 
 Nantes, and set up a French school at Portarlington. The son, who obtained a commis- 
 sion in the army, is said to have become known to Sterne in his earlier life, and it is 
 observed that Sterne has made his Le Fevre's son a schoolmaster. But let us not omit to 
 consider what must have been the effect on Laurence Sterne himself of a homeless child- 
 hood, in which he was shifted restlessly from barrack to barrack, the comrade of smal?. 
 brothers and sisters of whom three perished under the blight of an unwholesome life. 
 
 Sterne says of himself that " at school he would learn what he pleased, and notoftener 
 than once a fortnight." In 1732 his uncle Richard sent him to Jesus College, Cambridge, 
 and saved expense by entering him as a sizar. While at Cambridge he for the first time 
 spat blood. He was small, thin, of consumptive habit, and the cough that now came 
 stuck to him. He took his B.A. degree, and took Holy Orders ; was ordained deacon 
 in 1736, and priest in August 1738. In the same year, family influence obtained for him 
 the Vicarage of Sutton-on-the-Forest, which was in the gift of the Archbishop of York. 
 His uncle Jaques was Canon Residentiary', Prebendary and Precentor of York Minster, 
 and held also two small rectories in Yorkshire. It was not until 1746 that Canon Sterne 
 became Archdeacon. He had a bachelor house at York in Minster Yard ; and there 
 was also a town-house of Richard Sterne's in Castlegate. So far only as outward 
 circumstances were concerned, the way of life lay plain and easy before Laurence 
 Sterne. In 1740 he proceeded to his M.A. degree. In 1741, after two years' courtship, 
 he married, in his 28th year, Elizabeth, daughter of the Rev. Mr. Lumley, late Rector 
 of Bedal, Staffordshire. The lady had been in ill health, and had been lodging at 
 York. She brought him ;^4o a year, and the further patronage of a friend who would 
 have the gift of some York preferment. Sterne had also the rare gift of genius, and the 
 artist nature in him was perhaps indicated by a taste that he had for playing the 
 bass viol and for drawing. In 1743 the prebendal stall and living of Stillington became 
 vacant, and were given to Sterne by his wife's friend. They added about ^Cso a year 
 to his income. 
 
 It was at this time that the English novel had just broken itself free from the con- 
 ventional forms of chivalrous pastoral romance, in which Pamelas and Parthenissas were 
 all heroines of royal blood. Samuel Richardson had produced in 1740 his story of 
 a Pamela who was only a servant-maid, and Heniy Fielding, who was but six or 
 seven years older than Laurence Sterne, had produced, with iest on the weak point in 
 Richardson's story, his "Joseph Andrews," the first novel of our English master novelist, 
 in 1742. In 1743 followed, among Fielding's " Miscellanies," his " History of the Life 
 of the late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great," a keen satire on false estimates of human 
 glory. 
 
 In Sterne there was frailty of body, and for his mind the springs of health had in his 
 childhood been almost sealed up. He was conscious of the quick movement of 
 his genius, and glad of applause for free sallies of wit. While Fielding's mind, 
 vigorous in health to the last, whatever ihe condition of his body, shaped images of 
 life, expressing the wholesome truths associated with revolt from dead convention and 
 the growing movement towards truer relations between man and man, Sterne often was 
 content to follow the humour of his daj'^, in defiance of convention, sometimes by mere 
 witless eccentricities, and often by witty flights beyond what ordinary men took for the 
 bounds of decency. On the first of October 1745 a daughter was born to him, who 
 was named Lydia, and died next day. At this time Sterne's wit, unknown to the world, 
 had attached him to John Hall, who took from his wife's family the name of 
 Stevenson. Hall Stevenson was five years younger than himself, had been a fellow- 
 commoner at Jesus College, and now lived crazily at Skelton Castle, near Gulsboro', 
 called the place '* Crazy Castle," and estabhshed there a would-be Rabelaisian order of 
 the Monks of Medmenham Abbey. They took for their motto that of an ideal Abbey, 
 through whose monks Rabelais pointed upwards to a higher race of men. But theit 
 minds were low, and could not rise above the gross animal surrounding within which 
 Rabelais set the highest aspirations of his sou). Having John Hall Stevenson for 
 one of his familiar friends, the Reverend Laurence Sterne employed his wit as 
 Yorick in such unseemly trifling as his friend—his Eugenius— had mind enough to 
 praise. So h«i?,?«x Sterne's association of himself with Rabelais, of v/hose mann^ 
 
INTRODUCTION. 7 
 
 ' Tristram Shandy ** contains sundry '(Veak imitations, but in whose mind there were 
 aims and aspirations little known to Sterne. 
 
 Sterne's mother appears to have maintained herself by keeping a school, until she was 
 brought to ruin by the extravagance of her daughter Catherine. Sterne afterwards spoke 
 *f Catherine as " unhappily estranged from me by my uncle's wickedness and her own 
 folly." But in the year before " Tristram Shandy " appeared, a letter of Sterne's shows him 
 to have been busy at York on his mother" . behalf, for he writes, *' I trust my poor mother's 
 affair is by this time ended to our coriitort, and I trust to hers." The sins of omission in 
 Sterne's life were many ; but he did not deserve the sneer at the close of Horace Walpole's 
 note on the position of his mother : " I know from indubitable authority that his mother, who 
 kept a school, having run in debt on account of an extravagant daughter, would h?ve 
 /otted in a gaol if the parents of her scholars had not raised a subscription for her. Her 
 own son had too much sentiment to have any feeling. A dead ass was more important to 
 him than a living mother." 
 
 Sterne's first printed work was a charity sermon preached at York on Good Friday in 
 the year 1747. On the ist of December in that year a dat^hter was again born to him. 
 Again he gave the name of Lydia ; but this Lydia lived. A sermon preached on the 29th 
 of July before the Judges at the York Summer Assizes, was not printed at the time, but 
 was introduced afterwards into ** Tristram Shandy " as the sermon on Conscience read by 
 Corporal Trim. 
 
 In the year 1759, the Rev. Mr. Sterne, aged forty-six, was in love sentimentally with a 
 young French lady, Miss Catherine de Fourmantelle, who was lodging at York with her 
 mother. " I must ever," he said, "have some Dulcinea in my head : it harmonizes the 
 soul." And so he harmonized the soul by talking and writing empty sentiment, after the 
 weaker manner of the sentimentalists who represented in France the emotional form of 
 the reaction of the time, and whose great master was Rousseau, a man but one year 
 older than Sterne. It was between 1747 and 1755 that Rousseau, sentimentally united to 
 the cook-maid Therese Levasseur, sent all his five children to the Foundling Hospital, 
 because he trembled to think how their mother would have spoilt them, or what 
 monsters their mother's family would have made of them. And yet in his " Emile," 
 published in 1762, he thought it a fine sentiment to write, and therefore wrote, " no toils, 
 no poverty, and no respect of men absolve a father from the duty of being himself the 
 educator of his children." The writings of Rousseau, who was, like Sterne, a weak man 
 of fine genius, were a product of the human forces of their time, under the influence of 
 which Rousseau wrote. By his power of expression, he became a source from which like 
 influences spread ; and Sterne s sensitive mind was far more under the influence of Rousseau, 
 and of those free movements of thought in his time to which Rousseau gave intellectual 
 expression, than under the influence of Rabelais, or of those English writers who in his 
 Gwn day found in man the proper study of mankind. To Miss Fourmantelle Sterne 
 wrote, '* I have but one obstacle to my happiness, and what that is you know as well as 
 I." "llxe reverend sentimentalist even speculated on his wife's death by saying, ** God 
 will open a door when we shall some time be much more together." And in Sterne, as 
 in Rousseau, the mainstay of the worst weaknesses was vanity. 
 
 In 1758 there was an ecclesiastical squabble at York. A lawyer. Dr. Topham, held an 
 office in the Cathedral, to which, as a patent place, he claimed for his son the right of suc- 
 cession. Sterne took part in the controversy that arose, and attacked the claim in a 
 pamphlet, withheld from the press, in which the story of the patent place was figured as 
 the story of "A Good Warm Watch Coat" that had hung up for many years m tho 
 church. Dr. Topham appeared in the parable under the name of Trim. At the same 
 time Sterne was beginning to write Tristram Shandy, about the beginning of the year 
 J7S9, ten years after Fielding's "Tom Jones," and in the year of Voltaire's " Candide " 
 and of Johnson's " Rasselas." Indeed, when arranging for publication in two volumes 
 of the part then written, Sterne wrote to Dodsley : " I propose to print a lean edition, 
 in two small volumes of the size of Rasselas, and on the same paper and type, at my 
 own expense, merely to feel the pulse of the world, and that I may know what pnce 
 to set on the remaimng volume from the reception of She first." If the venture succeeded 
 he proposed to furnish a new volume every six months. 
 
 Two small volumes, forming the first instalment of " Tristram Shandy," appeared first at 
 York in 1 759, and were reprinted in London. Their success was immediate, and m March 
 1760, Sterne went to Ix)ndon, took lodgings in Pall Mall, "the genteelest m town," and 
 wrote sentiment to Miss Fourmantelle as " dear, dear Jenny ;" but there are no extant 
 
B INTRODUCTION, 
 
 letters to his wife. He sat to Sir Joshua Reynolds, taking extreme pains to look clever: 
 dined out abundantly; and was, as Horace Walpole then reported of him, "topsy-tunry 
 with success and fame." Warburton gave Sterne the name he sought, ** the English 
 Rabelais. " A new game of cards called ** Tristram Shandy " was presented to the 
 fashionable world ; and Gray the poet wrote, '* one is invited to dinner, where he dines, 
 a fortnight beforehand." Goldsmith, in "The Citizen of the World," condemned the 
 wilful indelicacies of the book, which had no other aim than to excite attention by de- 
 fiance of convention while ingeniously pandering to the corrupt taste of the time. War- 
 burton also ventured to write Sterne a wi.se and kind letter of counsel against them. Sterne 
 had wit and genius given him for higher uses, and ** Tristram Shandy " does not depend 
 for life on its unseemly pages, which are only about a tenth part of the whole. In sweep- 
 ing them out of this edition of the book — and so, for once, taking tithe from a parson — 
 many shrewd turns of wit have doubtless been lost, but there is less disturbed enjoyment 
 of the nine-tenths that remain. 
 
 Sterne supped with the gay and dis.solute Prince Edward, afterwards Duke of York ; 
 announced sermons for publication as '*The Sermons of Mr. Yorick ;" and went back 
 to Yorkshire with a new curacy of Coxwould, about sixteen miles from York, which he 
 now made his home, and where he styled his parsonage house Shandy Hall. 
 
 In January 1761, at the beginning of the reign of George III., vols. iii. and iv. were 
 ready. Sterne came to London to drink flattery, and before coming wrote in comic Latin 
 to his friend. Hall Stevenson, that he was more than ever sick and tired of his wife— 
 fatigatus et (Bgrotus de meo uxore plus quatn unquatn. He returned to Coxwould in July 
 to write more volumes, " unless this vile cough kills me," anxious to be back in London. 
 He was still negligent of his wife : and his daughter Lydia, fourteen years old and in weak 
 health, was copying " Tristram " for him. Before Christmas 1761 he was again in London, 
 and burst a blood-vessel in his lungs. 
 
 On the 2ist of December volumes v. and vi. appeared, containing his story of "Le 
 Fevre." Sterne came to London again to be lionized ; travelled in France in January 
 1762 ; was lionized in Paris without his wife and daughter. Joined by his wife and 
 Lydia in July 1762,— Lydia having "a vile asthma,"— he made an expensive journey to 
 Lyons, Avignon, Toulouse, where they remained while he finished another " Shandy ** 
 volume. Having obtained extended leave from his Bishop, he left Toulouse for 
 Bagnieres, then visited Mar.<:eilles. By October 5, 1763, they were at Montpellier. 
 Being told that the cUmate of Montpellier would not suit him, Sterne became eager 
 again for London. His wife, anxious for Lydia, remained at Montauban. Steine pass- 
 ing through Paris, where he found Hume being lionized, was in London by the end of 
 May. 
 
 In January 1765 appeared volumes vii. and viii. of " Tristram Shandy." He was in 
 London till April, then at Bath ; then sentiment, scandal, cough and spitting of blood- 
 In September Sterne had again to leave England. He passed through France, twice 
 visiting Paris, went to Turin, to Rome, and was back in London, lodging at 41 Old Bond 
 Street, when volume ix. (the last pubHshed) of " Tristram Shandy " appeared. 
 
 A Mrs. Draper had come with weakened health from India with her children, sent by 
 her husband. Sterne weakly sentimentalized with her as Eliza, wrote silly letters, 
 enjoyed silly scandal, again broke a blood-vessel. He was at Coxwould in September, 
 when his wife and daughter returned. They were to winter at York, and return to France 
 in the spring. Again there was spitting of blood, but after Christmas Day Sterne went 
 to l-ondon again leaving his wife and daughter at York. 
 
 On the 37th of February 1768 appeared his " Sentimental Journey." On the 18th of 
 the following March Sterne was found dying in his lodgings by a footman sent to remind him 
 that he was expected at one of the dinner parties to which his vanity had caused him to 
 sacrifice his higher duties as the fool of fashion. He was followed to his grave by two 
 gentlemen in a mourning-coach. His body was then dug up by a resurrectionist, and 
 afterwards recognized on a dissecting-table. He died eleven hundred pounds in debt, 
 and left no will His effects produced only J^^oo. His neglected wife gave up her own 
 £,^0 a year to clear his meraory. But the hat was sent round for the wife and daughter of 
 the Reverend Laurence Sterne at the next York races, and from the sympathies of the 
 sporting world ;^8oo were '«=»«yccted. 
 
 H. M, 
 Augmt 1884. 
 
THE 
 LIFE AND OPINIONS 
 
 OF 
 
 Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. 
 
 VOLUME L 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 On the 5th day of November, 17 18, which to the era fixed on, was as 
 near nine calendar months as any husband could in reason have ex- 
 pected, was I, Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, brought forth into this 
 scurvy and disastrous world of ours. I wish I had been bom in the 
 moon, or in any of the planets (except Jupiter or Saturn), because I 
 never could bear cold weather ; for it could not well have fared worse 
 with me in any of them (though I will not answer for Venus) than it 
 has in this vile dirty planet of ours, which of my conscience, with 
 reverence be it spoken, I take to be made up of the shreds and clippings 
 of the rest ; not but the planet is well enough, provided a man could 
 be bom in it to a great title or to a great estate, or could anyhow con- 
 trive to be called up to public charges and employments of dignity and 
 power ; but that is not my case ; and tlierefore every man will speak of 
 the fair as his own market has gone in it ; for which cause I affirm it 
 over again to be one of the vilest worlds that ever was made ; for I can 
 truly say, that from the first hour I drew my breath in it, to this, that I 
 can now scarce draw it at all, for an asthma I got in skating against the 
 wind in Flanders, I have been the continual sport of what the world 
 calls Fortune, and though I will not wrong her by saying she has ever 
 made me feel the weight of any great and signal evil ; yet with all the 
 good temper in the world, I affirm it of her, that in every stage of my 
 life, and at every turn and comer where she could get fairly at me, the 
 
16 Tristram shandy. [vol. t 
 
 ungracious Duchess has pelted me with a set of as pitiful misadventures 
 and cross accidents as ever small hero sustained. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 In the beginning of the last chapter, I informed you exactly when I 
 was born ; but I did not inform you how. No, that particular was 
 reserved entirely for a chapter by itself ; besides, Sir, as you and I are 
 in a manner perfect strangers to each other, it would not have been 
 proper to have let you into too many circumstances relating to myself 
 at once. You must have a little patience. I have undertaken, you see, 
 to write not only my life, but my opinions also ; hoping and expecting 
 that your knowledge of my character, and of what kind of a mortal I 
 am, by the one, would give you a better relish for the other. As you 
 proceed further with me, the slight acquaintance which is now begin- 
 ning betwixt us, will grow into familiarity ; and that, unless one of us is 
 in fault, will terminate in friendship — O diem prcsclarum! — then 
 nothing which has touched me will be thought trifling in its nature, or 
 tedious in its telling. Therefore, my dear friend and companion, if you 
 should think me somewhat sparing of my narrative on my first setting 
 out, bear with me, and let me go on, and tell my story my own way ; 
 or if I should seem now and then to trifle upon the road, or should 
 sometimes put on a fool's cap with a bell to it for a moment or two as 
 we pass along, don't fly off, but rather courteously give me credit for a 
 little more wisdom than appears on my outside ; and as we jog on, 
 either laugh with me, or at me, or in short, do any thing — only keep 
 your temper. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 In the same village where my father and mother dwelt, dwelt also a 
 thin, upright, motherly, notable, good old body of a midwife, who, with 
 the help of a little plain good sense, and some years full employment in 
 her business, in which she had all along trusted little to her own efforts, 
 and a great deal to those of dame Nature, had acquired in her way no 
 small degree of reputation in the world ; by which word world, need I 
 in this place inform your worship, that I would be understood to mean 
 no more of it than a small circle described upon the circle of the great 
 world of four English miles diameter, or thereabouts, of which the 
 cottage where the good old woman lived is supposed to be the centre. 
 She had been left, it seems, a 'wddow in great distress, with three or four 
 small children, in her forty-seventh year ; and as she was at tliat time a 
 person of decent carriage, grave deportment, a woman moreover of few 
 words, and withal an object of compassion, whose distress and silence 
 under it called out the louder for a friendly lift, the wife of the parson 
 of the parish was touclied with pity ; and havino- often lamented an in- 
 convenience, to which her husband's flock had for many years been 
 exposed, inasmuch as there was no such thing as a midwife of any kind 
 or degree to be got at, let the case have been never so urgent, within 
 less than six or seven long miles riding, which said seven long miles 
 
VOL. I.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. H 
 
 in dark nights and dismal roads, the country thereabouts being nothing 
 but a deep clay, was almost equal to fourteen ; and that in effect was 
 sometimes next to having no midwife at all ; it came into her head that 
 it would be doing as seasonable a kindness to the whole parish, as to 
 the poor creature herself, to get her a little instructed in some of the 
 plain principles of the business in order to set her up in it. As no 
 woman thereabouts was better qualified to execute the plan she had 
 formed than herself, the gentlewoman very charitably undertook it ; 
 and having great influence over the female part of the parish, she 
 found no difficuliy in effecting it to the utmost of her wishes. 
 In tnith, the parson joined his interest with his wife's in the 
 whole affair, and in order to do things as they should be, and give 
 the poor soul as good a title by law to practice as his wife had given 
 by institution, he cheerfully paid the fees for the ordinary's hcense 
 himself, amounting in the whole to the sum of eighteen shillings and 
 four-pence. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 De gustibus 7ton est disptUandum : that is, there is no disputing 
 against Hobby-horses ; and, for my part, I seldom do ; nor could I 
 with any sort of grace had I been an enemy to them at the bottom, for 
 happening at certain intervals and changes of the moon to be iDoth 
 fiddler and painter, according as the fly stings : be it known to you, 
 that I keep a couple of pads myself, upon which in their turns (nor do 
 I care who knows it), I frequently ride out and take the air ; though 
 sometimes, to my shame be it spoken, I take somewhat longer journeys 
 than what a wise man would think altogether right, but the truth 
 is, I am not a wise man ; and besides am a mortal of so little conse- 
 quence in the world, it is not much matter what I do ; so I seldom fret 
 or fume at all or about it : nor does it much disturb my rest when I see 
 such great lords and tall personages as hereafter follow, such, for in- 
 stance, as my Lord A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, 
 and so on, all of a row, mounted upon their several horses ; some with 
 large stirrups, getting on in a more grave and sober pace ; others, on the 
 contrar}'', tucked up to their very chins, with whips across their mouths, 
 scourging and scampering it away like so many little parti- coloured 
 devils astride a mortgage, and as if some of them were resolved to break 
 their necks. So much the better, say I to myself; for in case 
 the worst should happen, the world would make a shift to do 
 excellently well without them ; and for the rest, why, God speed 
 them ; even let them ride on without any opposition from me ; for 
 were their lordships unhorsed this very night, 'tis ten to one but that 
 many of them would be worse mounted by one half before to-morrow 
 morning. 
 
 Not many of these instances therefore can be said to break in upon 
 my rest. But there is an instance, which I own puts me off my guard, 
 and that is when I see one born for great actions, and, what is still more 
 for his honour, whose nature ever inclines him to good ones, when I 
 behold such a one, my lord, like yourself, whose principles and conduct 
 are as generous and noble as his blood, and whom for that reason a 
 
11 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. i. 
 
 corrupt world cannot spare one moment ; when I see such a one, my 
 lord, mounted, though it is but for a minute beyond the time which my 
 love to my country has prescribed to him, and my zeal for his glory 
 wishes, then, my lord, I cease to be a philosopher, and in the first 
 transport of an honest impatience, I wish the Hobbjr-horse with all his 
 fraternity at the devil. 
 
 "My Lord, 
 "I maintain this to be a dedication, notwithstanding its singularity in 
 the three great essentials, of matter, form, and place : I beg, therefore, 
 you will accept it as such, and that you will permit me to lay it with the 
 most respectful humility at your lordship's feet, when you are upon 
 them, which you can be when you please ; and that is, my lord, when- 
 ever there is occasion for it, and I will add to the best purposes too. I 
 have the honour to be, 
 
 " My lord, your lordship's most obedient, 
 
 " And most devoted, and most humble servant, 
 "Tristram Shandy." 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 I SOLEMNLY declare to all mankind that the above dedication was 
 made for no one prince, prelate. Pope, or potentate, duke, marquis, 
 earl, viscount, or baron, of this or any other realm in Christendom ; 
 nor has it yet been hawked about, or offered publicly or privately, 
 directly or indirectly, to any one person or personage, great or small ; but 
 is honestly a true virgin dedication, untried on upon any soul living. 
 
 I labour this point so particularly merely to remove any offence or 
 objection which might arise against it from the manner in which I 
 propose to make the most of it ; which is the putting it up fairly to 
 public sale, which I now do. 
 
 Every author has a way of his own in bringing his points to bear ; 
 for my own part, as I hate chaffering and higgling for a few guineas in 
 a dark entry, I resolved within myself, from the very beginning, to deal 
 squarely and openly with your great folks in this affair, and try whether 
 I should not come off the better by it. 
 
 If therefore there is any one duke, marquis ,earl, viscount, or baron in 
 these His Majesty's dominions who stands in need of a tight, genteel 
 dedication, and whom the above will suit (for, by-the-by, unless it 
 suits in some degree, I will not part with ii), it is much at his service for 
 fifty guineas, which I am positive is twenty guineas less than it ought to 
 be afforded for by any man of genius. 
 
 My lord, if you examine it over again, it is far from being a gross 
 piece of daubing, as some dedications are. The design, your lordship 
 sees, is good, the colouring transparent, the drawing not amiss, or, to 
 speak more like a man of science, and measure my piece in the painter's 
 scale, divided into 20, I believe, my lord, the outlines will turn out as 
 12, the composition as 9, the colouring as 6, the expression 13 and a 
 half, and the design — if I may be allowed, my lord, to understand my 
 own design, and supposing absolute perfection in designing — to be as 
 ^y I think it cannot well fall short of 19. Resides all this, there is 
 
VOL. L] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 13 
 
 keeping in it, and the dark strokes in the Hobby-horse (which is a 
 secondary figure, and a kind of background to the whole) give 
 great force to the principal lights in your own figure, and make it come 
 off wonderfully, and besides there is an air of originality in the tout 
 ensemble. 
 
 Be pleased, my good lord, to order the sum to be paid into the 
 hands of Mr. Dodsley, for the benefit of the author ; and in the next 
 edition care shall be taken that this chapter be expunged, and your 
 lordship's titles, distinctions, arms and good actions, be placed at the 
 front of the preceding chapter : all which from the words De giutibus 
 non est disputandum^ and whatever else in this book relates to Hobby- 
 horses, but no more shall stand dedicated to your lordship. The rest 
 I dedicate to the moon, who, by-the-by, of all the patrons or matrons 
 I can think of, has most power to set my book a-going, and make the 
 world run mad after it. 
 
 Bright Goddess, 
 If thou art not too busy with Candid and Miss Cunegond's affairs, 
 take Tristram Shandy's under thy protection also. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 Whatever degree of small merit, the act of benignity in favour of the 
 midwife might justly claim, or in whom that claim truly rested, at first 
 sight seems not very material to this history ; certain, however, it was, 
 that the gentlewoman, the parson's wife, did run away at that time with 
 the whole of it. And yet, for my life, I cannot help thinking but that 
 the parson himself, though he had not the good fortune to hit upon the 
 design first, yet, as he heartily concurred in it the moment it was laid 
 before him, and as heartily parted with his money to carry it into 
 execution, had a claim to some share of it, if not to a fiiU half of what- 
 ever honour was due to it 
 
 The world at that time was pleased to determine the matter otherwise. 
 
 Lay down the book, and I will allow you half a day to give a pro- 
 bable guess at the grounds of this procedure. 
 
 Be it known, then, that for about five years before the date of 
 the midwife's license, of which you have had so circumstantial an 
 account, the parson we have to do with had made himself a country - 
 talk by a breach of all decorum which he had committed against himself, 
 his station, and his office, and that was in never appearing better, or 
 otherwise mounted than upon a lean, sorry jackass of a horse, value 
 about one pound fifteen shillings, who, to shorten all description of him, 
 was full brother to Rosinante, as far as similitude congenial could naake 
 him, for he answered his description to a hair-breadth in everything, 
 except that I do not remember it is any where said that Rosinante was 
 broken- winded, and that, moreover, Rosinante, as is the happiness of most 
 Spanish horses, fat or lean, was undoubtedly a horse at all points. 
 
 I know very well that the hero's horse was a horse of chaste deport^ 
 ment, which may have given grounds for a contrary opinion. But it is 
 certain at the same time that Rosinante's continency (as may be demon- 
 strated from the adventure of the Yanguesian carriers) proceeded from 
 no bodily defect or cause whatsoever, but from the tempercinge and 
 
14 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. I, 
 
 orderly current of his blood ; and let me tell you, madam, there is a 
 gread deal of very good chastity in the world, in behalf of which you 
 could not say more for your life. 
 
 Let that be as it may, as my purpose is to do exact justice to every 
 creature brought upon the stage of this dramatic work, I could not 
 stifle this distinction in favour of Don Quixote's horse ; in all other points 
 the parson's horse, I say, was just such another, for he was as lean, and 
 as lank, and as sorry a jade as Humility herself could have bestrided. 
 
 In the estimation of here and there a man of weak judgment, it was 
 greatly m the parson's power to have helped the figure of this horse of 
 his, for he was master of a very handsome demi-peaked saddle, quilted 
 on the seat with green plush, garnished with a double row of silver- 
 headed studs, and a noble pair of shining brass stirrups, with a housing 
 altogether suitable, of grey superfine cloth, with an edging of black lace, 
 terminating in a deep black silk fringe, potidre d^ar^ all which he had 
 purchased in the pride and prime of his life, together with a grand 
 embossed jbridle ornamented at all points as it should be. But not 
 caring to banter his beast, he had hung all these up behind his study- 
 door, and, in lieu of them, had seriously befitted him with just such a 
 bridle and such a saddle as the figure and value of such a steed might 
 well and truly deserve. 
 
 In the several sallies about his parish, and in the neighbouring visits 
 to the gentry who hved around him, you will easily comprehend that the 
 parson, so appointed, would both hear and see enough to keep his philo- 
 sophy from rusting. To speak the truth, he neveJ could enter a village 
 but he caught the attention of both old and young. Labour stood still 
 as he passed, the bucket hung suspended in the middle of the well, the 
 spinning wheel forgot its round, even chuck-farthing and shuffle-cap 
 themselves stood gaping till he had got out of sight, and as his move- 
 ment was not of the quickest, he had generally time enough upon his 
 hands to make his observations, to hear the groans of the serious, and 
 the laughter of the light-hearted, all which he bore with excellent tran- 
 quillity. His character was — he loved a jest in his heart, and as he saw 
 himself in the true p6int of ridicule, he would say, he could not be angry 
 with others for seeing liim in a light in which he so strongly saw himself ; 
 so tliat to his friends, who knew his foible was not the love of money, 
 and who therefore made the less scruple in bantering the extravagance 
 of his humour, instead of giving the true cause, he chose rather to join 
 in the laugh against himself, and as he never carried one single ounce 
 of flesh upon his own bones, being altogether as spare a figure as his 
 beast, he would sometimes insist upon it that the horse was as good as 
 the rider deserved—that they were centaur-like, both of a piece. At 
 other times, and in other moods, when his spirits were above the 
 temptation of false wit, he would say he found himself going off fast in 
 a consumption, and with great gravity would pretend he could not bear 
 the sight of a fat horse without a dejection of heart, and a sensible 
 alteration in his pulse, and that he had made choice of the lean one he 
 rode upon, not only to keep himself in countenance, but in spirits. 
 
 At different times he v/ould give fifty humorous and opposite reasons 
 for riding a meek-spirited jade of a broken-winded hoi-se preferable to 
 one of mettle — for on such a one he could sit mechanically, and medi- 
 tate as delightCttlly oV vanitate viundi ct fuga s<sculiy as with the advan- 
 
VOL. I.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 15 
 
 tage of a death's head before him ; that in ail other exercitations he 
 could spend his time as he rode slowly along to as much account as in 
 his study ; that he could draw up an argument in his sermon, or a hole 
 in his breeches, as steadily on the one as in the other ; that brisk 
 trotting and slow argumentation, like wit and judgment, were two 
 incompatible movements ; but that upon his steed he could unite and 
 reconcile everything : he could compose his sermon, he could compose 
 his cough, and, in case nature gave a call that way, he could likewise 
 compose himself to sleep. In short, the parson upon such encounters 
 would assign any cause but the true cause — and he withheld the true 
 on-, only out of a nicety of temper, because he thought it did honour to 
 him. 
 
 But the truth of the story was as follows : In the first years of this 
 gentleman's life, and about the time when the superb saddle and bridle 
 were purchased by him, it had been his manner, or vanity, or call it 
 what you will, to run into the opposite extreme. In the language of 
 the country where he dwelt, he was said to have loved a good horse, 
 and generally had one of the best in the whole parish standing in his 
 stable always ready for saddling ; and as the nearest midwife, as I told 
 you, did not live nearer to the village than seven miles, and in a vile 
 country, it so fell out that the poor gentleman was scarce a whole week 
 together without some piteous application for his beast ; and as he was 
 not an unkind-hearted man, and every case was more pressing and more 
 distressful than the last ; as much as he loved his beast, he had never a 
 heart to refuse him. The upshot of which was generally this — that his 
 horse was either clapped, or spavined, or greased, or he was twitter- 
 boned or broken -winded, or something, in short, or other had befallen 
 him which would let him cany no flesh ; so that he had, every nine or 
 ten months, a bad horse to get rid of and a good horse to purchase in 
 his stead. 
 
 What the loss in such a balance might amount to communibus annis, 
 I would leave to a special jury of sufferers in the same traffic to deter- 
 mine ; but let it be what it would, the honest gentleman bore it for 
 many years without a murmur, till at length, by repeated ill-accidents 
 of the kind, he found it necessary to take the thing under consideration ; 
 and upon weighing the whole and summing it up in his mind, he found 
 it not only disproportioned to his other expenses, but withal so heavy 
 an article in itself as to disable him from any other act of generosity 
 in his parish. Besides this, he considered that, with half the sum thus 
 galloped away, he could do ten times as much good. And what still 
 weighed more with him than all other considerations put together 
 was this, that it confined all his charity into one particular channel, 
 resei-ving nothing for the impotent, nothing for the aged, nothing for the 
 many comfortless scenes he was hourly called forth to visit, where 
 poverty, and sickness, and affliction dwelt together. 
 
 For these reasons he resolved to discontinue the expense ; and there 
 appeared but two possible ways to extricate him clearly out of it — and 
 these were either to make it an irrevocable law never more to lend his 
 steed upon any application whatever, or else to be content to ride the 
 last poor devil, such as they had made him, with all his aches and in- 
 firmities, to the very end of the chapter. 
 
 As he dreaded his own constancy in the first, he very cheerfully 
 
i6 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. L 
 
 betook himself to the second ; and though he could very well have 
 explained it, as I said, to his honour, yet, for that very reason, he had a 
 spirit above it, choosing rather to bear the contempt of his enemies and 
 the laughter of his friends than undergo the pain of telling a story, which 
 might seem a panegyric upon himself. 
 
 I have the highest idea of the spiritual and refined sentiments of this 
 reverend gentleman from this single stroke in his character, which I 
 think comes up to any of the honest refinements of the peerless knight of 
 La Mancha, whom, by-the-by, with all his follies, I love more, and 
 would actually have gone farther to have paid a visit to, than the greatest 
 hero of antiquity. 
 
 But this is not the moral of my story. The thing I had in view was 
 to show the temper of the world in the whole of this affair ; for you 
 must know that so long as this explanation would have done the parson 
 credit — the devil a soul could find it out — I suppose his enemies would 
 not, and that his friends could not. But no sooner did he bestir himself 
 in behalf of the midwife, and pay the expenses of the ordinary's license 
 to set her up, but the whole secret came out : every horse he had lost, 
 and two horses more than ever he had lost, with all the circumstances of 
 their destruction, were known and distinctly remembered. The story 
 ran like wildfire. ** The parson had a returning fit of pride which had 
 just seized him, and he was going to be well mounted once agam in his 
 life ; and if it was so, 'twas plain as the sun at noon-day he would 
 pocket the expense of the license ten times told the very first year ; so 
 that everybody was left to judge what were his views in this act of 
 charity." 
 
 What were his views in this, and in every other action of his life, or 
 rather what were the opinions which floated in the brains of other 
 people concerning it, was a thought which too much floated in his 
 own, and too often broke in upon his rest, when he should have been 
 sound asleep. 
 
 About ten years ago this gentleman had the good fortune to be made 
 entirely easy upon that score, it being just so long since he left his 
 parish and the whole world at the same time behind him, and stands 
 accountable to a judge of whom he will have no cause to complain. 
 
 But there is a fatality attends the action of some men. Order them 
 as they will, they pass through a certain medium which so twists and 
 refracts them from their true directions that, with all the tiles to praise 
 which a rectitude of heart can give, the doers of them are nevertheless 
 forced to live and die without it. 
 
 Of the truth of which this gentleman was a painful example. But to 
 know by what means this came to pass, and to make that knowledge 
 of use to you, I insist upon it that you read the two following chapters, 
 which contain such a sketch of his life and conversation as will carry its 
 moral along with it. When this is done, if nothing stops us in our way, 
 we will go on. 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 YORICK was this parson's name, and what is very remarkable in it (as 
 appears from a most ancient account of the family wrote upon strong 
 
VOL. 1.] TktSTRAM SHANDY, \^ 
 
 vellum, and now in perfect preservation), it had beeh exslctly so spelt 
 for near — I was within an ace of saying nine hundred years ; but 
 I would not shake my credit in telling an improbable truth, however 
 indisputable in itself, and therefore I shall content myself with only 
 saying it had been exactly so spelt, without the least variation or trans- 
 position of a single letter, for I do not know how long, which is more 
 than I would venture to say of one half of the best surnames in the 
 kingdom, which, in a course of years, have generally undergone as 
 many chops and changes as their owners. Has this been owing to the 
 pride or to the shame of their respective proprietors ? I honest truth, 
 I think sometimes to the one and sometimes to the other, just as the 
 temptation has wrought But a villainous affair it is, and will one day 
 so blend and confound us all together, that no one shall be able to stand 
 np and swear "that his own great-grandfather was the man who did 
 either this or that. " 
 
 This evil had been sufficiently fenced against by the prudent care of 
 the Yorick family, and their religious preservation of these records I 
 quote, which do further inform us that the family was originally of 
 Danish extraction, and had been transplanted into England as early as 
 in the reign of Horwendillus, king of Denmark, in whose court it seems 
 an ancestor of this Mr. Yorick 's, and from whom he was lineally 
 descended, held a considerable post to the day of his death. Of what 
 nature this considerable post was, this record saith not, it only adds, 
 that for near two centuries it had been totally abolished as altogether 
 unnecessary, not only in that court, but in every other court in the 
 Christian world. 
 
 It has often come into my head, that this post could be no other than 
 that of the king's chief Jester ; and that Hamlet's Yorick in our 
 Shakespeare, many of whose plays, you know, are founded upon 
 authenticated facts, was certainly the very man. 
 
 I have not the time to look into Saxo Grammaticus's Danish history, 
 to know the certainty of this ; but if you have leisure, and can easily get 
 at ftie book, you may do it full as well yourself. 
 
 I had just time in my travels through Denmark with Mr. Noddy's 
 eldest son, whom, in the year 1741, I accompanied as governor, riding 
 along with him at a prodigious rate through most parts of Europe, and of 
 which original journey performed by us two, a most delectable narrative 
 will be given in the progress of this work. I had just time, I say, and 
 that WIS all, to prove the truth of an observation made by a long so- 
 journer in that country ; namely, '* That Nature was neither very lavish, 
 nor was she very stingy in her gifts of genius and capacity to its inhabi- 
 tants ; but, like a discreet parent, was moderately kind to them all, 
 observing such an equal tenor in the distribution of her favours, as to 
 bring them, in those points, pretty near to a level with each other ; so 
 that Tou will meet with few instances in that kingdom of refined parts, 
 but a great deal of good plain household understandmg amongst all ranks 
 of people, of which everybody has a share ;" which is, I think, very 
 righ. 
 
 With us, you see, the case is quite different ; we are all ups and downs 
 in this matter ; you are a great genius ; or it is fifty to one, sir, you are 
 a great dunce and a blockhead ; not that there is a total want of inter- 
 mediate steps, no, we are not so iiTegular as that comes to ; but the two 
 
la TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vcL, I. 
 
 extremes are more common, and in a greater degree in this unsettled 
 island, where Nature, in lier gifts and dispositions of this kind, is most 
 whimsical and capricious ; fortime herself, not being more so in the 
 bequest of her goods and chattels than she. 
 
 This is all that ever staggered my faith in i egard to Yorick's extraction, 
 who, by what I can remember of him, and by all the accounts I could 
 ever get of him, seemed not to have had one single drop of Danish 
 blood in his whole crasis ; in nine hundred years it might possibly have 
 all run out I will not philosophize one moment with you about it ; 
 for happen how it would, the fact was this : that instead of that cold 
 phlegm and exact regularity of sense and humours you would have 
 looked for in one so extracted, he was, on the contrary, as mercurial and 
 sublimated a composition, as heteroclite a creature in all his declen- 
 sions, with as much life, and whim, and gditS de cceur about him, as the 
 kindliest climate could have engendered and put together. With all 
 this sail, poor Yorick carried not one ounce of ballast ; he was utterly 
 unpractised in the world ; and at the age of twenty-six, knew just about 
 as well how to steer his course in it as a romping unsuspicious girl of 
 thirteen : so that upon his first settii^ out, the brisk gale of his spirits, 
 as you will imagine, ran him foul ten times in a day of somebody's 
 tackling ; and as the grave and more slowpaced were oftenest in his 
 way, you may likewise imagine 'twas with such he generally had the ill 
 luck to get the most entangled. For aught 1 know, there might be 
 some mixture of unlucky wit at the bottom of such fracas, for, to speak 
 the truth, Yorick had an invincible dislike and opposition in his nature 
 to gravity ; not to gravity as such, for where gravity was wanted, lie 
 would be the most grave and serious of mortal men for days and weeks 
 together ; but he was an enemy to the affectation of it, and declared 
 open v/ar against it, only as it appeared a cloak for ignorance or 
 for folly ; and then, whenever it fell in his way, however sheltered end 
 protected, he seldom gave it much quarter. 
 
 Sometimes, in his wild way of talking, he would say that gravity was 
 au arrant scoundrel ; and he would add, of the most dangerous kmd, 
 too, because a sly one ; and that he verily believed, more honest well- 
 meaning people were bubbled out of their goods and money by it in one 
 twelvemonth, than by pocket- picking and shop-lifting in seven. In the 
 naked temper which a merry heart discovered, he would say, there was 
 no danger but to itself : whereas the very essence of gravity was design, 
 and consequently deceit; 'twas a taught trick, to gain credit of the 
 world for more sense and knowledge than a man was worth ; aad that, 
 with all its pretensions, it was no better, but often worse, than what a 
 French wit had long ago defined it — viz., a mysterious carriage of the 
 bo<iy to cover the defects of the mind : which definition of gravity, 
 Yorick, with great imprudence, would say, deserved to be wrote in 
 letters of gold. 
 
 But, in plain truth, he viras a man unhackneyed and unpractised in 
 the world, and was altogether as indiscreet and foolish on every other 
 subject of discourse, where policy is wont to impress restraint. Yorick 
 had no impression but one, and that was what arose from the nature of 
 the deed spoken of ; which impression he would usually translate into 
 plain EnglisJi witlujut any periphrasis, and too oft without much dis- 
 tinction of either pers ria^e, time, or phce ; so that when mention was 
 
VOL. I.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 19 
 
 made of a pitiful or an ungenerous proceeding, he never gave himself a 
 moment's time to reflect who was the hero of the piece, what his station, 
 or how far he had power to hurt him hereafter ; but if it was a dirty 
 action, without more ado, the man was a dirty fellow, and so on. And 
 as his comments had usually the ill fate to be terminated either in a 
 bon mot, or to be enlivened throughout with some drollery or humou- 
 of expression, it gave wings to Yorick's indiscretion. In a word, 
 though he never sought, yet at the same time, as he seldom shunned 
 occasions of saying what came uppermost, and without much ceremony, 
 he had but too many temptations in life, of scattering his wit and his 
 humour, his gibes and his jests about him. They were not lost for want 
 of gathering. 
 
 What were the consequences, and what was Yorick's catastrophe 
 thereupon, you will read in the next chapter. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 The mortgager and the mortgagee differ the one from the other, not 
 more in length of purse, than the jester and jestee do in that of memory. 
 But in this the comparison between them runs, as the scholiasts call it, 
 U{)on all four ^ which, by -the -by, is upon one or two legs more than 
 s<3me of the best of Homer's can pretend to ; namely, that the one 
 raises a sum and the other a laugh at your expense, jwid think no more 
 about it- Interest, however, still runs on in both cases ; the periodical 
 or accidental payments of it, just serving to keep the memory of the 
 affair alive ; till at length, in some evil hour, pop comes the creditor 
 upon each, and by demanding principal upon the spot, together with full 
 interest to the very day, makes them both feel the full extent of their 
 obligations. 
 
 As the reader (for I hate your ifs) has a thorough knowledge of 
 human nature, I need not say more to satisfy him, that my hero could 
 not go on at this rate without some slight experience of these incidental 
 mementos. To speak the truth, he had wantonly involved himself in a 
 multitude of small book debts of this stamp, which, notwithstanding 
 Eugenius's frequent advice, he too much disregarded, thinking that, as 
 not one of them was contracted through any maUgnancy, but, on the 
 contrary, from an honesty of mind and a mere jocundity of humour, 
 they would all of them be crossed out in course. 
 
 Eugenius would never admit this, and would often tell him that one 
 day or other he would certaujly be reckoned with, and he would often 
 add, in an accent of sorrowfiil apprehension, to the uttermost mite. I'o 
 which Yorick, with his usual carelessness of heart, would as often 
 answer with a pshaw ! and if the subject was started in the fields, 
 with a hop, skip, and a jump, at the end of it ; but if close pent up i,a 
 the social chimney comer, where the culprit was barricadoed in, with a 
 table and a couple of arm-chairs, and could not so readily fly off in a 
 tangent, Eugenius would then go on with his lecture upon discretion, in 
 words to this purpose, though somewhat better put together : — 
 
 ** Tmst me, dear Yorick, this unwary pleasantry of this will sooner 
 or later bring thee into scrapes and difficulties, which no after-wit can 
 ^tripate thee out of. Jn these sallies, loo oft I see it happens that g. 
 
^ TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. I. 
 
 person laughed at considers himself in the light of a person injured, with 
 all the rights of such a situation belonging to him, and when thou 
 viewest him in that light too, and reckonest up his friends, his family, 
 his kindred, and allies, and musterest up with them the many recruits 
 which will list under him from a sense of common danger, it is no extra- 
 vagant arithmetic to say that for every ten jokes thou hast got an hun- 
 dred enemies, and till thou hast gone on and raised a swarm of wasps 
 about thy ears, and art half stung to death by them, thou wilt never be 
 convinced it is so. 
 
 ** I cannot suspect it in tlie man whom I esteem that there is the least 
 spur from spleen or malevolence of intent in these sallies. I believe and 
 know them to be truly honest and sportive ; but consider, my dear lad, 
 that fools cannot distinguish this, and that knaves will not ; and thcfu 
 knovvcst not what it is, either to provoke the one, or to make merry 
 with the other. Whenever they associate for mutual defence, depend 
 upon it they will carry on the war in such a manner against thee, my 
 dear friend, as to make thee heartily sick of it, and of thy life too. 
 
 ** Revenge from some baneful comer shall level a tale of dishonour 
 at thee, which no innocence of heart or integrity of conduct shall set 
 right. The fortunes of thy house shall totter, thy character, which led 
 the way to them, shall bleed on every side of it, thy faith questioned, 
 thy works belied, thy wit forgotten, thy learning trampled on. To 
 wind up the last scene of thy tragedy, cruelty and cowardice, twin- 
 ruffians, hired and set on by malice in the dark, shall strike together at 
 all thy infirmities and mistakes, llie best of \xs^ my dear lad, lie open 
 there ; and trust me, trust me, Yorick, when to gratify a private 
 appetite it is once resolved upon that an innocent and an helpless 
 creature shall be sacrificed, 'tis an easy matter to pick up sticks enough 
 from any thicket where it has strayed, to make a fire to offer it up with." 
 
 Yorick scarce ever heard this sad vaticination of his destiny read over 
 to him, but with a tear stealing from his eye, and a promissory look 
 attending it, that he was resolved for the time to come to ride his tit 
 with more sobriety. But, alas, too late ! A grand confederacy, 
 
 with and at the head of it, was formed before the first 
 
 prediction of it. The whole plan of the attack, just as Eugenius 
 had foreboded, was put in execution all at once, with so iittle mercy on 
 the side of the allies, and so little suspicion in Yorick of what was 
 carrying on against him, that when he thought, good easy man ! full 
 surely preferment was over-ripening, they had smote his root, and then 
 he fell, as many a worthy man had fallen before him. 
 
 Yorick, however, fought it out with all imaginable gallantry for some 
 time, till, overpowered by numbers, and worn out at length by the 
 calamities of the war, but more so by the ungenerous manner in which it 
 was carried on, he threw down the sword, and though he kept up his 
 spirits in appearance to the last, he died nevertheless, as was generally 
 thought, quite broken-hearted. 
 
 What inclined Eugenius to the same opinion was as follows : — 
 
 A few hours before Yorick breathed his last, Eugenius stepped in with 
 an intent to take his last sight and last farewell of him. Upon his 
 drawing Yorick*s curtain, and asking how he felt himself, Yorick, 
 looking up in his face, took hold of his hand, and, after thanking him 
 for the many toicenb Qf lii§ friendship to him, for which, he sa^d, if k 
 
VOL. L] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 21 
 
 was their fate to meet hereafter, he would thank him again and again, 
 he told him he was within a few hours of giving his enemies the slip 
 for ever. " I hope not," answered Eugenius, with tears trickling down ' 
 his cheeks, and with the tenderest tone that ever man spoke, ** I hope 
 not, Yorick," said he. Yorick replied, with a look up, and a gentle 
 squeeze of Eugenius's hand, and that was all ; but it cut Eugenius to his 
 heart. " Come, come, Yorick," quoth Eugenius, wiping his eyes, and 
 summoning up the man within him, *' my dear lad, be comforted ; let 
 not all thy spirits and fortitude forsake thee at this crisis, when thou 
 most wantest them. Who knc^ws what resources are in store, and 
 what the power of God may yet do for thee ?" Yorick laid his hand 
 upon his heart, and gently shook his head. " For my part," continued 
 Eugenius, crying bitterly as he uttered the words, ** I declare I know 
 not, Yorick, how to part with thee, and would gladly flatter my hopes," 
 added Eugenius, cheering up his voice, ** that there is still enough left 
 of thee to make a bishop, and that I may live to see it." " I beseech 
 thee, Eugenius," quoth Yorick, taking off his night-cap as well as he 
 could with his left hand, his right being still grasped close in that of Euge- 
 nius, *' I beseech thee to take a view of my head." ** I see nothing that 
 ails it," replied Eugenius. " Then, alas ! my friend," said Yorick, " let me 
 tell you that 'tis so biniised and misshapened with the blows which 
 
 and and some others have so unhandsomely given me 
 
 in the dark, that I might say with Sancbo Panza, that ^.hould 1 recover, 
 and * mitres thereupon be suffered to rain down from heaven as thick as 
 hail, not one of them would fit it.' " Yorick's last breath was hans^ing 
 upon his trembling lips, ready to depart, as he uttered this, yet still it 
 was uttered with something of a Ccrvantic tone, and as he spoke it, 
 Eugenius could perceive a stream of lambent fire lighted up for a 
 moment in his eyes, faint picture of those flashes of his spirit, which 
 (as Shakespeare said of his ancestor) were wont to set the lable in 
 a roar ! 
 
 Eugenius was convinced from this that the heart of his friend was 
 broke ; he sqeezed his hand, and then walked softly out of the room, 
 weeping as he walked. Yorick followed Eugenius with his eyes to the 
 door ; he then closed them, and never opened them more. 
 
 He lies buried in a corner of his churchyard, in the parish of , 
 
 under a plain marble slab, which his friend Eugenius, by leave of his 
 executors, laid upon his grave, with no more than these three words of 
 inscription, serving both for his epitaph and elegy ; 
 
 Alas, poor YORICK ! 
 
 Ten times in a day has Yorick's ghost the consolation to hear his 
 monumental inscription read over, \Yith such a variety of plaintive tones, 
 as denote a general pity and esteem for him ; a foot-way crossing the 
 churchyard close by the side of his grave, not a passenger goes by 
 without stopping to cast a look upon it and sighing as he walks on, 
 Alas, poor YonQH \ 
 
22 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol, I. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 It is so long since the reader of this rhapsodical work has been parted 
 from the midwife, that it is high time to mention her again to him, 
 merely to put him in mind that there is such a body still in the world, 
 and whom, upon the best judgment I can form upon my own plan at 
 present, I am going to introduce to him for good and all. But as fresh 
 matter may be started, and much unexpected business fall out betwixt 
 the reader and myself which may require immediate dispatch, 'twas 
 right to take care that the poor woman should not be lost in the mean- 
 time ; because when she is wanted we can no way do without her. 
 
 I think I told you that this good woman was a person of no small 
 note and consequence throughout our whole village and township ; that 
 her fame had spread itself to the very out edge and circumference of 
 that circle of importance, of which kind every soul living, whether he 
 has a shirt to his back or no, has one surrounding him — which said 
 circle, by the way, whenever 'tis said that such a one is of great weight 
 and importance in the world, I desire may be enlarged or contracted in 
 your worship's fancy, in a compound ratio of the station, profession, 
 knowledge, abilities, height, and depth (measuring both ways) of the 
 personage brought before you. 
 
 In the present case, if I remember, I fixed it at about four or five 
 miles, which not only comprehended the whole parish, but extended 
 itself to two or three of the adjacent hamlets in the skirts of the next 
 parish, which made a considerable thing of it I must add that she 
 was, moreover, very well looked on at one large grange house, and 
 some other odd houses and farms within two or three miles, as I said, 
 from the smoke of her own chimney. But I must here, once for all, 
 inform you that all this will be more exactly delineated and explained 
 in a map now in the hands of the engraver, which, with many other 
 pieces and developments to this work, will be added to the end of the 
 twentieth volume, not to swell the work ; I detest the thoughts of such 
 a thing ; but by way of commentary, scholium, illustration and key to 
 such passages, incidents or innuendoes, as shall be thought to be either 
 of private interpretation, or of dark or doubtful meaning, after my life 
 and ray opinions shall have been read over (now don't forget the 
 meaning of the word) by all the world ; which, betwixt you and me, 
 and in spite of all the gentleman reviewers in Great Britain, and of all 
 that their woi*ships shall undertake to write or say to the contrary, I am 
 determined shall be the case. I need not teU your worship that all 
 this is spoke in confidence. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 Upon looking into my mother's marriage settlement, in order to satisfy 
 myself and reader in a point necessary to be cleared up, before we could 
 proceed any farther in this history, I had the good fortune to pop upon 
 the very thing I wanted before I had read a day and a half straight 
 forwards — it might have taken me up a month ; which shows plainly, 
 that when a m^n sits down to write a history — though it be but the 
 
^U I.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 55 
 
 history of Jack Hickathrift or Tom Thumb, he knows no more than 
 his heels what lets and confounded hindrances he is to meet with in his 
 way, or what a dance he may be led, by one excursion or another, before 
 all is over. Could an historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer 
 drives on his mule — straight forward ; for instance, from Rome all the 
 way to Loretto, without ever once turning his head aside, either to the 
 right hand or to the left, he might venture to foretell you to an hour 
 when he should get to his journey's end ; but the thing is, morally 
 speaking, impossible, for if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have 
 fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as 
 he goes along, which he can no ways avoid. He will have views and 
 prospects to himself perpetually soliciting his eye, which he can no 
 more help standing still to look at than he can fly ; he will moreover 
 have various 
 
 Accounts to reconcile : 
 
 Anecdotes to pick up : 
 
 Inscriptions to make out : 
 
 Stories to weave in : 
 
 Traditions to sift : 
 
 Personages to call upon : 
 
 Panegyrics to paste up at this door : 
 
 Pasquinades at that ; all which both the man and the mule are 
 quite exempt from. To sum up all, there are archives at every stage to 
 be looked into, and rolls, records, documents, and endless genealogies, 
 which justice ever and anon calls him back to stay the reading of. In 
 short, there is no end of it. For my own part I declare I have been at 
 it these six weeks, making all the speed I possibly could, and am not 
 yet bom ; I have just been able, and that's all, to tell you when it 
 happened, but not how, so that you see the thing is yet far from being 
 accomplished. 
 
 These unforeseen stoppages, which I own I had no conception of 
 when I firet set out, but which, I am convinced now, will rather increase 
 than diminish as I advance, have struck out a hint which I am resolved 
 to follow, and that is, not to be in a hurry, but to go on leisurely, 
 writing and publishing two volumes of my life every year ; which, if I 
 am suffered to go on quietly, and can make a tolerable bargain with my 
 bookseller, I shall continue to do as long as I live. 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 The article in my mother's marriage settlement, which I told tlie reader 
 I was at the pains to search for, and which, now that I have found it, I 
 think proper to lay before him, is so much more fully expressed in the 
 deed itself than ever I can pretend to do it, that it W(ndd be barbarity 
 to take it out of the lawyer's hand. It is as follows : — 
 
 ''And this indenture further witnesseth : That the said Walter 
 Shandy, mercliant, in consideration of the said intended marriage to be 
 had, and, by God's blessing, to be well and truly solemnized and con- 
 summated, between the said Walter Shandy and Elizabeth MoUineux, 
 aforesaid, and divers other good and valuable causes and considerations 
 Mm thereunto specially moving, doth grant, covenant, condescend, con- 
 
fi4 TRISTRAM SHAND K [VOL. ti 
 
 sent, conclude, bargain, and fully agree to and with John Dixon and Jamet 
 Turner, Esqs., the above-named trustees, &c. &c., to wit : that in case 
 it should hereafter so fall out, chance, happen, or otherwise come to 
 pass that the said Walter Shandy, merchant, shall have left off business 
 before the time or times that the said Elizabeth Mollineux shall, accord- 
 ing to the course of Nature, or other wise, have left off bearing and 
 bringing forth children, and that, in consequence of the said Walter 
 Shandy having so left off business, shall, in despite, and against the 
 free-will, consent, and good-liking of the said Elizabeth Mollineux, 
 make a departure from the city of London in order to retire to and 
 
 dwell upon his said estate at Shandy Hall, in the county of >, or at 
 
 any other country seat, castle, hall, mansion house, messuage, or grange 
 house, now purchased, or hereafter to be purchased, or upon any part 
 or parcel thereof, that then and as often as the said Elizabeth Mollineux 
 shall happen to be enceinte with child or children during her said cover- 
 ture, he the said Walter Shandy shall, at his own proper cost and 
 charges, and out of his own proper moneys, upon good and reasonable 
 notice, which is hereby agreed to be within six weeks of her the said 
 Elizabeth Mollineux's full reckoning, pay, or cause to be paid, the sum 
 of one hundred and twenty pounds of good and lawful money to John 
 Dixon and James Turner, Esqs., or assigns, upon trust and confidence, 
 and for and imto the use and uses, intent, end, and purposes following — 
 that is to say : That the said sum of one hundred and twenty pounds 
 shall be paid into the hands of the said Elizabeth Mollineux, or to be 
 otherwise applied by them the said trustees for the well and truly hiring 
 of one coach, with able and sufficient horses, to carry and convey the 
 body of the said Elizabeth Mollineux and the child or children unto 
 the city of London, and for the further paying and defraying of all other 
 incidental costs, charges, and expenses whatsoever, in and about and for, 
 and relating to her said intended delivery and lying-in in the said city or 
 suburbs thereof ; and that the said Elizabeth Mollineux shall and may 
 from time to time, and at all such time and times as are here covenanted 
 and agreed upon, peaceably and quietly hire the said coach and horses, 
 and have free ingress, egress, and regress, throughout her journey, in 
 and from the said coach according to the tenor, true intent, and mean- 
 ing of these presents, without any let, suit, trouble, disturbance, mo- 
 lestation, discharge, hindrance, forfeiture^ eviction, vexation, interrup- 
 tion, or incumbrance whatsoever. And that it shall moreover be then 
 lawful to and for the said Elizabeth Mollineux to live and reside in such 
 })iace or places, and in such family or families, and with such relations, 
 friends, and other persons within the said city of London as she, at her 
 own will and pleasure, notwithstanding her present coverture, and as if 
 she was 2.femme sole and unmarried, shall think fit. And this indenture 
 further witnesseth ; That for the more effectually carrying of the said 
 covenant into execution, the said Walter Shandy, merchant, doth hereby 
 grant, bargain, sell, release, and confirm unto the said John Dixon and 
 James Turner, Esqs., their heirs, executors, and assigns, in their actual 
 possession now being, by virtue of an indenture of bargain and sale for 
 a year to them the said John Dixon and James Turner, Esqs., by him 
 the said Walter Shandy, merchant, thereof made ; which said bargain 
 and sale for a year bears date the day next before the date of these pre- 
 sents, and by force and virtue of the statate for transferring of uses into 
 
VOL. I.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 25 
 
 possession, all that the manor and lordship of Shandy, in the county of 
 
 , with all the rights, members, and appurtenances thereof, and all 
 
 and every the messuages, houses, buildings, barns, stables, orchards, 
 gardens, backsides, tofts, crofts, garths, cottages, lands, meadows, feed- 
 ings, pastures, marshes, commons, woods, underwoods, drains, fisheries, 
 waters, and water-courses, together with all rents, reversions, services, 
 annuities, fee-farms, knights' fees, views of frank-pledge, escheats, reliefs, 
 mines, quarries, goods and chattels of felons and fugitives, felons of 
 themselves, and put in exigent, deodands, free warrens, and all other 
 royalties, and seignories, rights and jurisdictions, privileges and heridita- 
 ments whatsoever ; and also the advowson, donation, presentation, and 
 free disposition of the rectory or parsonage of Shandy aforesaid, and all 
 and every the tentlis, titlies, glebe-lands." In three words, my mother 
 was to lie-in (if she chose it) in London. 
 
 But in order to put a stop to the practice of any unfair play on the 
 part of my mother, which a marriage article of this nature too mani- 
 festly opened a door to, and which indeed had never been thought of at 
 all but for my Uncle Toby Shandy, a clause was added in security of my 
 father, which was this : " Tliat in case my mother hereafter should at 
 any time put my father to the trouble and expense of a London journey 
 upon false cries and tokens, that for every such instance she shall forfeit 
 all the right and ritle which the covenant gave her to the next turn, but 
 to no more, and so on, totus quotieSy in as effectual a manner as if such 
 a covenant betwixt them had not been made. " This, by the way, was 
 no more than what was reasonable ; and yet, as reasonable as it was, I 
 have ever thought it hard that the whole weight of the article should 
 have fallen entirely, as it did, upon m)rself. 
 
 But I was begot and born to misfortunes ; for in the latter end of 
 September, 1717, which was the year before I was bom, my mother 
 having carried my father up to town much against the grain, he per- 
 emptorily insisted upon the clause ; so that I was doomed, by marriage 
 articles, to have my nose squeezed as flat to my face as if the destinies 
 had actually spun me without one. 
 
 How this event came about, and what a train of vexatious disappoint- 
 ments, in one stage or other of my life, have pursued me from the mere 
 loss, or rather compression, of this one single member, shall be laid 
 before the reader all in due time. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 My father, as any body may naturally imagine, came down with my 
 mother into the country in but a pettish kind of a humour. The first 
 twenty or five-and-twenty miles he did nothing in the world but fret and 
 teai^e himself, and indeed my mother too, about the cursed expense 
 which, he said, might every shilling of it have been saved. Then, what 
 vexed him more than everything else was the provoking time of the 
 year, which, as I told you, was towards the end of September, when 
 his wall-fruit, and greengages especially, in which he was very curious, 
 were just ready for pulling. ** Had he been whistled up to London 
 upon a Tom Fool's errand in any other month of the whole year, he 
 should not have said three words about it." 
 
26 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. 1. 
 
 For the next two whole stages no subject would go down but the 
 hea\'y blow he had sustained from the loss of a son, whom, it seems, he 
 had fully reckoned upon in his mind and registered down in his pocket- 
 book, as a second staff for his old age, in case Bobby should fail 
 him. " The disapwintment of this," he said, ** was ten times more to a 
 wise man than all the money which the journey, &c., had cost him, put 
 together. Rot the hundred and twenty pounds, he did not mind k a 
 rush," 
 
 From Stilton all the way to Grantham, nothing in the whole affair 
 provoked him so much as the condolences of his friends, and the foolish 
 figure they should both make at church the first Sunday, of which, in 
 the satirical vehemence of his wit, now sharpened a little by vexation, 
 he would give so many humorous and provoking descriptions, and 
 place his rib and self in so many tormenting lights and attitudes in the 
 face of the whole congregation, that my mother declared these two 
 stages were so truly tragi-comical, that she did nothing but laugh and 
 cry in a breath, from one end to the other of them all the way. 
 
 From Grantham, till they had crossed the Trent, my father was out 
 of all kind of patience at the vile trick and imposition which he fancied 
 my mother had put upon him in this affair. *' Certainly," he would say, 
 to himself, over and over again, " the woman could not be deceived 
 herself ; if she could — what weakness !" Tormenting word ! which led 
 his imagination a thorny dance, and before all was over, played 
 the deuce and all with him ; for, sure as ever the word weakness was 
 uttered and struck full upon his brain, so sure it set him upon running 
 divisions upon how many kinds of weaknesses there were ; that there was 
 such a thing as weakness of the body as well as weakness of the mind, 
 and then he would do nothing but syllogize within himself for a stage or 
 two together, how far the cause of all these vexations might, or might 
 no<^, have arisen out of himself. 
 
 In short, he had so many little subjects of disquietude springing out 
 of this one affair, all fretting successively in his mind as they rose up in 
 it, that my mother, whatever was her journey up, had but an uneasy 
 jouniey of it down ; in a word, as she complained to my Uncle Toby, 
 he would have tired out the patience of any flesh alive. 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 Though my fiitlier travelled homewards, as I told you, in none of the 
 best moods, pshawing and pishing all the way down, yet he had the 
 complaisance to keep the worst part of the story still to himself, which 
 was the resolution he had taken of doing himself the justice, which 
 my Uncle Toby's clause in the marriage settlement empowered him. 
 
 My father was a gentleman of many virtues, but he had a strong 
 spice of that in his temper which might, or might not, add to the 
 number. 'Tis known by the name of perseverance in a good cause, 
 and of obstinacy in a bad one. Of this my mother had so much knowledge 
 that she knew 'twas to no purpose to make any remonstrance, so she even 
 resolved to sit down quietly and make the most of it. 
 
VOL, I.J TRISTRAM SHANDY. 25? 
 
 CHAPTER XVIIL 
 
 As the point was that night agreed, or rather determined, that my mother 
 should lie-in of me in the country, she took her measures accordingly ; 
 for as the famous Dr. Manningham was not to be had, she had come to 
 a final determination in her mind, to trust her life and mine with it, into 
 no soul's hand but this old woman's only. Now this I like ; when we 
 cannot get at the very thing we wish, never to take up with the next be.-t 
 in degree to it ; no, that's pitiful beyond description ; it is no more than 
 a week from this very day, in which I am now writing this book for 
 the edification of the world — which is March 9, 1759 — that my dear, 
 dear Jenny, observing I looked a little grave, as she stood cheapening 
 a silk of five-and- twenty shillings a yard, told the mercer she was sorry 
 she had given him so much trouble, and immediately went and bought 
 herself a yard- wide stuff of tenpence a yard. 'Tis the duplication of one 
 and the same greatness of soul, only what lessened the honour of it some- 
 what in my mother's case was that she could not heroine it into so 
 violent and hazardous an extreme, as one in her situation might have 
 wished, because the old midwife had really some little claim to be 
 depended upon, as much, at least, as success could give her, having, in 
 the course of her practice of near twenty years in the parish, brought 
 every mother's son of them into the world, without any one shp or 
 accident, which could fairly be laid to her account. 
 
 These facts, though they had their weight, yet did not altogether 
 satisfy some few scruples and uneasinesses which hung upon my father's 
 spirits in relation to this choice. To say nothing of the natural 
 workings of humanity and justice, or of the yearnings of parental and 
 connubial love, all which prompted him to leave as little to hazard as 
 possible in a case of this kind, he felt himself concerned in a particular 
 manner, that all should go right in the present case from the accumu- 
 lated sorrow he lay open to, should any evil betide his wife and child 
 in Shandy HalL lie knew the world judged by events, and would add 
 to hb afflictions in such a misfortune, by loading him with the whole 
 blame of it. ** Alas o'day I had Mrs. Shandy, poor gentlewoman, had 
 but her wish in going up to town and come down again, which, they 
 say, she begged and prayed for upon her bare knees, and which, in my 
 opinion — considering the fortune which Mr. Shandy got with her — was 
 no such mighty matter to have complied with, the lady and her babe 
 might both of 'em have been alive at this hour." 
 
 This exclavnation my father knew was unanswerable ; and yet, it was 
 not merely to shelter himself, nor was it altogether for care of his 
 offspring and wife that he seemed so extremely anxious about this 
 point ; my father had extensive views of things, and stood, moreover, as 
 he thought, deeply concerned in it for tiie pubKc good, from the dread 
 he entertained of the bad uses an ill-fated instance might be put to. 
 
 He was very sensible that all political writers upon the subject had 
 unanimously agreed and lamented, from the beginning of Queen 
 Elizabeth's reign down to liis own time, that the current of men and 
 money towards the metropolis, upon one frivolous errand or another 
 set in so strong as to become dangerous jo our civil rights ; though, by- 
 the-by, a current was not the image he took most delight in, ^ 
 
28 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [voL. t. 
 
 distemper was here his favourite metaphor, and he would run it do-wTi 
 into a perfect allegory, by maintaining it was identically the same in 
 the body national as in the body natural, where blood and spirits were 
 driven up into the head faster than they could find their ways down ; a 
 stoppage of circulation must ensue, which was death in both cases. 
 
 There was little danger, he would say, of losing our liberties by 
 French politics or French invasions ; nor was he so much in pain of a 
 consumption from the mass of corrupted matter and ulcerated humours 
 in our constitution, which he hoped was not so bad as it was imagined, 
 but he verily feared that in some violent push, we should go off all at 
 once in a state-apoplexy, and then he would say, " The Lord have 
 mercy upon us all." 
 
 My father was never able to give the history of this distemper 
 without the remedy along with it. 
 
 "Was I an absolute prince," he would say, pulling up his breeches 
 with both his hands, as he rose fron^. his arm-chair, " I would appoint 
 able judges at every avenue of my metropolis, who should take cog- 
 nizance of every fool's business who came there ; and if, upon a fair and 
 candid hearing, it appeared not of weight sufficient to leave his own 
 home, and come up, bag and baggage, with his wife and children, 
 farmers' sons, &c. &c. , they should be all sent back from constable to 
 constable, like vagrants as they were, to the place of their legal settle- 
 ments. By this means I shall take care that my metropolis tottered not 
 through its own weight, that the head be no longer too big for the body, 
 that the extremes now wasted and pinned in be restored to their due 
 share of nourishment, and regain with it their natural strength and 
 beauty. I would effectually provide that the meadows and corn-fields 
 of my dominions should laugh and sing, that good cheer and hospitality 
 flourish once more, and that such weight and influence be put thereby 
 into the hands of the squirality of my kingdom, as should counterpoise 
 what I perceive my nobility are now taking from them. 
 
 " Why are there so few palaces and gentlemen's seats," he would 
 ask, with some emotion, as he walked across the room, '* throughout 
 so many delicious provinces in France ? Whence is it that the few 
 remaining chateaus amongst them are so dismantled, so unfurnished, and 
 in so ruinous and desolate a condition ? Because, sir (he would say), 
 in that kingdom no man has any country interest to support ; the little 
 interest of any kind which any man has anywhere in it is concentrated 
 in the court and the looks of the Grand Monarch, by the sunshine of 
 whose countenance, or the clouds which pass across it, every Frenchman 
 lives or dies." 
 
 Another political reason which prompted my father so strongly to 
 guard against the least evil accident to my mother in the country 
 was, that any such instance would infallibly throw a balance of 
 power, too great already, into the weaker vessels of the gentry, in his 
 own or higher stations, which, with the many other usurped rights 
 which that part of the constitution was hourly establishing, would in the 
 end prove fatal to the monarchical system of domestic government 
 established in the first creation of things by God. 
 
 In this point he was entirely of Sir Robert Filmer's opinion, that the 
 plans and institutions of the greatest monarchies in the eastern parts of 
 the world were originally all stolen from that admirable pattern and 
 prototype of this household and paternal power, which for a century, he 
 
VOL. I.] TRISTRAM SHAND V. 4$ 
 
 said, and more had gradually been degenerating away into a mixed 
 government, the form of which, however desirable in great combinations 
 of the species, was very troublesome in small ones, and seldom produced 
 anjlhing that he saw but sorrow and confusion. 
 
 For all these reasons, private and public, put together, my father was for 
 having the man-midwife by all means — my mother by no means. My 
 father begged and entreated she would for once recede from her ]^rero- 
 gative in this matter, and suffer him to choose for her ; my mother, on tlie 
 contrary, insisted upon her privilege in this matter to choose for herself 
 and have no mortal's help but the old woman's. What could my father do? 
 He was almost at his wit's end, talked it over with her in all moods, 
 placed his ailments in all lights, argued the matter with her like a 
 Christian, like a heathen, like a husband, like a father, like a patriot, 
 like a man. My mother answered everything only like a woman, 
 which was a little hard upon her, for as she could not assume and fight 
 it out behind such a variety of characters, 'twas no fair match ; 'twas 
 seven to one. What could my mother do ? She had the advantage 
 (otherwise she had been certainly overpowered) of a small reinforcement 
 of cliagrin personal at the bottom, which bore her up and enabled her 
 to dispute the affair with my father with so equal an advantage that 
 both sides sung Te Daim. In a word, my mother was to have the old 
 woman, and the operator was to have license to drink a bottle of wine 
 with my father and my Uncle Toby Shandy in the back parlour, for 
 which he was to be paid five guineas. 
 
 I must beg leave, before I finish this chapter, to enter a caveat in the 
 breast of my fair reader, and it is this — not to take it absolutely for 
 grr^nted from an unguarded word or two which I have dropped in it, 
 **That I am a married man." I own the tender appellation of my 
 dear, dear Jenny, with some other strokes of conjugal knowledge inter- 
 spersed here and there, might naturally enough have misled the most 
 candid judge in the world into such a determination against me. All I 
 plead for in this case, madam, is strict justice, and that you do so much 
 of it to me as well as to yourself as not to prejudge or receive such an 
 impression of me till you have better evidence than, I am positive, at 
 present can be produced against me. Not that I can be so vain or 
 unreasonable, madam, as to desire you should therefore think that 
 my dear, dear Jenny is my kept mistress. No ; that would be flattering 
 my character in the other extreme, and giving it an air of freedom, 
 which, perhaps, it has no kind of right to. All I contend for is the 
 utter impossibility for some volumes that you, or the most penetrating 
 spirit upon earth, should know how this matter really stands. It is not 
 impossible but that my dear, dear Jenny, tender as the appellation is, 
 may be my child. Consider, I was bom in the year eighteen. Nor is 
 there anything unnatural or extravagant in the supposition that my dear 
 Jenny may be my friend. Friend ! My friend. Surely, madam, a 
 friendship between the two sexes may subsist and be supported without 
 — Fy, Mr. Shandy ! without anything, madam, but that tender and 
 delicious sentiment which ever mixes in friendship where there is a 
 difference of sex. Let me entreat you to study the pure and sentimental 
 parts of the best French romances ; it will really, madam, astonish you 
 to see with what a variety of chaste expression this delicious sentiment 
 which T have the honour to speak of is dressed out. 
 
30 TRISTRAM SHANDV, [VOU t 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 1 WOULD sboner undertake to explain the hardest problem in geometry 
 than pretend to account for it, that a gentleman of my father's great good 
 sense, knowing as the reader must have observed him, and curious too 
 in philosophy, vi^ise also in political reasoning, and in polemical (as he 
 will find) no way ignorant, could be capable of entertaining a notion in 
 his head so out of the common track, that I fear the reader, when 1 
 come to mention it to him, if he is the least of a choleric temper, will 
 immediately throw the book by ; if mercurial, he will laugh most 
 heartily at it ; and if he is of a grave and saturnine cast, he will at first 
 sight absolutely condemn as fanciful and extravagant, and tliat was in 
 respect to the choice and imposition of Christian names, on which he 
 thought a great deal more depended than what superficial minds were 
 capable of conceiving. 
 
 His opinion in this matter was, that there was a strange kind of 
 magic bias, which good or bad names, as he called them, irresistiUy 
 impressed upon our characters and conduct. 
 
 The hero of Cervantes argued not the point with more seriousness, 
 nor had he more faith, or more to say on the power of necromancy in 
 dishonouring his deeds, or on Dulcinea's name, in shedding lustre upon 
 them, than my father had on those of Trismegistus or Archimedes on the 
 one hand, or of Nyky and Simkin on the other. How many Csesarsand 
 Pompeys, he would say, by mere inspiration of the names, have been 
 rendered worthy of them ? And how many, he would add, are there 
 who might have done exceeding well in the world had not their charac- 
 ters and spirits been totally depressed and Nicodemused into nothing. 
 
 " I see plainly, sir, by your looks " (or as the case happened), my father 
 would say, **that you do not heartily subscribe to this opinion of mine, 
 which to those, he would add, who have not carefully sifted it to the 
 bottom, I own has an air more of fancy than of solid reasoning in it ; 
 and yet, my dear sir, if I may presume to know your character, I am 
 morally assured, I should liazard little in stating a case to you, not as a 
 ])arty in the dispute, but as a judge, and trusting my appeal upon it to 
 your own good sense and candid disquisition in this matter. You are a 
 person free from as many narrow prejudices of education as most men ; 
 and, if I may presume to penetrate further into you, of a liberality of 
 genius above bearing down an opinion, merely because it wants friends. 
 Your son, your dear son, from whose sweet and open temper you have 
 so much to expect — your Billy, sir — would you for the world have 
 called him Judas? Would you, my dear sir," he would say, laying 
 his hand upon your breast with the genteelest address, and in that soft 
 and irresistible piano of voice which the nature of the arguvientum ad 
 honiinem absolutely requires, "would you, sir, if a Jew of a godfather 
 had proposed the name of your child, and offered you his purse along 
 with it, woidd you have consented to such a desecration of him? O 
 nriy God !'' he would say, looking up, **if I know your temper right, 
 sir, you are incapable of it ; you would have trampled upon the offer ; 
 you would ha^»e thrown the temptation at the tempter's head with 
 abhorrence. 
 
rOL. t] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 33 
 
 writing an express dissertation simply upon the word " Tristram," 
 showing the world, with great candour and modesty, the grounds of his 
 great abhorrence to the name. 
 
 When this story is compared with the title-page, will not the gentle 
 reader pity my father from his soul, to see an orderly and well-disposed 
 gentleman, who, though singular yet inoffensive in his notions, so 
 played upon in them by cross purposes ? to look down upon the stage, 
 and see him baffled and overthrown in all his little systems and wishes ? 
 to behold a train of events perpetually falling out against him, and in so 
 critical and cruel a way as if tliey had purposely been planned and 
 pointed oirt against him, merely to insult his speculations? — in a word, 
 to behold such a one, in his old age, ill fitted for troubles, ten times in a 
 day suffering sorrow ; ten times in a day calling the child of his prayers 
 Tristram ? Melancholy dissyllable of sound ! which to his ears was 
 unison to Nicompoop and every name vituperative under heaven. By 
 his ashes I swear it, if ever malignant spirit took pleasure or busied 
 itself in traversing the purposes of mortal man, it must have been here ; 
 and if it was not necessary I should be born before I was christened, I 
 would this moment gire the reader an account of it. 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 ** How could you, madam, be so inattentive in reading the last chapter ? 
 I told you in it that my mother was not a papist." — *' Papist! You 
 told me no such tiling, sir." — "Madam, I beg leave to repeat it over 
 again, that I told you as plain at least as words by direct inference 
 could tell you "such a thing." — "Then, sir, I must have missed a page." 
 — " No, madam, you have not missed a word." — ** Then I was asleep, 
 sir." — " My pride, madam, cannot allow you that refuge." — '* Then, I 
 declare, I know not*hing at all about the matter." — " That, madam, is 
 the very fault I lay to your charge ; and as a punishment for it, I do 
 insist upon it that you immediately turn back — that is, as soon as you 
 get to the next full stop — and read the whole chapter over again." 
 
 I have imposed this penance upon the lady neither out of wantonness 
 or cruelty, but from the best of motives, and therefore shall make her no 
 apology for it when she returns back. 'Tis to rebuke a vicious taste 
 which has crept into thousands besides herself, of reading straight- 
 forwards, more in quest of the adventures than of the deep erudition and 
 knowledge which a book of this cast, if read over as it should be, would 
 infallibly impart with them. The mind should be accustomed to make 
 wise reflections and draw curious conclusions as it goes along, the 
 habitude of which made Pliny the younger afhrm that "he never read 
 a book so bad but he drew some profit from it." The stories of Greece 
 and Rome, run over without this turn and application, do less service, I 
 affirm it, than the history of Parismus and Parismenus, or of the Seven 
 Champions of England, read with it. 
 
 But here comes my fair lady. " Have you read over again the chapter, 
 madam, as I desired you ? You have ! And did you not observe the 
 passage, upon the second reading, which admits the inference ?" — " Not a 
 word like it." — ** Then, madam, be pleased to ponder well the last line 
 but one of the chapter where I take upon me to say * It was mcasary 
 ^^ B 
 
34 TRISTRAM SHAND K [vol. i. 
 
 I should he bom before I was christened/ Had my mother, madam, 
 i)een a Papist, that consequence did not follow. " 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 " I WONDER what's all that noise and running backwards and forwards 
 for above stairs, " quoth my father, addressing himself after an hour and 
 a half's silence to my Uncle Toby, who, you must know, was sitting on 
 the opposite side of the fire, smoking his social pipe all the time in mute 
 contemplation of a new pair of black plush breeches which he had got 
 on. ** What can they be doing, brother ?" quoth my father ; " we can 
 scarce hear ourselves talk.'' 
 
 ** I think," replied my Uncle Toby, taking his pipe from his mouth, 
 and striking the head of it two or three times upon the nail of his left 
 
 thumb, as he began his sentence ; *' I think," says he But to enter 
 
 rightly into my Uncle Toby's sentiments upon this matter, you must be 
 made to enter first a little into liis character, the outlines of which I 
 shall just give you, and then the dialogue between him and my father 
 will go on as well again. 
 
 Pray what was that man's name, for I write in such a hurry I have 
 no time to recollect or look for it, who firet made the observation, 
 that *' there was great inconstancy in our air and climate?" Whoever 
 he was, it was a just and good observation in him. But the corollary 
 drawn from it, namely, * ' That it is this v/hich has furnished us with 
 such a variety of odd and whimsical characters," that was not his. It 
 was found out by another man, at least a century and a half after him. 
 Then again, that this copious storehouse of original materials is the true 
 and natural cause that our comedies are so much better than those of 
 France or any other that either have or can be wrote upon the Con- 
 tinent. That discovery was not fully made till about the middle of King 
 William's reign, when the great Dryden, in writing one of his long 
 prefaces (if I mistake not) most fortunately hit upon it. Indeed, 
 towards the latter end of Queen Anne, the great Addison began to 
 patronize the notion, and more fully explained it to the world in one or 
 two of his Spectators; but the discovery was not his. Then, fourthly 
 and lastly, that this strange irregularity in our climate, producing so 
 strange an irregularity in our characters, doth thereby in some sort make 
 lis amends, by giving us somewhat to make us merry with when the 
 weather will not suffer us to go out of doors, that observation is my own, 
 and was struck out by me this very rainy day, March 26, 1759, and 
 betwixt the hours of nine and ten in the morning. 
 
 Thus — thus, my fellow- labourers and associates in this great harvest 
 of our learning, now ripening before our eyes — thus it is, by slow steps 
 of casual increase, that our knowledge, physical, metaphysical, pliysioio- 
 gical, polemical, nautical, mathematical, enigmaticaJ, technicai, biogra- 
 phical, romantical, chen:iical, and obstetrical, with fifty other branches 
 of it (most of them ending, as tiiese do, in *' ical "), have for these two 
 last centuries and more gradually been creeping upwards towards 
 Aif/xi7 of their perfection from which, if we may fopn a conjecture from 
 the advances of these last seven years, we cannot possibly be far off. 
 
 When that happens, it is t^ ^^ hoped it will put an end to all kind of 
 
VOL. I.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 35 
 
 writings whatsoever ; the want of all kind of writing will put an end to all 
 kind of reading ; and that in time, as war begets poverty, poverty peace, 
 must in course put an end to all kind of knowledge, and then we shall 
 have all to begin over again, or, in other words, be exactly where we started. 
 
 Happy ! thrice happy times ! I only wish that the era of my beget- 
 ting, as well as the mode and manner of it, had been a little altered, or 
 that it could have been put off with any convenience to my father or 
 mother for some twenty or five- and -twenty years longer, when a man in 
 the literary world might have stood some chance. 
 
 But I forget my Uncle Toby, whom all this while we have left 
 knocking the ashes out of his tobacco-pipe. 
 
 His humour was of that particular species which does honour to our 
 atmosphere, and I should have made no scruple of ranking him amongst 
 one of the first-rate pi^ductions of it had not there appeared too many 
 strong lines in it of a family likeness, v/hich showed that he derived the 
 singularity of his temper more from blood than either wind or water, or 
 any modifications or combinations of them whatever. And I have 
 therefore oftimes wondered that my father, though I believe he had his 
 reasons for it, upon his observing some tokens of eccentricity in my 
 course when I was a boy, should never once endeavour to account for 
 them in this way ; for all the Shandy family were of an original 
 character throughout — I mean the males — the females had no character 
 at all, except, indeed, my great-aunt Dinah, who, about sixty years ago, 
 was married and got with child by the coachman, for which my father, 
 according to his hypothesis of Christian names, would often say. she 
 might thank her godfathers and godmothers. 
 
 It will seem very strange — and I would as soon think of dropping a 
 riddle in the reader's way, which is not my interest to do^ s-s set him 
 upon guessing how it could come to pa^s— that an event of this kind, so 
 many years after it had happened, should be reserved for the inter- 
 ruption of the peace and unity which otherwise so cordially subsisted 
 between my father and my Uncle Toby. One would have thought that 
 the whole force of the misfortune should have spent and wasted itself in 
 the family at first, as is generally the case ; but nothing ever wrought 
 Mrith our family after the ordinary way. Possibly at the very time this 
 happened it might have something else to afflict it, and as afflictions 
 are sent down for our good, and that as this had never done the 
 Shandy family any good at all, it might lie waiting till apt times and 
 circumstances should give it an opportunity to discharge its office. 
 Observe, I detennine nothing upon this. My way is ever to point out 
 to the curious different tracts of investigation, to come at the first springs 
 of the events I tell, not with a pedantic fescue, or in the decisive 
 manner of Tacitus, who outwits himself and his reader, but with the 
 officious humility of a heart devoted to the assistance merely of the 
 inquisitive ; to them I write, and by them I shall be read, if any such 
 reading as this could be supposed to hold out so long, to the very end 
 of the world. 
 
 Why this cause of sorrow, therefore, was thus reserved for my father 
 and uncle is undetermined by me. But how and in what direction it 
 exerted itself so as to become the gause of dissatisfaction between them, 
 after it began to operate, is what I am able to explain with gi^at exact- 
 ness, and is as foilows ; 
 
 B2 
 
36 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [VOL. I. 
 
 My Uncle Toby Shandy, madam, was a gentleman who, with the virtues 
 which usually constitute the characier of a man of honour and rectitude, 
 possessed one in a very eminent degree which is seldom or never put into 
 tJie catalogue, and that was a most extreme and unparalleled modesty in 
 nature ; though I correct the word nature for this reason, that I may not 
 prejudge a point which must shortly^come to a hearinp^, and that is, 
 whether this modesty of his was natural or acquired. Whichever way 
 my Uncle Toby came by it, it was nevertheless modesty in the truest 
 sense of it ; and that is, madam, not in regard to words, for he was so 
 unhappy as to have very little choice in t^ierri, but to things ; and this 
 kind of modesty so possessed him, and it arose to such a height in him, 
 as almost to equal, if such a thing could be, even the modesty of a 
 woman — that female nicety, madam, and inward cleanliness of mind 
 and fancy in your sex, which makes you so much the awe of ours. 
 
 You will imagine, madam, that my Uncle Toby had contracted all this 
 from this very source ; that he had spent a great part of his time in 
 'converse with your sex ; and that from a thorough knowledge of you, 
 and the force of imitation which such fair examples render irresistible, 
 he had acquired this amiable turn of mind. 
 
 I wish I could say so ; for unless it was with his sister-in-law, my 
 father's wife and my mother, my Uncle Toby scarce exchanged three 
 words with the sex in as many years. No, he got it, madam, by a blow. 
 A blow ! Yes, madam, it was owing to a blow frcwn a stone, broken ofi 
 by a ball from the parapet of a horn- work at the siege of Namur, which 
 struck full upon my Uncle Toby's groin. Which way could that affect 
 it ? The story of that, madam, is long and interesting ; but it would 
 be running my history all upon heaps to give it you here. It is for an 
 episode hereafter ; and every circumstance relating to it in its proper 
 place shall be faithfully laid before you. Until then it is not in my 
 power to give further light into this matter, or say more than what I 
 have said already : that my Uncle Toby was a gentleman of unparal- 
 leled modesty, which happening to be somewhat subtilized and rarified 
 by the constant heat of a little family pride, they both so wrought to- 
 gether within him that he could never bear to hear the affair of my Aunt 
 Dinah touched upon but with the greatest emotion. The least hint of it 
 was enough to make the blood fly into his face ; but when my father 
 enlarged upon the story in mixed companies, which the illustration of 
 his hypothesis frequently obliged him to do, the unfortunate blight of 
 one of the fairest branches of the family would set my Uncle Toby's 
 honour and modesty a-bleeding, and he would often take my father 
 aside, in the greatest concern imaginable, to expostulate and tell him 
 ne would give him anything in the world only to let the story rest. 
 
 My father, I believe, had the truest love and tenderness for my Uncle 
 Toby that ever one brother bore towards another, and would have done 
 anything in nature, which one brother in reason could have desired of 
 another, to have made my Uncle Toby's heart easy in this or any other 
 point. But this lay out of his power. 
 
 My father, as I told you, was a philosopher in grain, speculative, 
 systematical ; and my Aunt Dinah's affair was a matter of as much con- 
 sequence to him as the retrogradation of the planets to Copernicus. 
 The backsliding of Venus in her orbit fortified the Copernican system, 
 called so after his name ; and the backslidings of my Aunt Dinah in her 
 
VOL. I.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 37 
 
 ©rbit did the same service in establishing my father's system, which, I 
 trust, will for ever hereafter be called the Shandean system, after his. 
 
 In any other family dishonour my father, I believe, had as nice a 
 sense of shame as any man whatever, and neither he, nor I daresay 
 Copernicus, would have divulged the affair in either case, or have taken 
 the least notice ct" it to the world, but for the obligations they owed, 
 as they thought, to truth. ** Amicus Plato," my father would say, 
 construing the words to my Uncle Toby as he went along, "Amicus 
 Plato ; that is, Dinah was my aunt ; sed viagis arnica Veritas^ but Truth 
 is my sister." 
 
 This contrariety of humours betwixt my father and my uncle was 
 the source of many a fraternal squabble. The one could not bear to 
 hear the tale of family disgrace recorded, and the other would scarce 
 ever let a day pass to an end without some hint at it 
 
 " For God's sake," my Uncle Toby would cry, ** and for my sake, 
 and for all our sakes, my dear brother Shandy, do let this story of our 
 aunt and her ashes sleep in peace ; how can you — how can you have so 
 little feeling and compassion for the character of our family ? " — ** What 
 is the character of a family to an hypothesis ? *' my father would reply. 
 ** Nay, if you come to that, what is the life of a family?*' — ** The life 
 of a family ! " my Uncle Toby would say, throwing himself back in his 
 arm-chair and lifting up his hands, his eyes, and one leg. — ** '^^es, the 
 life," my father would say, maintaining his point. *' How many 
 thousands of them are there every year that comes, cast away (in all 
 civilized countries at least) and considered as nothing but common air 
 in competition of an hypothesis ?" — " In my plain sense of things," my 
 Uncle Toby would answer, *' every such instance is downright murder, 
 let who will commit it." — *' There lies your mistake," my father would 
 reply ; " for inforo sciefitics there is no such thing as murder, 'tis only 
 death, brother." 
 
 My Uncle Toby would never offer to answer this by any other kind 
 of argument than that of whistling half-a-dozen bars of ** Lillabullero." 
 You must know it was the usual channel through which his passions 
 got vent when anything shocked or surprised him, but especially when 
 anything which he deemed very absurd was offered. 
 
 As not one of our logical writers, nor any of the commentators upon 
 them, that I remember, have thought proper to give a name to this 
 particular species of argument, I here take the liberty to do it myself, 
 for two reasons. First, that in order to prevent all confusion in 
 disputes, it may stand as much distinguished for ever from every other 
 species of argument as the Argufnentum ad Verecundtam, ex AbsurdOy 
 ex Fortiori^ or any other argument whatsoever. And secondly, that it 
 may be said by my children's children, when my head is laid to rest, 
 that their learned grandfather's head had been busied to as much 
 purpose once as other people's. That he had invented a name, and 
 generously thrown it into the treasury of the Ars Logica, for one of the 
 most unanswerable arguments in the whole science ; and if the end 
 of disputation is more to silence than convince, they may add, if they 
 please, to one of the best arguments too. 
 
 I do therefore by these presents strictly order and command that it be 
 known and distinguished by the name and title of the Argumentum 
 fistulatoriurn^ and no other; and that it rank hereafter with the 
 
38 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. I. 
 
 Argitmentuni Baculinum and the Argumentum ad Crwnatam^ and for 
 ever hereafter be treated of in the same chapter. 
 
 As for the Argumentum Tripodium^ which is never used but by the 
 woman ngainst the man, and the Ajgumenium ad Rem^ whieh, con- 
 trariwise, is made use of by the man only against the woman — as these 
 two are enough in conscience for one lecture, and, moreover, as the 
 one is the best to answer to the other, let them likewise be kept apart, 
 and be treated of in a place by themselves. 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 The learned Bishop Hall — I mean the famous Dr. Joseph Hall, who 
 was bishop of Exeter in King James the First's reign — tells us in one of 
 his Decades, at the end of his " Divine Art of Meditation," imprinted at 
 London, in the year i6lo, by John Beal, dwelling in Aldersgate Street, 
 **that it is an abominable thing for a man to commend himself;" and 
 I really think it is so. 
 
 And yet, on the other' hand, when a thing is e^^ecuted in a 
 masterly kind of a fashion, which thing is not likely to be found 
 out~I think it is full as abominable that a man should lose the 
 honour of it, and go out of the world with the conceit of its rotting 
 in his head. 
 
 This is precisely my situation. 
 
 For in this long digression, which I was accidentally led into, as in 
 all my digressions (one only excepted), there is a master-stroke of 
 digressive skill, the merit of which has all along, I fear, been over- 
 looked by my reader, not for want of penetration in him, but because 
 it is an excellence seldom looked for, or expected indeed, in a digres- 
 sion ; and it is this, that though my digressions are all fair, as you 
 observe, and that I fly of! from what I am about, as far and as often 
 too as any writer in Great Britain, yet I constantly take care to 
 order affairs so that my main business does not stand still in my 
 absence. 
 
 I was just going, for example, to have given you the great outlines 
 of my Uncle Toby's most whimsical character, when my Aunt Dinah 
 and the coachman came across us, and led us a vagary some millions of 
 miles into the very heart of the planetary system ; nothwithstanding all 
 this, you perceive that the drawing of my Uncle Toby's character 
 went on gently all the time ; not the great contours of it, that 
 was impossible, but some familiar strokes and faint designations 
 of it, were here and there touched in, as we went along, so that 
 you are much better acquainted with my Uncle Toby now than you 
 was before. 
 
 By this 'contrivance the machinery of my work is of a species by 
 itself ; two contrary motions are introduced into it, and reconciled, 
 which were thought to be at variance with each other. In a 
 word, my work is digressive, and it is progressive too, and at the 
 same time. 
 
 ITiis, sir, is a very different story from that of the earth's moving 
 round her axis in her diurnal rotation, with her progress in her elliptic 
 orbit, which brings about the year, and constitutes that variety and 
 
VOL. I.] TRISTRAM SHAND K 39 
 
 vicissitude of seasons we enjoy ; thoUgh I own it suggested the thought, 
 as I believe, the greatest of our boasted improvements and discoveries 
 have come from some such trifling hints. 
 
 Digressions, incontestibly, are the sunshine, they are the life, the soul 
 of reading; take them out of this book, for instance, you might as well 
 take the book along with them ; one cold eternal winter v/ould reign in 
 every page of it ; restore them to the writer, he steps forth like a 
 bridegroom, bids all hail, brings in variety, and forbids the appetite 
 to fail. 
 
 All the dexterity is in the good cookery and management of them, 
 so as to be not only for the advantage of the reader, but also of the 
 author, whose distress in this matter is truly pitiable : for if he begins a 
 digression, from that moment, I observe his whole work stands stock- 
 still ; and if he goes on with his main work, then there is an end of his 
 digression. 
 
 This is vile work. For which reason, from the beginning of this, 
 you see, I have constructed the main work and the adventitious parts of 
 it with such intersections, and have so complicated and involved the 
 dic^ressive and progressive movements, one wheel within another, that 
 the whole machine, in general, has been kept a-going ; and, what's 
 more, it shall be kept a-going these forty years, if it pleases the fountain 
 of health to bless me so long with life and good spirits. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 I HAVE a strong propensity in me to begin this chapter very nonsensi- 
 cally, and I will not baulk my fancy. Accordingly I set off thus ; 
 
 If the fixture of Momus's glass in the human breast, according to the 
 proposed emendation of that arch-critic, had taken place, first, this 
 foolish consequence would certainly have followed, that the very wisest 
 and the very gravest of us all, in one coin or other, must have paid 
 window-money every day of our lives. 
 
 And secondly, that had tlie said glass been there set up, nothing 
 more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man's 
 character, bat to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a 
 dioptrical bee-hive, and looked in, viewed the soul stark naked, observed 
 ^11 her motions, her machinations, traced all her maggots from their 
 first engendering to their crawling forth, watched her loose in her frisks, 
 her gambols, her caprices, and after some notice of her more solenm 
 deportment, consequent upon such frisks, &c., then t.iken your pen and 
 ink and set down nothing but what you had seen and could have sworn 
 to. But this is an advantage not to be had by the biographer in this 
 planet. In the planet Mercury belike it may be so, if not better still 
 for him, for there the intense heat of the country, which is proved by 
 computators, from its vicinity to the sun, to be more than equal to that 
 of red-hot iron, must, I tliink, long ago have vitrified the bodies of the 
 inhabitants, as the efhcient cause, to suit them for tlie climate, which 
 is the final cause ; so that, betwixt them both, all the tenements of 
 their souls, from top to bottom, may be nothing else — for aught the 
 soundest philosophy can show to the contrary — but one fine transparent 
 body of clear glass, bating the umbilical knot ; so that, till the ia<* 
 
40 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vOL. L 
 
 habitants grow old and tolerably wrinkled, whereby the rays of light 
 in passing through them become so monstrously refracted, or return re- 
 flected from their surfaces in such transverse lines to the eye that a man 
 cannot be seen through, his soul might as well, unless for mere cere- 
 mony or the trifling advantage which the umbilical point gave her — 
 might upon all other accounts, I say, as well play the fool out of doors 
 as in her own house. 
 
 But this, as I said above, is not the case of the inhabitants of this 
 earth ; our minds shine not through the body, but are wrapped up here 
 in a dark covering of uncrystallized flesh and blood, so that if we would 
 come to the specific characters of them we must go some other way to 
 work. 
 
 Many, in good truth, are the ways which human wit has been forced 
 to take to do this thing with exactness. 
 
 Some, for instance, draw all their characters with wind instruments ; 
 Virgil takes notice of that way in the affair of Dido and ^neas ; but it 
 is as fallacious as the breath of fame, and, moreover, bespeaks a narro^ 
 genius. I am not ignorant that the Italians pretend to a mathematical 
 exactness of their designations of one particular sort of character among 
 them, from the forte or piano of a certain wind instrument they use, 
 which they say is infallible. I dare not mention the name of the instru- 
 ment in this place. It is sufficient we have it amongst us, but never 
 think of making a drawing by it. This is enigmatical, and intended to 
 be so, at least ad populum. And therefore I beg, madam, when you 
 come here that you read on as fast as you can, and never stop to make 
 any inquiry about it. 
 
 There are others again who will draw a man's character from no 
 other helps in the world but merely from his evacuations. But this 
 often gives a very incorrect outline, unless, indeed, you take a sketch of 
 his repletions too ; and by correcting one drawing from the other, com- 
 pound one good figure out of them both. 
 
 I should have no objection to this method, l)ut that I think it must 
 smell too strong of the lamp, and be rendered still more operose by 
 forcing you to have an eye to the rest of his non-naturals. Why the most 
 natural actions of a man's life should be called his non-naturals, is 
 another question. 
 
 There are others, fourthly, who disdain every one of these expedients 
 — ^not from any fertility of their own, hut from the various ways of doing 
 it which they have borrowed from the honourable devices which the 
 pentagraphic brethren* of the brush have shown in taking copies.* 
 These, you must know, are your great historians. 
 
 One of these you will see drawing a full-length character against the 
 light — that's illiberal, dishonest, and hard upon the character of the man 
 who sits. 
 
 Others, to mend the matter, will make a drawing of you in the 
 ca?mera — that is most unfair of all, because there you are sure to be 
 represented in some of your most ridiculous attitudes. 
 
 To avoid all and eveiy one of these errors, in giving you my Uncle 
 Toby's character, I am determined to draw it by no mechanical help 
 whatever ; nor shall my pencil be guided by any one wind instrument 
 
 » ♦ Pentagraph, an instrument to copy prints and pictures mechanically, an4 in any 
 proporttoA, 
 
VOL. I.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 4< 
 
 which ever was blown upon, either on this or on the other side of the 
 Alps ; nor will I consider either his repletions or his discharges, or 
 touch upon his non-naturals; but, in a word, I will draw my Uncle 
 Toby's character from his hobby-horse. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 If I was not morally sure that the reader must be out of all patience 
 for my Uncle Toby's character, I would here previously have convinced 
 him that there is no instrument so fit to draw such a thing with as that 
 which I have pitched upon. 
 
 A man and his hobby-horse, though I cannot say that they act and 
 re-act exactly after the same manner in which the soul and body do upon 
 each other, yet doubtless there is a communication between them of 
 some kind, and my opinion rather is that there is something in it more 
 of the manner of electrified bodies, and that by means of the heated 
 parts of the rider which come immediately into contact with the back 
 of the hobby-horse. By long journeys and much friction it so happens 
 that the body of the rider is at length filled as full of hobby-horsical 
 matter as can it hold ; so that if you are able to give but a clear 
 description of the nature of the one, you may form a pretty exact notion 
 of the genius and character of the other. 
 
 Now the hobby-horse which my Uncle Toby always rode upon was, 
 in my opinion, a hobby-horse well worth giving a description of, if it 
 was only upon the score of his great singularity, for you might have 
 travelled from York to Dover, from Dover to Penzance in Cornwall, 
 and from Penzance to York back again, and have not seen such another 
 upon the road; or if you had seen such an one, whatever haste you had 
 been in, you must infallibly have stopped to have taken a view of him. 
 Indeed, the gait and figure of him was so strange and so utterly unlike 
 was he, from his head to his tail, to any one of the whole species, that 
 it was now and then made a matter of dispute whether he was really a 
 hobby-horse or no. But as the philosopher would use no other argu- 
 ment to the sceptic who disputed with him against the reality of motion, 
 save that of rising up upon his legs, and walking across the room ; 
 so would my Uncle Toby use no other argument to prove his hobby- 
 horse was a hobby-horse indeed, but by getting upon his back and 
 riding him about ; leaving the world after that to determine the point 
 as it thought fit. 
 
 In good truth, my Uncle Toby mounted him with so much pleasure, 
 and he carried my Uncle Toby so well, that he troubled his head very 
 little wiih what the world either said or thought about it. 
 
 It is now high time, however, that I give you a description of him. 
 But to go on regularly, I only beg you will give me leave to acquaint 
 you first how my Uncle Toby came by him. 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 The wound in my Uncle Toby's groin, which he received at the siege 
 of Namur, rendering him unfit for the service, it was thought expedient 
 h^ shoiild return to England, in order, if possible, to be set to rights. 
 
43 , TRISTRAM SHANDY, [VOL. 1. 
 
 He was four years totally confined, part of it to his bed, and all of 
 it to his room ; and in the course of his cure, which was all that time 
 in hand, suffered unspeakable miseries, owing to a succession of exfolia- 
 tions from the os pubis ^ and the outward edge of that part of the 
 coxendix^ called the os ileum^ both which bones were dismally crushed, 
 as much by the irregularity of the stone which I told you was broke 
 off the parapet, as by its size (though it was pretty large), which inclined 
 the sui^eon all along to think that the great injury which it had done 
 my Uncle Toby's groin, was more owing to the gravity of the stone 
 itself than to the projectile force of it, which he would often tell him 
 was a great happiness. 
 
 My father at that time was just beginning business in London, and 
 had taken a house, and as the truest friendship and cordiality subsisted 
 between the two brothers, and that my father thought my Uncle Toby 
 could nowhere be so well nursed and taken care of as in his own house, 
 lie assigned him the very best apartment in it. And what was a much 
 more sincere mark of his affection still, he would never suffer a friend 
 or an acquaintance to step into the house on any occasion, but he would 
 take him by the hand and lead him upstairs to see his brother Toby, 
 and chat an hour by his bedside. 
 
 The history of a soldier's wound beguiles the pain of it — my uncle's 
 visitors at least lhoug:ht so, and in their daily calls upon him from the 
 courtesy arising out of that belief, they would frequently turn the dis- 
 course to that subject, and from that subject the discourse would 
 generally roll on to the siege itself. 
 
 These conversations were infinitely kind, and vc.y Uncle Toby re- 
 ceived great relief from them, and Avould have received much more, but 
 that they brought him into some unforeseen perplexities which for 
 three months together retarded his cure greatly, and if he had not hit 
 upon an expedient to extricate himself out of them, I verily believe they 
 would have laid him in his grave. 
 
 What these perplexities of my Uncle Toby were, 'tis impossible for 
 you to guess. If you could, I should blush ; not as a relation, not as 
 a man, nor even as a w<jman, but I should blush as an author, inas- 
 much as I set no small store by myself upon this very account, that 
 my reader has never yet been able to guess at anything. And in this, 
 sir, I am of so nice and singular a humour, that if I thought you was 
 able to form the least judgment or probable conjecture to yourself of 
 what was to come in the next page, I would tear it out of my book. 
 
VOLUME II. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 I HAVE begun a new book, on purpose that I might have room enough 
 to explain the nature of the perplexities in which my Uncle Toby was 
 involved from the many discourses and interrogations about the siege of 
 Namur, where he received his wound. 
 
 I must remind the reader, in case he has read the history of King 
 William's wars, but if he has not, 1 then inform him that one of the 
 most memorable attacks in that siege was that which was made by the 
 English and Dutch upon the point of the advanced counterscarp before 
 the gate of St. Nicolas, which enclosed the great sluice or water-stop, 
 where the English were terribly exposed to the shot of the counter- 
 guard and demi-bastion of St. Roch, the issue of which hot dispute in 
 three words was this : that the Dutch lodged themselves upon the 
 counter-guard, and that the English made themselves masters of the 
 covered way before St. Nicolas's gate, notwithstanding the gallantry of 
 the French officers, who exposed themselves upon the glacis sword 
 in hand. 
 
 As this was the principal attack of which my Uncle Toby was an eye- 
 witness at Namur, the army of the besiegers being cut off by the con- 
 fluence of the Maes and Sambre from seeing much of each other's 
 operations, my Uncle Toby was generally more eloquent and particular 
 in his account of it, and the many perplexities he was in arose out of 
 the almost insurmountable difficulties he found in telling his story intel- 
 ligibly, and giving such clear ideas of the differences and distinctions 
 between the scarp and counterscarp, the glacis and covered way, the 
 half-moon and ravelin, as to make his company fully comprehend where 
 and what he was about. 
 
 Writers themselves are too apt to confound these terms, so that you 
 will the less wonder if in his endeavours to explain them, and in oppo- 
 sition to many misconceptions, that my Uncle Toby did ofttimes puzzle 
 his visitors, and sometimes himself too. 
 
 To speak the truth, unless the company my father led upstairs were 
 tolerably clear-headed, or my Uncle Toby' was in one of his best expla- 
 natory moods, 'twas a difficult thing, do what he could, to keep the 
 discourse free from obscurity. 
 
 What rendered the account of this affair the more intricate to my 
 Uncle Toby was this, that in the attack of the counterscarp before the 
 gate of St. Nicolas, extending itself from the bank of the Maes quite up 
 
44 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vOL. it 
 
 to tlie great water-stop, the gi'ound was cut and cross-cut with such a 
 multitude of dykes, drains, rivulets, and sluices on all sides, and he 
 Would get so sadly bewildered and set fast amongst them, that 
 frequently he could neither get backwards or forwards to save his life, 
 and was ofttimes obliged to give up the attack upon that very 
 account only. 
 
 These perplexing rebuffs gave my Uncle Toby Shandy more perturba- 
 tions than you would imagine ; and as my father's kindness to him was 
 continually dragging up fresh friends and fresh inquirers, he had but a 
 very uneasy talk of it. 
 
 No doubt my Uncle Toby had great command of himself, and could 
 guard appearances, I believe, as well as most men ; yet any one may 
 imagine that when he could not retreat out of the ravelin without 
 getting into the half-moon, or getting out of the covered way without 
 falling down the counterscarp, nor cross the dyke without danger of 
 slipping into the ditch, but that he must have fretted and fumed in- 
 wardly; he did so, and the little and hourly vexations, which may seem 
 trifling and of no account to the man who has not read Hippocrates, 
 yet, whoever has read Hippocrates, or Dr. James Mackenzie, and has 
 considered well the effects which the passions and affections of the 
 mind have upon the digestion (why not of a wound as well as of a 
 dinner?) may easily conceive what sharp paroxysms and exacerba- 
 tions of his wound my Uncle Toby must have undergone upon that 
 score only. 
 
 My Uncle Toby could not philosophize upon it, 'twas enough he 
 felt it was so, and having sustained the pain and sorrows of it for three 
 months together, he was resolved some way or other to extricate 
 himself. 
 
 He was one morning lying upon his back in his bed, the anguish 
 and nature of the wound upon his groin suffering him to lie in no other 
 position, when a thought came into his head, that if he could purchase 
 such a thing, and have it pasted down upon a board, as a large map of 
 the fortifications of the town and citadel of Namur, with its environs, it 
 might be a means of giving him ease. I take notice of his desire to 
 have the environs along with the town and citadel, for this reason, be- 
 cause my Uncle Toby's wound was got in one of the traverses, about 
 thirty toises from the returning angle of the trench, opposite to the 
 salient angle of the demi-bastion of St. Roch ; so that he was pretty 
 confident he could stick a pin upon the identical spot of ground where 
 he was standing in when the stone struck him. 
 
 All this succeeded to his wishes, and not only freed him from a 
 world of sad explanations, but, in the end, it proved the happy means, 
 as you will read, of procuring my Uncle Toby his hobby-horse. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 There is nothing so foolish, when you are at the expense of making an 
 entertainment of this kind, as to order things so badly, as to let your 
 critics and gentry of refined taste run it down ; nor is there anything so 
 
VOL. II.] TRISTRAM SHANDV. 45 
 
 likely to make them do it, as that of leaving them out of the party, 
 or, what is full as ofTensive, of bestowing your attention upon the rest 
 of your guests in so particular a way, as if there was no such thing as a 
 critic (by occupation) at table. 
 
 I guard against both ; for, in the first place, I have left half a dozen 
 places purposely open for them ; and, in the next place, I pay them all 
 court. Gentlemen, I kiss your hands, I protest no company could give 
 me half the pleasure ; by my soul I am glad to see you, I beg only you 
 will make no strangers of yourselves, but sit down without any 
 ceremony, and fall on heartily. 
 
 I said I had left six places, and I was upon the point of carrying my 
 complaisance so far, as to have left a seventh open for them, and in 
 this very spot I stand on ; but being told by a critic (though not by 
 occupation, but by nature) that I had acquitted myself well enough, I 
 shall fill it up directly, hoping, in the meantime, that I shall be able to 
 make a great deal of more room next year. 
 
 ** How, in the name of wonder, could your Uncle Toby, who, it seems, 
 was a military man, and whom you have represented as no fool, be at 
 the same time such a confused, pudding-headed, muddle-headed fellow, 
 as — Go look." 
 
 So, Sir Critic, I could hava replied ; but I scorn it. 'Tis language 
 unurbane, and only befitting the man who cannot give clear and satis- 
 factory accounts of things, or dive deep enough into the first causes of 
 human ignorance and confusion. It is moreover the reply valiant, and 
 therefore I reject it ; for though it might have suited my Uncle Toby's 
 character as a soldier excellently well, and had he not accustomed him- 
 self, in such attacks, to whistle the Lillabullero^ as he wanted no 
 courage, 'tis the very answer he would have given ; yet it would by no 
 means have done for me. You see as plain as can be, that I write as a 
 man of erudition ; that even my similes, my allusions, my illustrations, 
 my metaphors, are erudite, and that I must sustain my character 
 properly, and contrast it properly too, else what would become of me ? 
 Why, sir, I should be undone ; at this very moment that I am going 
 here to fill up one place against a critic, I should have made an opening 
 for a couple. 
 
 Therefore I answer thus : 
 
 Pray, sir, in all the reading which you have ever read, did you ever 
 read such a book as Locke's " Essay upon the Human Understanding ? " 
 Don't answer me rashly, because many, I know, quote the book, who 
 have not read it, and many have read it, who understand it not. If 
 either of these is your case, as I write to instruct, I will tell you in three 
 words what the book is. It is a history. A history ! of who? what? 
 where? when? Don't hurry yourself. It is a history book, sir 
 (which may possibly recommend it to the world), of what passes in a 
 man's own mind, and if you will say so much of the book, and no more, 
 believe me, you will cut no contemptible figure in a metaphysic circle. 
 
 But this by the way. 
 
 Now, if you will venture to go along with me, and look down into 
 the bottom of this matter, it will be found that the cause of obscurity 
 and confusion in the mind of man is threefold. 
 
 Dull organs, dear sir, in the first place. Secondly, slight and 
 transient impressions made by objects, when the said organs are not 
 
46 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [voL. IL 
 
 dull. And, thirdly, a memory like unto a sieve, not able to retain what 
 it has received. Call down Dolly your chambermaid, and I will give 
 yoii my cap and bell along with it, if I make not this matter so plain 
 that Dolly herself shall understand it as well as Malbranch. When 
 Dolly has indited her epistle to Robin, and has thrust her arm into the 
 botitom of her pocket hanging by her right side, take that opportunity 
 to recollect that the organs and faculties of perception, can, by nothing 
 in this world, be so aptly typified and explained as by tliat one thing 
 which Dolly's hand is in search of. Your organs are not so dull that I 
 should inform you, 'tis an inch, sir, of red seal wax. 
 
 When this is melted and dropped upon the letter, if Dolly fumbles 
 too long for her thimble, till the wax is over-hardened, it will not 
 receive the mark of her thimble from the usual impulse whicli v/as wont 
 to imprint it. Very well, if Djlly's wax, for want of better, is bees- wax 
 or of a temper too soft, though it may receive, it will not hold the 
 impression, how hard soever Dolly thrusts against it ; and last of all, 
 supposing the wax good, and eke the thimble, but applied thereto in 
 careless haste, as her mistress rings the bell ; in an»y one of these three 
 cases the print left by the thimble will be as unlike the prototype as 
 a brass-jack. 
 
 Now you must understand that not one of these was the true cause of 
 the confusion in my Uncle Toby's discourse ; and it is for that very 
 reason I enlarge upon them so long, after the manner of great physiolo- 
 gists, to show the world what it did not arise from. 
 
 What it did arise from I have hinted above, and a fertile source of 
 obscurity it is, and ever will be, and that is the unsteady uses of words 
 which have perplexed the clearest and most exalted understandings. 
 
 It is ten to one (at Arthur's) whether you have ever read the literary 
 histories of past ages ; if you have, what terrible battles, yclept logoma- 
 chies, have they occasioned and perpetuated with so much gall and 
 ink shed, that a good-natured man cannot read the accounts of them 
 without tears in his eyes. 
 
 Gentle critic ! when thou hast weighed all this, and considered 
 within thyself how much of thy own knowledge, discourse and conver- 
 sation has been pestered and disordered at one time or other by this, 
 and this only ; what a pudder and racket in councils about oWio. and 
 virbaTacTL^, and in the schools of the learned about power, and about 
 spirit ; about essences, and about quintessences ; about substances, and 
 about space. What confusion in greater theatres from words of little 
 meaning, and as indeterminate a sense. When thou considerest this, thou 
 wilt not wonder at my Uncle Toby's perplex"ties, thou wilt drop a tear 
 » of pity upon his scarp and his counterscarp, his glacis and his covered 
 
 * way, his ravelin and his half-moon. 'Tvvas not by ideas, by heaven ! 
 
 • his life was put in jeopardy by words. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 When my Uncle Toby got his map of Namur to his mind, he began 
 immediately to apply himself, and with the utmost diligence, to the 
 
VOL. II.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 47 
 
 study of it ; for nothing being of more importance to him than his re- 
 covery, and his recovery depending, as you have read, upon tlie passions 
 and affections of his mind, it behoved him to take the nicest care to 
 make himself so far master of his subject as to be able to talk upon it 
 without emotion. 
 
 In a fortnight's close and painful application — which, by-the-by, did 
 my Uncle Toby's wound upon his groin no good — he was enabled, by the 
 help of some marginal documents at the feet of the elephant, together 
 with Gobesius's military architecture and pyroballogy, translated from ; 
 the Flemish, to form his discourse with passable perspicuity ; and before 
 he was two full months gone he was right eloquent upon it, and could 
 make not only the attack of the advanced counterscarp with great order, 
 but having by that time gone much deeper into the art than what his 
 first motive made necessary, my Uncle Toby was able to cross the Maes 
 and Sambre, make diversions as far as Vau ban's line, the abbey of 
 Salsines, &c., and give his visitors as distinct a history of each of their 
 attacks as of that of the gate of St. Nicolas, w^here he had the honour to 
 receive his wound. 
 
 But the desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever 
 with the acquisition of it. The more my Uncle Toby pored over his 
 map, the more he took a liking to it. By the same process and elec- 
 trical assimilation, as I told you, through which I ween the souls of 
 connoisseurs themselves, by long friction and incubation, iiave the 
 happiness at length to get all be-virtued, be-pictured, be-butterflied, and 
 be-fiddled. 
 
 The more my Uncle Toby drank of this sweet fountain of science, the 
 greater was the heat and impatience of his thirst, so that, before the 
 first year of his confinement had well gone round, there was scarce a 
 fortified town in Italy or Flanders of which, by one means or other, he 
 had not procured a plan, reading over as he got them, and carefully col- 
 lating therewith the histories of their sieges, their demolitions, their 
 improvements and new works, all which he would read with that intense 
 application and delight that he would forget himself, his wound, his 
 confinement, his dinner. 
 
 In the second year my Uncle Toby purchased Ramelli and Cataneo, 
 translated from the Italian ; likewise Stevinus, Moralis, the Chevalier 
 de Ville, Lorini, Cochorn, Sheeter, the Count de Pagan, the Marshal 
 Vauban, Mons. Blondel, with almost as many more books of military 
 architecture as Don Quixote was found to have of chivalry, when the 
 curate and barber invaded his library. 
 
 Towards the beginning of the third year, which was in August, '9,9, 
 my Uncle Toby found it necessary to understand a little of projectiles ; 
 and having judged it best to draw his knowledge from the fountain-head, ■ 
 he began with N. Tartaglia, who, it seems, was the first man who 
 detected the imposition of a cannon-ball's doing all that mischief under 
 the notion of a right line. This N. Tartaglia proved to my Uncle Toby 
 to be an impossible thing. 
 
 Endless is the search of truth! 
 
 No sooner was my Uncle Toby satisfied which road the cannon-ball 
 did not go but he was insensibly led on, and resolved in his mind to 
 inquire and find out which road the ball did go ; for which purpose he 
 was obliged to set off afresh with old Maltus, and studied him devoutly. 
 
48 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. II. 
 
 He proceeded next to Galileo and Torricellius, wherein, by certain 
 geometrical rules, infallibly laid down, he found the precise path to be a 
 parabola, or else an hyperbola, and that the parameter or latus rectum 
 of the conic section of the said path, was to the quantity and amplitude 
 in a direct ratio, as the whole line to the sine of double the angle of 
 incidence formed by the breach upon an horizontal plane ; and that the 
 semi-parameter — stop, my dear Uncle Toby, stop — go not one foot 
 further into this thorny and bewildered track ; intricate are the steps ! 
 intricate are the mazes of this labyrinth ! intricate are the troubles which 
 the pursuit of this bewitching phantom Knowledge will bring upon thee ! 
 O, my Uncle ! fly — fly — fly from it as from a serpent ! Is it fit, good- 
 natured man, thou should'st sit up with the wound upon thy groin 
 whole nights baking thy blood with hectic watchings ? Alas ! 'twill 
 exasperate thy symptoms, check thy perspirations, evaporate thy spirits, 
 waste thy animal strength, dry up thy radical moisture, bring thee into 
 a costive habit of body, impair thy health, and hasten all the infirmities 
 of thy old age. O, my Uncle ! my Uncle Toby. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 I WOULD not give a groat for that man's knowledge in pencraft who 
 does not understand this : that the best plain narrative in the world, 
 tacked very close to the last spirited apostrophe to my Uncle Toby, 
 would have felt^'both cold and vapid upon the reader's palate ; there- 
 fore I forthwith put an end to the chapter, though I was in the middle 
 of my story. 
 
 Writers of my stamp have one principle in common with painters. 
 Where an exact copying makes our pictures less striking, we choose the 
 less evil, deeming it even more pardonable to trespass against truth than 
 beauty. This is to be understood d:«w^/^«^ j«//j; but be it as it will, 
 as the parallel is made more for the sake of letting the apostrophe cool 
 than anything else, 'tis not very material whether upon any other score 
 the reader approves of it or not. 
 
 In the latter end of the third year, my Uncle Toby perceiving that the 
 parameter and semi-parameter of the conic section angered his wound, 
 he left off the study of projectiles in a kind of a hufl", and betook 
 himself to the practical part of fortification only, the pleasure of which, 
 like a spring held back, returned upon him with redoubled force. 
 
 It was in this year that my uncle began to break in upon the daily 
 regularity of a clean shirt, to dismiss his barber unshaven, and to allow 
 his surgeon scarce time sufficient to dress his wound, concerning himself 
 so little about it as not to ask him once in seven times' dressing how it 
 Avent on, when, lo ! all of a sudden — for the change was as quick as 
 lightning — he began to sigh heavily for his recovery, complained to my 
 father, grew impatient with the surgeon ; and one morning, as he heard 
 his foot coming upstairs, he shut up his books, and thrust aside his in- 
 struments, in order to expostulate with him upon the protraction of his 
 cure, which, he told him, might surely have been accomplished at least 
 \>y that tirne. He dwelt long upon the miseries he had undergone, a;i4 
 
VOL. II.] TRISTRAM SHAND V. 49 
 
 the sorrows of his four years' melancholy imprisonment, adding, that 
 had it not been for tlie kind iooks and fraternal cheerings of the best of 
 brothers, he had long since sunk under his misfortunes. My father was 
 by. My Uncle Toby's eloquence brouglit tears into his eyes ; 'twas 
 unexpected. My Uncle Toby by nature was not eloquent ; it had the 
 greater effect. The surgeon was confounded. Not that there wanted 
 grounds for such, or greater, marks of impatience, but 'twas unexpected 
 too. In the four years he had attended him he had never seen anything 
 like it in my Uncle Toby's carriage, he had never once dropped one 
 fretful or discontented word ; he had been all patience, all submission, 
 i We lose the right of complaining sometimes by forbearing it ; but we 
 oftener treble the force. I'he surgeon was astonished ; but much more 
 so when he heard my Uncle Toby go on, and peremptorily insist upon 
 his healing up the wound directly, or sending for Monsieur Ronjat, the 
 king's Serjeant- surgeon, to do it for him. 
 
 The desire of life and health is implanted in man's nature ; the love 
 of liberty and enlargement is a sister passion to it. These my Uncle 
 'J oby had in common with his species ; and either of them had been 
 sufficient to account for his earnest desire to get well and out of doors. 
 But I have told you before that nothing wrought with our family after 
 the common way ; and from the time and manner in which this eager 
 desire showed itself in the present case the penetrating reader will sus- 
 pect there was some other cause or crotchet for it in my Uncle Toby's 
 head. There was so ; and 'tis the subject of the next chapter to set 
 forth what that cause and crotchet was. 1 own, when that's done, 'twill 
 be time to return back to the parlour fireside, where we left my Uncle 
 Toby in the middle of his sentence. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 When a man gives himself up to the government of a ruling passion, 
 or, in other words, when his hobby-horse grows headstrong, farewell 
 cool reason and fair discretion. 
 
 My Uncle Toby's wound was near well, and as soon as the surgeon 
 recovered his surprise, and could get leave to say as much, he told him 
 'twas just beginning to incarnate, and that if no fresh exfoliation hap- 
 pened, which there were no signs of, it would be dried up in five or 
 six weeks. The sound of as many olympiads twelve hours before would 
 have conveyed an idea of shorter duration to my Uncle Toby's mind. 
 The succession of his ideas was now rapid ; he broiled with impatience 
 to put his design in execution ; and so, without consulting further with 
 any soul living, which, by-the-by, I think is right, when you are pre- 
 determined to take no one soul's advice, he privately ordered Trim, his 
 man, to pack up a bundle of lint and dressings, and hire a chariot and 
 four to be at the door exactly by twelve o'clock that day, when he knew 
 my father would be upon 'Change. So, leaving a bank-note upon the 
 table for the surgeon's care of him, and a letter of tender thanks for his 
 brother's, he packed up his maps, his books of fortification, his instru- 
 ments, &c., and by the help of a crutch on one side and Trim on the 
 Qtlier^ my Uncle Toby embo-rk^d for Sl^andy Hall, 
 
5o TRISTRAM SHANDY. [VOL. II. 
 
 The reason, or rather the rise, of this sudden demigration was as 
 follows : — 
 
 The table in my Uncle Toby's room, and at which the night before 
 'thi^ change happened he was sitting with his maps, &c., about him, 
 being somewhat of the smallest for that infinity of grea.t and small 
 instruments of knowledge which usually lay crowded upon it, he had 
 the accident, in reaching over for his tobacco-box, to throw down his 
 compasses, and in stooping to take the compasses up, with his sleeve 
 he threw down his case of instruments and snuffers ; and as the dice 
 took a run against him in his endeavouring to caJch the snuffers in 
 falling, he thrust Mons. Blondel off the table and Count de Pagan on 
 top of him. 
 
 'Twas to no purpose for a man, lame as my Uncle Toby was, to think 
 of redressing all these evils by himself ; he rung his bell for his ma'i 
 Trim. — " Trim," quoth my Uncle Toby, " pr'ythee see what confusion 
 I have here been making. I must have some better contrivance." — • 
 Trim : " Canst not thou take my mle, and measure the length and 
 breadth of this table, and then go and bespeak me one as bigagrdn ?" 
 — *' Yes ; an' please your honour," replied Trim, making a bow, ** but 
 I hope your honour will be soon well enough to get down to your country 
 seat, where, as your honour takes so much pleasure in fortification, we 
 could manage this matter to a T." 
 
 I must here inform you that this servant of my Uncle Toby's, wlio 
 went by the name of Trim, had been a corporal in my uncle's own com- 
 pany. His real name was James Butler, but having got the nickname 
 of Trim in the regiment, my Uncle Toby, unle-s when he ha|)pened 
 to be very angry with him, would never call him by any other name. 
 
 The poor fellow had been disabled for the service by a wound on 
 his left knee by a musket-bullet at the battle of I^anden, which was 
 two years JDefore the affair of Namur ; and as the fellow was well- 
 beloved in the regiment, and a handy fellow into the bargain, my Uncle 
 Toby took him for his servant, and of excellent use was he, attending 
 my Uncle Toby in the camp and in his quarters as valet, groom, barber, 
 cook, semps!er, and nurse; and indeed, from first to last, waited upon 
 him and served him with great fidelity and affection. 
 
 My Uncle Toby loved the man in return, and what attached him 
 more to him still was the similitude of their knowledge ; for Corporal 
 Trim (for so for the future I shall call him) by four years' occasional 
 attention to his master's discourse upon fortified towns, and the advan- 
 tage of prying and peeping continually into his master's plans, &c.j, 
 exclusive and besides what he gained hobby-horsically as a body- 
 servant — lion hobby-horsical per se — had become no mean proficient in 
 the science, and was thought by the cook and chambermaid to know 
 as much of the nature of strongholds as my Uncle Toby himself. 
 
 I have but one more stroke to give to finish Corporal Trmi's cha- 
 racter, and it is the only dark line in it. The fellow loved to advi-e, 
 or rather to hear himself talk ; his carriage, however, was so perfectly 
 respectful, 'twas easy to keep him silent when you had him so ; but 
 set hi^ tongue a-going, you had no hold of him ; he was voluble ; the 
 eternal interlardings of **your honour,''with the respectfulness of Corporal 
 Trim's manner, interceding so strong in behalf of his elocution, that 
 though you might have been incommoded, you could not well be angr^% 
 
VOL.11.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 5I 
 
 My Uncle Toby was seldom either the one or the other with him, or, at 
 least, this fault m Trim broke no squares with them. My Uncle Toby, 
 as I said, loved the man ; and besides, as he ever looked upon a faithful 
 servant but as an humble friend, he could not bear to stop his mouth. 
 Such was Corporal Trim. 
 
 **If I durst presume," continued Trim, "to give your honour my 
 advice, and speak my opinion in this matter." — "Thou art welcome, 
 Trim,'' quoth my Uncle Toby ; *' speak, speak what thou thinkest upon 
 the subject, man, without fear." — '* Why, then," replied Trim (not 
 hanging his ears and scratching his head like a country lout, but), 
 stroking his hair back from his forehead, and standing erect as before 
 his division, " I think," quoth Trim, advancing his left, which was his 
 lame leg, a little forwards, and pointing with his right hand open 
 towards a map of Dunkirk which was pinned against the hangings, 
 ** I thick," quoth Corporal Trim, "with humble submission to your 
 honour's better judgment, that these ravelins, bastions, curtain-., and 
 horn-works, make but a poor, contemptible, fiddle-faddle piece of 
 work of it here upon paper, compared to what your honour and I could 
 make of it were we in the country by ourselves, and had but a rood or 
 ii rood and a half of ground to do what we pleased with. As summer is 
 coming on," continued Trim, " your honour might sic out of doors and 
 give me the nography " — (" Call it ichnography, " quoth my uncle) — '' of 
 the town or citadel your honour was pleased to sit down before, and I will 
 be shot by your honour upon the glacis of it if I did not fortify it to your 
 honour's mind." — " I dare say thou wouldst, Trim," quoth my uncle. — 
 " For if your honour," continued the Corporal, "could but mark me the 
 polygon, with its exact lines and angles " — " That I could do very 
 w^eli," quoth my Uncle " — " I would begin w4th the fosse, and if your 
 honour ci'uld tell me the proper depth and breadth " — *' I can, to a 
 hair's breadth, Trim," replied my uncle — " I would throw out the earth 
 upon this hand towards tlie town for the scarp, and on the other hand 
 towards the campaign for the counterscarp " — "Very right, Trim,'* 
 quoth my Uncle Toby — " And when I had sloped them to your mind, 
 an' please your honour, I would face the glacis, as the finest fortifications 
 are done in Flanders, with sods, and as your honour knows they should 
 be, and I would make the walls and parapets with sods too" — "The 
 best engineers call them gazons, Trim,"said my uncle Toby — " Whe- 
 ther they are gazons or sods, is not much matter," replied Trim. " Your 
 honour knows they are ten times beyond a facing either of brick or 
 stone." — " I know they are. Trim, in some respects,'' quoth my Uncle 
 Toby, nodding his head ; " for a cannon-ball enters into the gazon right 
 onwards without bringing any rubbish down with it, which might fill the 
 foss^ (as was the case at St. Nicolas's Gate) and facilitate the passage 
 over it." 
 
 *' Your honour understands these matters," replied Corporal Trim, 
 " better than any officer in His Majesty's service ; but would your 
 honour please to let the bespeaking of the table alo'.ie, and let us but go 
 into the country, I would work under your honour's directions like a 
 horse, and make fortifications for you something like a tansy, with all 
 their batteries, saps, ditches, and pallisadoes, that it should be worth all 
 the world's riding twenty miles to go and see it." 
 
 My Uncle Toby blushed as red as scarlet as Trim V\^ent on, but it was 
 
S2 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vOL.lt 
 
 not a blush of guilt, of modesty, or of anger — it was a blush of joy; he 
 was fired with Corporal Trim*s project and description. ** Trim," said 
 my Uncle Toby, ** thou has said enough." — ** We might begin the cam- 
 paign," continued Trim, *' on the very day that His Majesty and the allies 
 take the field, and demolish them town by town as fast as '* — "Trim," 
 quoth my uncle Toby, " say no more." — " Your honour," continued 
 Trim, *' might sit in your arm-chair (pointing to it) this fine weather, 
 giving me your orders, and I would" — " Say no more, Trim," quoth 
 my Uncle Toby. — ** Besides, your honour would get not only pleasure and 
 good pastime, but good air, and good exercise, and good health, and your 
 honour's wound would be well in a month." — " Thou hast said enough, 
 Trim," quoth my Uncle Toby, (putting his band into his breeches- 
 pocket). '' I like thy project mightily." — " And if your honour pleases, 
 I'll this moment go and buy a pioneer's spade to take down with us, 
 and I'll bespeak a shovel and a pickaxe, and a couple of" — " Say no 
 more, Trim," quoth my Uncle Toby, leaping up upon one leg quite over- 
 come with rapture, and thrusting a guinea into Trim's hand. **Trim," 
 said my Uncle Toby, *' say no more ; but go down, Trim, this moment, 
 my lad, and bring up my supper this instant." 
 
 Trim ran down and brought up his master's supper, to no purpose. 
 Trim's plan of operation ran so in my Uncle Toby's head, he could not 
 taste it. ** Trim," quoth my Uncle Toby, *' get me to bed." 'Twas 
 all one. Corporal Trim's description had fired his imagination. My 
 Uncle Toby could not shut his eyes. The more he considered it, the 
 more bewitching the scene appeared to him ; so that two full hours 
 before daylight he had come to a final determination, and had con- 
 certed the whole plan of his and Corporal Trim's decampment. 
 
 My Uncle Toby had a little neat country-house of his own in the 
 village where my lather's estate lay at Shandy, which had been left him 
 by an old uncle, with a small estate of about one hundred pounds a 
 year. Behind this house, and contiguous to it, was a kitchen-garden 
 of about half an acre ; and at the bottom of the garden, and cut off from 
 it by a tall yew-hedge, was a bowling-green, containing just about as 
 much ground as Corporal Trim wished for. So that as Trim uttered 
 the words, "A rood and a half of ground to do what they would with," 
 this identical bowling-green instantly presented itself, and became 
 curiously painted, all ai once, upon the retina of my Uncle Toby's 
 fa«icy, which was the physical cause of making him change colour, 
 or at least of heightening his l)lush to that immoderate degree I 
 spoke of. 
 
 Never did lover post down to a beloved mistress with more heat and 
 expectation than my Uncle Toby did to enjoy this self-same thing in 
 private. I say in private ; for it was sheltered from the house, as I told 
 you, by a tall yew- hedge, and was covered on the other three sides from 
 mortal sight by rough holly and thick -set flowering shrubs— so that the 
 idea of not being seen did not a little contribute to the idea of pleasure 
 preconceived in my Uncle Toby's mind. Vain thought ! However 
 thick it was planted about, or private soever it might seem, to think, 
 dear Uncle Toby, of enjoying a thing which took up a whole rood and 
 a half of ground, and not have it known ! 
 
 How my Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim managed this matter, with 
 the history of their campaigns, which were no way barren of events, 
 
VOL.11.] TRISTRAM SHANDr. 53 
 
 may make no uninteresting under-plot in the epitasis and working'up 
 of this drama. At present the scene must drop, and change for the 
 parlour fireside. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 '*What can they be doing, brother?" said my father.— ** 1 think," 
 replied my Uncle Toby, takmg, as I told you, his pipe from his mouth, 
 and striking the ashes out of it as he began his sentence, "1 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 there's Susannah running 
 down the garden there." — " 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 
 in 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." 
 
 " Mayhap, brother," replied my uncle, *' 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." 
 
 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 style the aposiopcsis. 
 
 But whether the snapping of my father's tobacco-pipe so critically 
 happened through accident or anger \Till be seen in due time. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Though my father was a good natural philosopher, yet he was something 
 of a moral philosopher too ; for which reason, when his tobacco-pipe 
 snapped 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 vio- 
 lence in the world ; and, to give action still the more emphasis, he 
 started up 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. 
 
54 ITRISTRAM SHANDY. [vOLo IL 
 
 ** * Not choose,' " quoth my father, repeating my Uncle Toby's words, 
 ** ' to let a mail come so near ! ' By heaven, brother Toby, you would 
 try the patience of a 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." 
 
 It is said in Aristotle's masterpiece, " 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 looked hori- 
 zontally. 
 
 " Then, brother Toby," replied my father, " I will tell you." 
 
 *' Everything in this world," continued my father (filling a fresh 
 pipe), ' ' everything in this earthly v/orld, my dear brother Toby, has 
 two handles." — **Not always," quoth my Uncle Toby. — "At least," 
 replied my father, "every one 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 of all the parts which constitute 
 the whole of that animal called v/oman, and compare them analo- 
 gically" "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 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. And at tliis hour it is a thing full as pro- 
 blematical as the subject of the dissertation itself — considering the con- 
 fusion and distresses of our domestic 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. 
 
 CHAPTER VHI. 
 
 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. Slap; 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 speak- 
 ing, the man perhaps has scarce had time to get on his boots, 
 
 If the hypercritic will ^o 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 
 
iroL, Il.J TRISTRAM SHANDY. 55 
 
 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, adjuring and detesting the jurisdiction of all other pen- 
 dulums whatever. 
 
 I would therefore desire him to consider that it is but poor eight 
 miles from Shandy Hall to Dr. Slop's house, and that whilst Obadiah 
 has been going the 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 tv/o 
 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 hypercritic is intractable, alleging that two minutes and thiitcen 
 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 dram.atically, 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 tiiat 
 Obadiah had not gone 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. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Imagine to yourself a little, squat, uncourily figure of a D/-J^^op, of 
 about four feet and a half perpendicular height, with a breadth of back 
 and a sesquipedabty of belly which might have done honour to a 
 serge.int in the ILrse Guards. 
 
 Such were the outlines 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 mmd by three strokes as three hundred. r t^ ci ' 
 
 Imagine such an one, for such, I say, were the outlmes of l-'r. blop s 
 figure, coming slowly along, foot by foot, waddling through the dirt 
 upon the vertebrae of a little diminutive pony, of a pretty colour, but 
 of strength, alack ! scare 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 nionster of a 
 coach-horse pricked into a full gallop, and making all practicable speea. 
 the adverse way. j • *• 
 
 Pray, sir, let me interest you a moment in this description. 
 
 Had Dr. Slop beheld Obadiah a mile oif, posting in a narrow lane 
 
56 TRISTRAM SHAND Y. [vol. it. 
 
 directly towards him at that monstrous rate, splashing and plunging 
 like a devil through thick and thin as he approached, would not such a 
 phenomenon, 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 rencontre — so impromptu, 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 stirmp — in losing which he lost his seat. And in 
 the multitude of all these losses (which, by-the-by, shows 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 style 
 and manner of a pack of wool, and without any other con-equence 
 from the fall save that of beinij left, as it would have been, with the 
 broadest part of him sunk about twelves inches deep in the mire. 
 
 Obadiah pulled off his cap twice to Dr. Slop ; once as he was fall- 
 ing, and then again when he saw him seated. Ill-timed complaisance ! 
 had not the fellow better have stop[)ed his horse, and got off and 
 helped 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 nn 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. 
 
 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 occa- 
 sioned more surprise to them ; for as the accident happened so near the 
 house as not to make it worth while for Obadiah to remount him, 
 Obs-diah h?4 led him in as he was, unwiped, unappointed, uncinnealed^ 
 
Vol. il] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 57 
 
 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 hplding his hand), with all the majesty of mud ; 
 his hinder parts, u|5n which he had received his fall, totally be- 
 smeared, 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 h^d beheld Dr. Slop in 
 that piqkle could have dissented from so mucl^at least of my Uncle 
 Toby's opinion : " That mayhap his sister might not care to let such 
 a Dr. Slop come near her.*' But it was the Ar^umentum 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, though, it is certain, one moment's reflection in my father 
 might have solved it, for he had apprised Dr. Slop but the w«k 
 before that my mother was at her full reckoning, and as the doctor had 
 heard nothing since, 'twas natural and very politic 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 investi- 
 gation, running, like thehypercritic'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 irreconcilable 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. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 Writing, when properly managed — as you may be sure I think mine 
 is — is but a dLflferent name for conversation. As no one who knows 
 what he is about in good company would venture to talk all ; so no 
 author \iho 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 
 lis my own. 
 
St TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. ri. 
 
 '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 fot a while. 
 
 Let the reader imagine, then, that Dr. Slop has told his tale, and \xt 
 what words, and with what aggravations his fancy chooses. Let him 
 su{)pose that Obadiah has told his tale also, and with such rueful looks 
 of affected concern as he thinks will best contrast the two figures as 
 they stand by each other. Let him imagine that my father has stepped 
 up.^tairs to see my mother ; and, to conclude this work of imagination, 
 let him imagine the doctor washed, rubbed down, condoled with, 
 felicitated, got into a pair of Obadiah's pumps, stepping forward 
 towards the door upon the very point of entering upon action. 
 
 Truce, truce, good Dr. Slop ! stay thy obstetric 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 openation ! 
 Hast thou, Dr. Slop, hast thou been entrusted with the secret articles 
 of this solemn treaty wliich has brought thee into this place? Art thou 
 aware that, at thi^ instant, a daughter of Lucina is put obstetrically 
 over thy head? Alas ! 'tis too true. Besides, great son of Pilumnus, 
 wirat can'st thou do ? Thou liast come fortli unarmed ; thou hast left 
 thy tire ttte^ and all thy instruments of salvation and deliverance beliind 
 thee. By heaven ! at tliis moment they are hanging up in a green 
 l>aize bag, betwixt thy two pistols, at thy bed's head ! Ring, call, send 
 Obadiah l3ack 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." 
 
 CHAPTER Xn. 
 
 ** Your sudden and unexpected arrival," quoth my Uncle Toby, ad- 
 dressing himself to Dr. Slop (all three of them sitting down to the lire 
 together, as my Uncle Toby began to speak), *' instantly brought the 
 great Stevinus into my head, who, you must know, is a favourite author 
 v/ith me." — " Then," added my father, making use of the argument ad 
 crumetmnt^ " I wdl lay twenty guineas to a single crown-piece (which 
 will serve to give away to Obadiali 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 feare^^l 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 curtains and horn- 
 works." — " That, I daresay you would not," quoth Dr. Slop, inten*upt- 
 ing 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 ; Ue would grow testy upon k 
 
VOL.il] TRISTRAM SHAND\, 5^ 
 
 at any time ; but to be broke iii upon by one in a serious di.^ course 
 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 
 curtains my brother Shandy mentions here have nothing to do with 
 bedsteads, though 1 know Du Cange says, * That bed-curtains, in all 
 probability, have taken their name from them.' But the curtain, sir, 
 is the word we use in fortification for that part of the wall or rampart 
 which ]ies between the two bastions and joins them. Besiegers seldom 
 offer to carry on their attacks directly against the curtain," continued 
 my Uncle Toby ; '* to make sure, we generally choose to place ravelins 
 before them, taking care only to extend them beyond the fosse or ditch. 
 The common men, v. ho know very little of fortification, confound the 
 ravelin and the half- moon together, though 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 curtain, it is a ravelin ; and when a ravelin 
 stands before a bastion, then the ravelin is not a ravelin, it is % 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 curtain, '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 fiither, **that the noble science of defence has its weak sides, as 
 well as others." 
 
 ** As for the horn-works ["heigh-ho!" sighed my father] which," 
 continued my Uncle Toby, *' my brother was speaking of, they are a very 
 considerable part of an outwork. They are cnlJed by the French engineers 
 ouvrage-a-corne, and we generally make them to cover such places as 
 we suspect to be weaker than the rest ; they are formed by two epaule- 
 ments or demibastions ; they are very pretty, and if you would take a 
 walk, I'll engage to show you one well worth your trouble. I own," 
 continued my Uncle Toby, "when we crown them they are much 
 stronger, but then they are veiy expensive and take up a great deal of 
 ground ; so that, in my opinion, they are of most 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 1 Here you have 
 got us, I know not hov/, not only .^ouse 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 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, palisadoes, ravelins, half-moons, 
 and such trumpery, to be proprietor of Namur, and of all the towns in 
 Flanders with it." 
 
6o TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. il. 
 
 My Uncle Toby was a man patient of injuries ; not from want of 
 courage. I have told you, in the fifth chapter of this second book, 
 ** that he was a man of courage ;" and I 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 in- 
 sensibility 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 magic, 
 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 though I would not 
 depreciate what the study of the LitercB Humaniores at the university 
 have done for rae 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 
 wliich 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 sourness of temper, though this never transported 
 him to anything which looked like malignancy, yet, in the little rubs 
 and vexations of life, *twas apt to show itself in a droUish 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 
 his 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 con- 
 cerned), 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 
 whicR rose about St evinus. 
 
VOL. 11.] TRISTRAM SHAND Y. 6i 
 
 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?" — Oh, 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 ma« ; 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 adding children to 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. 
 
 CHAPTER Xni. 
 
 " 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." 
 
 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 further off than 
 the opposite side of the way. 
 
62 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. il. 
 
 Some men would have aropped the subject of Steviuus; but my 
 Uncle Toby had no resentment in his heart, and he went on with the 
 subject, to show 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 wh'ch 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 Leydea through the Hague, I walked as far as 
 Shevling, 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 the matter of 500 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 outgone." 
 
 "The more fool Peireskius," replied Dr. Slop. But mark, 'twas 
 out of no contempt of Peireskius at all ; but that Peireskius 's indefati- 
 gable 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 appetitite for that or any other morsel of sound know- 
 ledge ? For, notwithstanding I know nothing of the chariot in ques- 
 tion," continued he, "the inventor of it must have had a very me- 
 chanical head ; and though I cannot guess upon what principles of 
 philosophy he has achieved it, yet certainly his machine has been con- 
 structed 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 v/ell if not better ; for, 
 as Peireskius elegantly expresses it, speaking of the velocity of its 
 motion. Tarn citus erat quani crat venttss ; 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, 
 though not without begging pardon for it at the samfj time, *' upon what , 
 principles was this self-same chariot set agoing?"-—" Upon very pretty 
 principles, to be sure," replied Dr. Slop, '* and I have oiten 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 
 he 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 both cost and eat a great deal." 
 
 " For that very reason," replied my father, '' * because they cost nothing, 
 
Vol. ii.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 5j 
 
 and because tlicy eat nothing, the scheme is bad. It is the consump- 
 tion of our products, as well as the manufacture of them, which gives 
 bread to the hungry, circulates trade, brings in money, and supports the 
 value of our lands ; and though I own, if I v/as a prince, I would 
 generously recompense the scientific 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 pro- 
 sperously with his disseriation 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 hQ spun by my father that day ; for as he opened his mouth to 
 begin the next sentence 
 
 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 pr'ythee, corporal," quoth my father, drolling, ** look first into 
 it, and see if thou canst spy aught of a saihng 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, nnd running over the 
 leaves, *' An' please your honour," said Trim, " I can see no ^uch 
 thing. However," continued the corporal, drolling a little in his turn, 
 *• rJl 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 fallen out, however," said Trim, "an' please 
 your honour; but it is not a chariot or anything like one." — " Pr'ythee, 
 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 hke 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 liaye nothing better to do, at least till Obadiah gets back, I should 
 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 
 itwo whole campaigns \v. Flanders as clerk to the chaplain of the regi- 
 
64 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. 11. 
 
 ment."— ** 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 halbert but for the poor fellow's misfortune." — Corporal 
 Trim laid his hand upon his heart, and made an humble bow to his 
 master ; ihen 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 ad- 
 vanced, nothii^g doubting, into the middle of the room, where he could 
 best see and be best seen by his audience. 
 
 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 composi- 
 tion of a divine of our church as well as yours, so that we run equal 
 risks." — " '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 bespeak- 
 ing attention with a slight movement of his right hand» 
 
 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 Rke his fire- 
 lock. 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 eighty- five degrees and a half upon the 
 plane of the horizon — wliich 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, it is certain, and it is done every 
 day, but with what effect I leave the world to judge I 
 
 The necessity of this precise angle of eighty-five degrees and a half 
 to a mathematical exactness does it not show us, by the way, how the 
 arts and sciences mutually befriend each other? 
 
 How the deuce Corporal Trim, who knew not so much as an acute 
 angle from an obtuse one, came to liil it so exactly, or whether it was 
 chance, or nature, or good sense, or imitation, &c., shall be commented 
 upon in that part of this cyclopaedia of arts and sciences where the ia* 
 
VOL. II.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 65 
 
 Btrumental parts of the eloquence of the senate, the pulpit, and flie bar, 
 the coffee-house, the bed-chamber, and fireside, 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 firm 
 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 — ad- 
 vanced 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 further 
 advanced, or the knee more bent, than what would allow him, me- 
 chanically, to receive an eighth part of his whole weight upon 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 sermoa 
 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 have 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 whethre the oldest 
 fellow of a college, or the Hebrew professor himself, could have much 
 jjiended it. 
 
 Trim made a bow, and read as follows : 
 
 THE SERMON. 
 
 "For we trust we have a good conscience."— Hebrews xiii. i8* 
 
 •Trust ! Trust we have a good conscience ! '* 
 
 [** Certainly, Trim," quoth my father, interruptmg 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 ooncitided so soon, Dr. Slop, that the 
 
66 TRISTRAM SHAND F. [vol. It 
 
 writer is of our cliurch? For aught I can see yet, he may be of any 
 church." — " Because," answered Dr. Slop, " if he was of ours, he diirst 
 no more take such a license than a bear by his beard. If in our com- 
 munion, sir, a man was to insult an apostle, a saint, or even the paring 
 of a saint's nail, he would have his eye 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 
 5''our honours," quoth Trim, "the Inquisition is the vilest" — "Pr'ythee 
 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 though I am no great advocate for it, yet in such cases 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 af it before," said my 
 Uncle Toby, hastily. "How came he there, Trim ?" — " Oh, sir, the 
 story will make your heslrt 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 fortification ; 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. A 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 gotten a little vent, "read on, and put this melancholy story out of 
 thy head. ,1 grieve that I interrupted thee ; but pr'ythee 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." 
 
 Corpors^l Trim wiped his face, and returning his handkerchief into his 
 pocket, and making a bow as he did it, he began again.] 
 
 THE SERMON. 
 
 "For wc trust we have a good conscience.' — Hebrews xiii. 18. 
 
 " 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," 
 
V6l. 11.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 67 
 
 [" 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, eitlier of appro- 
 bation 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, 
 ^nd 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 irusi^ as the 
 apostle intimates, but a matter of certainty and fact, that the con- 
 science 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 pre- 
 sent>y 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 
 hnpressed upon the mind of man that, did no such thing evtr happen 
 as that the conscience of a man, by long habits of sin, might (as the 
 Scripture assures us it may) insensibly become hard, and like some 
 tender parts of his body, by much stress and continual hard usage, lose 
 ^y degress 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 j 
 could no such thing as favour and affection enter this sacrpd Court ; did 
 Wit disiain to take a bribe in it, or was ashamed to show its face as an 
 advocate for an unwarrantal^le enjoyment ; or, lastly, were we assured 
 
 C ? 
 
6g TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. ii. 
 
 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 accusd 
 liim (as it seldom errs on that side) that he is guilty ; and, 
 unless in melancholy and hypochondriac cases, we may safely 
 ]:)ronounce upon it, that there are always sufficient grounds for the 
 accusation. 
 
 " But the converse of the proposition will not hold true ; namely j 
 that whenever there is guilt the conscience nmst 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 h^ thanks God his mind does not misgive 
 him, and that consequently hd 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 f2Lbts,^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 dfebauched in his prinli^ples',* 
 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. Siurely, 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 peradven- 
 ture 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 in life secured him against all temptation 
 of committing ; so that he lives as merrily," [** If he was of our church 
 though," quoth Dr. Slop, **he could not"] — *' sleeps as soundly in 
 his bed ; and at last meets death as unconcernedly, perhaps much more 
 ^o, than a much better naan." 
 
 [' *A11 this is impossible with us," quoth Dr. Slop, turning to my father ; 
 *'the case could not happen in our church." — "It happens in ours, how- 
 ever," replied my father," but too often." — "I own," quoth Dr. Slop (struck 
 a little with my father's irank acknowledgment), ** that a man in the 
 
VDL.ii.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 69 
 
 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 1 " said my Uncle Toby — though not accented as a note of 
 acquiescence, but as an interjection of that particular species of surprise 
 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 wTioIe 
 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 pr'ythee," 
 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 friend- 
 ship or pubUc 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 unrequitable 
 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 per- 
 plexities 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 its gates for him. What is there to affright his con- 
 science ? Conscience has got safely intrenched 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 otiicr. "Ay, ay, Trim," quoth my Uncle Toby, shaking his 
 head, "these are but sorry fortifications. Trim." — "Oh, 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, 
 
^6 TRISTRAM SHANDY. {vOL. ii. 
 
 **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 ser- 
 mon." — " '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. Seethe barefaced 
 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? Ay, 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. Oh Popery ! wliat hast thou to answer for? 
 when not content with the too many natural and fatal ways through 
 which the heart of man is every day thus treacherous to itself above ail 
 things, thou hast wilfully set open this wide gate of deceit before the 
 face of this unwary traveller, too apt, dod know.>, to go astray of 
 himself, and confidently speak peace to himself when there is no 
 peace. 
 
 ** Of tliis 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 him- 
 self, 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, though eqiially 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 jflattering 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 cir- 
 cumstances of folly and dishonour. 
 
 "When David sui-prised Saul sleeping in the cave, and cut 6ff the 
 skirt of his robe, we read his htmX smote him for what he had done. 
 But in the matter of Uriah, where a faithful and gallant servant, >vhom 
 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 
 liim, 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. 
 
VOL.n.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. yt 
 
 ** 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 there- 
 fore 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, a 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 rul^ will be infallible." [Here Dr. Slop fell asleep.] " Thou wilt 
 have conhrteuco towards God ; that is, have just grounds to believe the 
 judgment thou hast passed 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 aatUor 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 \um, 
 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 cheer- 
 ful countenance ; his mind shall tell him more than seven watchmen 
 that sitabove upon a tower on high." — [" A tower has no strength," quoth 
 my Uncle Toby, ** unless ^tis flanked."] — '* 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 clauses 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 tliose 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 com- 
 posed 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 dif- 
 fered," 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 watchmen upon 
 
^>L TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol ir. 
 
 the tower, who, I suppose, are all sentinels there, are more, an' please 
 your honour, than were necessary, and to go on at that rate would 
 harass a regiment all to pieces, which a commanding officer, who loves 
 his men, will never do if he can help it ; because two sentinels," 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 con- 
 siderable 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 
 curtain in his time ; or such a foss^ as we make, with a cuvette in the 
 middle of it, and with covered ways and counterscarps, palisadoed 
 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 in- 
 wardly, but not outwardly— the subject between my Uncle Toby and 
 Corporal Trim 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 deal- 
 ings 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 con- 
 nected together that you cannot divide these two tables even in imagina- 
 tion — though 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 — though 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 stress. 
 
 " 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 phy- 
 sician 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 
 50 much scorn as to put the matter past doubt. Well, notwithstaiid^ 
 
VOL. II.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 73 
 
 ing this, I put my fortune into the hands of the one and, what is 
 dearer still to me, I trust my Hfe 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 disadvan- 
 tage ; 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. Straight security for two of 
 the most valuable blessings — my property and my life. 
 
 '* 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 pomts of religion ; 
 goes twice a day to church, attends the sacraments, and amuses him- 
 self 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 that such a man, through 
 force of his 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, murders, 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, nor sex, nor 
 condition ? And as he fought under the banners of a religion which set 
 him loose from justice and humanity, he showed none ; mercilessly 
 trampled upon both ; heard neither the cries of the unfortunate, nor 
 pitied their distresses." 
 
74 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. It 
 
 [** I have been in many a battle, and please, your honour," quoth 
 Trim, sighing, **but never in so melancholy a one as this. I would not 
 have drawn a trigger 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 pr'ythee, Trim," said my father, ** make an end, for I see thou 
 hast 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 honour and service to God by actions which are a dis- 
 honour 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 reli- 
 gion, 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 
 j^ystem of cruelly 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 tormentt)rs, his body so wasted with 
 sorrow and confinement." — ["Oh! 'tis my brother," cried poor Trim, 
 in a most passionate exclamation, dropping the seimon upon thegi-ound, 
 and clapping his hands together, "I fear 'tis poor Tom."] My father's 
 and my Uncle Toby's hearts 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; pr'ythee begin the sentence again."]— " Behold this helpless 
 victim delivered up to his tormentors ; his body so wasted with sorrow 
 and conlinement, 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 han<^ing 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, 
 
VOL. 11.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 75 
 
 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 mayest go." — 
 '*I must stay and hear it, too," replied Trim, **if your honour will 
 allow me j though \ 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 whicli 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 trem- 
 bling lips, willing to take its leave, but not suffered to depart ! Behold 
 the unhappy wretch led back to his cell !" [" Then, thank God, how- 
 ever," quoth Trim, ** they have not killed him."] "See him dragged 
 out of it again to meet the flames, and the insults in his last agonieSj 
 which this principle — tliis principle, that there can be religion without 
 mercy — has prepared for him." 
 
 f " 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 shoukl 
 incense Dr. Slop, '* we shall never have done at this rate."] 
 
 ** llie surest way to try the merit of any disputed notion is to trace 
 down the consequences such a notion has produced, and compare tiiem 
 with the spirit of Christianity. 'Tis the short and decisive rule which 
 our Saviour has left us for these and such like cases, and it is worth a 
 thousand argiunents : * By their fruits ye shall know them.' 
 
 ** I will add no further 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 sus- 
 pect 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 trouble- 
 some neighbours ; and where they separate, depend upon it 'lis no 
 other cause but quietness' sake. 
 
 " Secondly. When a man, thus represented, tells you in any parii- 
 cular 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 gene- 
 rally 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 mined 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." 
 
 "Thou liast read the sermon extremely well, Trim," qtioth 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 
 WW the very reason, Trim," replied my father, *' whigh has made thee 
 
76 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. il, 
 
 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 main- 
 tain it, that the eloquence of our pulpits, with such subjects to inflame 
 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 dramatic ; and there is 
 something in that way of writing, when skilfully managed, which 
 catches the attention." — " We preach much in that way with u?," 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, *' whose 
 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 cer- 
 tainly by the parson of the parish." 
 
 The similitude of the style, 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 a 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, a posteriori^ the day after, when 
 Yorick sent a servant to my Uncle Toby's house to inquire after it. 
 
 It seems that Yorick, who was inquisitive after all kinds of know- 
 ledge, 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 through 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. 
 
 IjQwever, as the gentleman who did it was in penect cjiarity witli 
 
VOL. il] TRISTRAM shandy, 77 
 
 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 co 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. 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 Obadiah gained the two crowns without dispute, for he came in 
 jingling, with all the instruments in the green-baize 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 smile upon his coun- 
 tenance, " 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 wished 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.'' — "One would almost give up any- 
 thing," replied Dr. Slop.— "I beg your pardon," answered my Uncle 
 Toby. 
 
 ( 
 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 
 QOurse, for it should have been told a hundred and fifty pages ago, but 
 
ri TRISTRAM SHAND V. [vou a 
 
 that I foresaw then 'twould come in pat hereafter and be of more ad- 
 vantage 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 point previous thereto, you was led, I 
 think, into an opinion (and I am sure I said as nmch) 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 weiglit of things 
 in the scientific steelyard, the fulcrum, he would say, should be almost 
 invisible, to avoid all friction from popular tenets ^ without this the 
 minutiae of philosophy, which should 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, as she was kept down at the bottom 
 of her well as inevitably by a mistake in the dust of a butterfly's wing, 
 as in the disc 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 vras 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. ^Vhence 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 them- 
 selves." 
 
 *'^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 
 through the minute holes and small crevices whiofe human nature leaves 
 Tinguaitied, 
 
VOL. ii.J TRISTRAM SHANDY. 79 
 
 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 aryuing the matter with her as a Christian, and came to . 
 argue it over again with her as a philosopher, he had put liis whole V 
 strength to, depending indeed upon it as his sheet-anchor. It failed 
 him • though 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 a 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 l^e master of one of the 
 finest chains of reasoning in Nature, and have a wife at the same time 
 with such a head-piece 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 molher, had 
 more weight with him than all his other arguments joined together. I 
 will, therefore endeavour to do 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-by, was the groundwork of the first axiom 
 though 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 organization of the body in that part where 
 the soul principally took up her residence, he had made it the subject 
 of his inquiry to find out the identical place. 
 
 Now, from the best accounts be had been able to get of this matter, 
 he was satisfied it could not be where Descartes 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 ; though, to speak the 
 truth, as so many nerves did tenninate all in that one place, 'twas no bad 
 conjecture ; and my father had certainly fallen with that great philo- 
 sopher 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 mugket-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 bo4y ; 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 
 
go TRISTRAM SHAND K [VOL. It. 
 
 Coglionissimo Borri, the great Milanese physician, affirms, in a letter 
 to Bartholine, to have discovered in the cellulse 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 later and most 
 enlightened ages, there are two souls in every man living — the one, 
 according to thje great Metheglingius, being called the Animus, the 
 other the Aninia) — 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 re- 
 fined, so immaterial, and so exalted a being as the Aninia^ or even 
 the Animus^ taking up her residence, and sitting dabbling, like a tad- 
 pole, 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 headquarters 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 
 fnedulla oblongata, wherein it was generally agreed by Dutch anatomists 
 that all the minute nerves from all the organs of the seven senses con- 
 centered, 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 netwDik and texture in the cerebellum itself ; 
 which opinion he favoured. 
 
 "Wise men are, therefore, to be born feet first. 
 
 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 
 (wlratever he did to the family) as any one of the great heroes we speak 
 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 iad of wonderful slow parts — my father spelt all these 
 together into his opinion ; and as he 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 ceasons 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. It seems, he had scattered a word or two in his book in 
 iavour of the very thing which ran in my father's fancy (though not 
 with a view to the soul's good in extracting by the feet, as was my 
 father's system), but for reaons 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 show the world how it could 
 
VOL. n.l TRISTRAM SHANDY, 8t 
 
 happen that I should have the misfortune to be called Tristram, 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 
 Alquise, 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. 
 
VOLUME III. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 " I WISH, Dr. Slop," quoih 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) — '* 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 tiie 
 party wished at instantly to get up 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 per- 
 ceiving, 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 : 
 
fOU in.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 83 
 
 CHAPTER IL 
 
 "What prorligious armies you had in Flanders ! " 
 
 *' Brother Toby," replied my father, taking his wig from off his 
 head with liis right hand, and with his left pulling out a striped India 
 handkerchief from his riglit 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 iiis wig with his right hand 
 or with his left," have divided the greaie^-t kingdoms, and made the 
 crowns of the monarchs who governed them to totter upon their heads. 
 But need I tell youV'Sir, that the circumstances with which everything in 
 this world is begirt give everything in this world its dze 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 
 sViould 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 witliout 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 re>olved 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 
 him?elf, 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 •^^'orse 
 fashion for one in my father's situation. 
 
 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 
 
S4 TRISTRAM SHAND V, [vol. in. 
 
 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 re- 
 ceived his wound upon his groin. 
 
 My father knit his brow^, 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 on horseback. 
 
 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 a gumtasseta, and the body-lining to 
 it of a sarcenet or thin persian. 
 
 Zeno, Cleanthef:, Diogenes Babylonius, Dionysius Heracleotes, 
 Antipater, Pansetius, and Possidonius, amongst the Greeks ; Cato, and 
 Varro, and Seneca, amongst the Romans ; Pantenus, 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 cannot recollect, all pretended that their jerkins were 
 made after this fashion ; you might have rumpled and crumpled, and 
 doubled and creased, and fretted and frayed the outside of them all to 
 pieces, in short ; you might have played the very devii 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 threepenny-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, messieurs, 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 Qod ble§s 
 
^OL. III.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 85 
 
 you. Only nexth 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.'* 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Any man, madam, veasoning 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 up 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 screwed 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, confuria, like mad. Grant 
 me patience. What has confuria, con strepito, or any other hurly-burly 
 word whatever to do with hannony ? 
 
 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 tailor 
 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 ineX' 
 pressible good- will, my father at length went on as follows : 
 
 CHAPTER VI. i 
 
 " 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 bom, come with their heads foremost into the world ; but believe 
 me, dear Toby, the dangers and difficulties our children are beset with 
 after they are got forth into the world are enough ; little need is there 
 to expose them to unnecessary ones in their passage to it." — ** Are these 
 dangers," qupth my Uncle Toby, laying hi?, hand upon my father's knee, 
 
S6 TRISTRAM SHANDY. TvOL. in, 
 
 and looking up seriously in his face for an answer, *' are these dangers 
 greater nowaday??, brother, than in times past?" — "Brother Toby," 
 answered my father, *' if a child was but fairly born alive and healthy, 
 and the mother did well after it, our forefathers never looked further." 
 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 " Lillabiillero," 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Whilst my Uncle Toby v/as whistling " Lillabullero " to my father, 
 Dr. Slop was stamping and cursing 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 baize bag, with her 
 master's instruments in it, to Obadiah, she very sensibly exhorted him 
 k) 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 Vjag, 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 instru- 
 ments, 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 
 as would have been enough, had Hymen been taking a jaunt that way, 
 to have frightened him out of the country ; but when Obadiah accele- 
 rated this motion, and from a plain trot essayed 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 many political ill 
 consequences of this jingling never once entered his brain. He had, 
 however, this objection, which came hom^ to himself and weighed with 
 him, as it has oftimes done with the greatest patriots — The poor 
 fellow, sir, was not able to hear himself wjiistle. 
 
 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 
 
VOU III.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. g; 
 
 to contrive and to invent by what means he should put himself in a con- 
 dition 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 mixed case — mark, sirs, I say a mixed case, for 
 it was obstetrical, scriptical, squirtical, papistical, and, as far as the 
 coach-horse was concerned in it, cabal-listical 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 gripping 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 slip- 
 ping his har.d 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 un- 
 loosed 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 wilt be, had 
 that trial been made for thee — and it was fifty to one but it had— thy 
 affairs had not been so depressed (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 irreco- 
 verably abandoned, as thou hast been forced to leave them ! But 'tis 
 over, all but the account of them, which cannot be given to the curious 
 till I am got out into the world. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Great wits jump. For the moment Dr. Slop cast his eyes upon his 
 bag (wliieh he had not done till the dispute with my Uncle Toby 
 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 safe seven times told before one 
 half of tliese knots could have got untied." But here you must dis- 
 tinguish: the thought floated only in Dr. Slop's mind, without sail 
 or ballaift to it, as a simple proposition ; millions of which, as your 
 worship knows, are every day swimming quierly in the midtile of the 
 thm 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. 
 
88 TRISTRAM SHAND V. [VOL. itl. 
 
 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." 
 
 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 par- 
 ticular 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, tight, hard knots, made boftd 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 through the annulus or noose made 
 by the second implication of them, to get them slipped 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 pen- knife 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, either by extracting his favourite instru- 
 ment in a wrong direction, or by some misapplication of it, unfor- 
 tunately slipping, he had formerly, in a hard labour, knocked out three 
 of the best of his teeth with the handle of it. He tried his fingers ; 
 alas ! the nails of his fingers and thumbs were cut close. — '' The deuce 
 take it ! I can make nothing of it either way," cried Dr. Slop. — T4ie 
 trampling overhead near my mother's bedside increased. — "Plague take 
 the fellow ! I shall never get the knots untied as long as I live. [My 
 mother gave a groan.] Lend me your pen-knife ; I must e'en cut the 
 knots at last. Pugh, pugh ! — pshaw ! Lord ! I have cut my thumb 
 quite across to the very bone. Curse the fellow ! If there was not 
 
 another man within fifty miles I am undone for this bout. I 
 
 wish the scoundrel hanged. I wish he was shot." 
 
 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 
 passed it by — his prudence had triumphed ; as it was, he was deter- 
 mined 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 
 
-VOL. III.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 89 
 
 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 surprise, 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 Cervantic 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 provoca- 
 tions which could possibly happen to him ; which forms being well con- 
 sidered 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 poured out the tea. *Tis here, upon the 
 shelf over my head ; but if L^emember 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 ledger-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 wiy face, though without any suspicion, read aloud as follows, my 
 Uncle Toby whistling " Lillabullero " as loud as he could all the time. 
 
 The Latin text is here omitted.] 
 
 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 
 xay father; *' besides, ther« is something so whimsical, especially in the 
 
90 ■ TRISTRAM SHAND K [vol. hi, 
 
 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 
 in.*^tant 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 ** Lilla- 
 buUero," though not quite so loud as ]:)efore.] 
 
 *' By the authority of God Almighty, the Father, Son, and Holy 
 Ghost, and of the undeliled Virgin Mary, mother and patroness of our 
 Saviour, and of all the celestial virtues, angels, archangels, thrones, 
 dominions, powers, ciierubins 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 wortliy 
 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 damned (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 tor- 
 mented, disposed and delivered over with Dathan and Abiram, and 
 with those who say unto the Lord Cjod, * 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 hath tied), and make satisfaction (for them). 
 Amen. 
 
 " 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. 
 
 " 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."] 
 
 *' May St. John the Precursor, 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 lioly works are found pleasing to God Almighty, curse him 
 fObadiah). 
 
 ! "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 hxn.nd in tying these knots). 
 
 *'May he (Obadiah) be damned wherever be be, whether in the 
 house or the stables, the garden or the field, or the highway, or m the 
 path, or in the wood, or in the water, or in the church. May he be 
 cursed in livir>g, in dying." — [Here my Uncle Toby, taking the advantage 
 
Vol. in.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. ^i 
 
 of a minim in the second bar of his tune, kept whistling one continual 
 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, and in blood-letting. 
 
 " May he (Obadiah) be cursed in all the faculties of his body.. 
 
 ** 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, iu hi^ 
 forehead, in his ears, in his eyebrows, in his eyes, in his cheeks, in hi ; 
 jaw-bones, in his nostrils, in his fore-teeth and grinders, in his lips, iu 
 his throat, in his shoulders, in his v»'rists, in his arms, in his hands, in 
 his fingers. 
 
 "May he be damned in his mouth, in his breast, in his heart, and 
 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" — [My father shook 
 his head] — "and in his hips, and in his knees, his legs and feet and 
 loe-nails. 
 
 *• 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. 
 
 " May the Son of the living God, with all the glory of His ma- 
 jesty " — [Here my Uncle Toby, throwing back his head, gave a 
 monstrous, long, loud "whew — w — w !" something betwixt the inter- 
 jectional whistle of '* hey-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-ihe-by, was no small number — since what with the beards of your 
 celestial gods, and gods aerial and aquatic, 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 concubines (that is, in case 
 they wore 'em) — 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 stroked and sworn 
 by. By all these beards together then, I vow and protest, that of the 
 two bad cassocks I am worth in tlie world, I would have given the 
 better of them, as freely as ever Cid Hamet offered his, only to have 
 siood by and heard my Uncle Toby's accompaniment.] 
 
 *' 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 oi" 
 curses," replied Dr. Slop. — "So am not I," replied my uncle. --" But 
 he is cursed and damned 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 " whew— w— -w — " or interjectional 
 
912 TRISTRAM SHANDY. \you HI. 
 
 whistle, when the door hastily opening in the next chapter but one, put 
 an end to the affair. 
 
 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* 
 
 1*11 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 a connoisseur in painting, &c. &c. — the whole 
 set of them are so hung round and befetished with the bobs and trinkets 
 of criticism, or, to drop my metaphor, which by-the-by is a pity, for I 
 have fetched it as far as from the coast of Guinea — their heads, sir, are 
 struck 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 pricked 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 sub- 
 stantive 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 looked 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 
 critic ! " 
 
 " And for the epic poem your lordship bid me look at, upon taking the 
 length, breadth, lieight, 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 dimen- 
 sions." — '* 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 I for there is nothing 
 of the colouring of Titian, the expression of Rubens, the grace of Raphael, 
 the purity of Domenichino, the correggiescity of Correggio, the 
 learning of Poussin, the airs of Guido, the taste of the Caraccis, or the 
 grand contour of Angelo." 
 
 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 worlh ridtng on, 
 
VOL. ill.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 93 
 
 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 
 I 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 Emulphus a thousand times ; but, 
 like all other copies, how infinitely short of the force and spirit of the 
 original 1 It is thought to be no bad oath, and by itself passes very 
 well. ** G — d damn you." Set it beside Emulphus's *' G— d 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, 
 possessed more of the excellencies of a swearer, had such a thorough 
 knowledge of the human frame, its membranes, nerves, ligaments, knit- 
 tings 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 looked upon everything in a light very 
 different from all mankind, would, after all, never allow this to be an 
 original. He considered rather Emulphus'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 oftimes 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. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 ** Bless my soul ! My poor mistress is ready to faint, and her pains 
 ELFe gone, and the drops are done^ and the bottle of jalap is broke, anc( 
 
94 TRISTRAM SHANDY. tvoulll. 
 
 the iiurse 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 cdj^'e 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 mis- 
 tress ; but the midwife would gladly first give you an account how 
 things are, so desires you would ^o upstairs and speak to her this 
 mo 1) lent." 
 
 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 irarrison 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- ho rsical 
 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 h propos^ that, without it, the cut upon my thumb might have 
 been felt by the Shandy family as long as the Shandy family had 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 Let us ^q back to the in the last chapter. 
 
 It is a singular stroke of eloquence (at least it was so, when eloquence 
 flowed 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, iu the place you want it. 
 A .scar, an axe, a sword, a pinked doublet, a ru-ty helmet, a pound and 
 a half of potashes in an urn or a three-halfpenny pickle-pot, but above 
 all, a tender infant royally accoutred. Though, if it was too young, 
 and the oration as long as Tully's .secouvi Philippic, it must certainly 
 have deliled 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 opened the sluices, and turned 
 the brains, and shook the principles, and unhinged the politics of half a 
 nation. 
 
 These feats, however, are not to be done, except in those states and 
 times, I say, where orators wore mantler,, and pretty large cmes too, 
 my brethren, with some twenty or five-and-twenty yards of good purple 
 superfine marketable cloth in them, with large flowing folds and 
 douhiles, and in a great style of design. All which plainly shows, 
 may it please your worships, that the decay of eloquence, and the 
 
VOL. III.] TRISTRAM SHAND K 95 
 
 little good service it does at present, both within arid witho'at doors, 
 is owing to nothing ehe in the world but short coats and the disuse 
 of trunk-hose. We can conceal nothing under ours, madam, worth 
 showing. 
 
 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 vou have crushed all my knuckles into the bargain with them, 
 to a jelly." — "'Tis your own fault," said Dr. Slop. *' You should 
 have clinched your two fists together in 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 armed, or 
 the rivet wants closing, or else the cut on my thumb has made me a 
 little awkward, or possibly " — " 'Tis well," quoth my father, in- 
 terrupting the detail of possibilities, "that the experiment was not first 
 made upon my child's headpiece." — ** 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 gran ado), and turned 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, 
 1 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. 
 
 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 ail at your service ; and I freely make you a 
 present of 'cm on condition you give me ail your attention to this 
 chapter. 
 
 Though my father said "he knew not how it happened," yet he 
 knew very well how it happened, and at the instant he spoke it 
 was predetermined 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 ft-der to show 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 
 discour.se from one thing to another, since Dr. Slop had come into 
 the room, had lengtliened out so short a period to so inconceivable an 
 
96 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. in. 
 
 extent. ** I know not how it liappens," cried my father, " but it seems 
 an age." 
 
 * ' 'Tis owing entirely," quotn my Uncle Toby, " to the succession of 
 our ideas. 
 
 My father, who had an itch, in common ^^^th 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 snatched out of 
 his hands by my Uncle Toby, who (honest man !) generally took every- 
 thing 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 surprised 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 y so as to give a satisfactory account how we came by it." — 
 "What is that to anybody?" quoth my Uncle Toby. — "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 exist- 
 ence, 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 precon- 
 ceived* ' — ** 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 not," continued my father, "ia 
 
 • Fid^ Locke. 
 
VOL. iir.J TRISTRAM SHANDY. 97 
 
 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 lantern turned 
 round by the heat of a candle." — *' I declare," quoth my Uncle Toby, 
 "mine are more like a smoke-jack." — **Then, brother Toby, I have 
 nothing more to say to you upon the subject," said my father. 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 What a conjuncture 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 encom- 
 passed it about ; my Uncle Toby, in one of the finest dispositions for it 
 in the world— his head like a smoke-jack, the funnel unswept, and the 
 ideas whirling round and round about in it, all obfuscated and darkened 
 over with fuliginous matter ! By the tombstone of Lucian, if it is in 
 being ; if not, why then by his ashes !— by the ashes of my dear Rabe- 
 lais 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. 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 Though my father persisted in not going on with the discourse, yet he 
 could not get my Uncle Toby's smoke-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 steadfastly 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 i 
 discourse, the idea of the smoke-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 smoke-jack had not made a dozen revolu- 
 tions before he fell asleep also. Peace be with them both ! Dr. Slop is 
 above stairs ; Trim is busy in turning an old pair of jack-boots 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. 
 
98 ^ TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. m. 
 
 THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 No, I'll not say a word about it. Here it is. In publishing it I have ap- 
 pealed 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 — ay, and a discreet — taking care only, as I went along, 
 lo put into it all the wit and 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 Agalastes (speaking dispraisingly) sayeth that there may be 
 some wit in it for aught he knows, but no judgment at all. And Tripto- 
 lemus 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 is from west. So says Locke. So are trumpeting and hiccupping, 
 I say. But in answer to this, Didius, the great church lawyer, in his 
 code De fartandi 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 t£e 
 argument itself, in order to free it from any little motes or specks of opa- 
 cular matter, which, if left swimming therein, might hinder a conception 
 and spoil all. 
 
 Now, my dear anti- Shandeans and thrice-able critics 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 ; Monopolos, my politician ; Didius, my counsel ; 
 Kysarcius, my friend ; Phutatorius, my guide ; Gastripheres, the pre- 
 server of my life ; Somnolentius, the bahn 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 toc^ether. Believe 
 me, right worthy. 
 
 My most zealous wish and fervent prayer in your behalf, and in my 
 own to-^j 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 S[)are places of our brains, in such sort that they mi*^ht 
 continue to be injected and tunned into, according to the true intent 
 and meaning of my wish, until every vessel of them, both great and 
 small, be so replenished, saturated, and filled up therewith, that no 
 more, would it save a man's Hfe, 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 raptutes would you sit and 
 
VOL. lilj TRISTRAM SHANDY, 99 
 
 read ! But oh, 'tis too much. I am sick ; I faint away deliciously at 
 the thoiights of it ; 'tis more than nature can bear ! Lay hold of me, 
 I am giddy ; I am stone-blind, I'm dying, I am jrone ! 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 
 rallying and reparteeing of it, thiusting and parrying in one corner or 
 another, there would be nothin<T but mischief amongst us. Chaste stars ! 
 what biting and scratching, and what a racket and a clatter we should 
 make, what with breaking of heads, and 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 would 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 mysalf, 
 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 by-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 states 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 arctic and antarctic circles, where the 
 whole province of a man's concernments lies for near nine months 
 together wiihin the narrow compass of his cave, where the spirits are 
 compressed almost to nothing, and where ihe passions of a man, with 
 everything which belongs to them, are as frigid as the zone itself; 
 there thelea^t quantity of judj^ment 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. Ansiels 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 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 wc 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 slates and provinces which border upon the far side of the Gulf 
 of Finland and the north-east of the Baltic up to Petersburg, and 
 just stepping into Ingria, then stretching over directly from thence, 
 through the north parts of ihe Russian empire, leaving Siberia a Uttle 
 
 D 2 
 
loo TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. lit 
 
 upon the left hand, till we get into the very heart of Russian and 
 Asiatic Tartary. 
 
 Now, through 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, thej 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 run high, where we have more ambition, and pride, and envy, 
 and other 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 decent 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 
 s^tled 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 dialectic induction, 
 that I draw and set up this position as most true and veritable. 
 
 That of these two luminaries so much of their irradiations is 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 journey's end, some falling 
 with their noses perpendicularly into stinks, others horizontally with 
 their tails into kennels. Here one-half of a learned profession, tilting full 
 butt against the other half of it, and then tumbling and rolling, one half 
 over the other in the dirt, like hogs. Here, the brethren of another pro- 
 fession, who should have nm in opposition to each other, flying, on the 
 contrary, like a flock of wild geese all in a row the same way. What con- 
 
VOL. III.] TRISTRAM SHANDY-. : , , iui 
 
 fusion ! 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 foreground of this picture, a statesman, turning the political 
 wheel, like a brute, the wrong way round, against the stream of cor- 
 ruption — by heaven ! — instead of with it. 
 
 In this comer, 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 background upon his 
 knees, in tears, drawing the curtains of a mangled victim to beg his for- 
 giveness, offering a fee instead of taking one. 
 
 In that spacious hall, a coalition of the gown, from all the bars of it, 
 driving a 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 in- 
 veteracy in their manner of kicking it, as if the laws had been origin- 
 ally 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, surprises, 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 sad 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 under- 
 taken to clear up — and that is, how it c®mes 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 eveiy day upon trust, I maintain to be a 
 vile and a malicious report into the bargain. 
 
 This by the help of the observations 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, opaque 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 mitten, 
 
10- TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. fii. 
 
 a truckle for a pulley, 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 
 tvi^o 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 1 have to say in so clear a light as lo 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 sunbeams. 
 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 ; cind 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 orna- 
 ments (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 
 iutther 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 
 b tter without any knob at all? 
 
 Now tliese 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 
 prized, the most calamitous to be without, and consequently the hardest 
 to come at ; for all these reasons put together there is not a mortal 
 amongst 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 
 steadfastly 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 lay hold of the other, pray what do you think 
 would become of them ? Why, sirs, in spite of all their gravities, they 
 must even 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 sup- 
 ]:>osed 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 periwigs, 
 had they not raised a hue and a cry at the same time against the law-« 
 ful o^Tiers. 
 
VOL. in.] TRISTRAM SHANDx': io^ 
 
 '• 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 manner, 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 th;n 
 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 holloed 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 t«) it is not worth a groat, which, by-the-by, 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 qualiiy 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 further than when I see they are bespoke and 
 let grow on purpose to carry on this self-same imposture, for any pur- 
 pose, peace be with them ! Mark only, I write not for them. 
 
 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 sul)ject 
 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 
 rhetoric and conduct were at perpetual handy-cuffs. Never did the 
 parlour door open but his philosophy or his principles fell a victim t<^ 
 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 enough, 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. 
 
104 TRISTRAM SHAND K [vOL. HI, 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 When Corporal lYim had brought his two mortars to bear, he was 
 delighted with his handiwork 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 turned 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 ; otbervrise 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 
 thought of being unavoidably awakened by the first person who should 
 open the door was always uppermost in his imagination, and so 
 incessantly stepped 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. — "Zounds ! I 
 hate pei'petuities 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 de- 
 clare I would not hajve taken ten pounds for them." — " I'll pay you 
 the money, brother Shandy, " quoth my U^de Toby, looking at the 
 
VOL. III.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 105 
 
 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 a 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, v\ ith 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 expenses 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. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 " All is quiet and hush," cried my father, " at least above stairs. I 
 hear not one foot stirring. Pr'ythee, Trim, who is 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 has gone 
 right this day! Had I faith in astrology, brother," which, by-the-by, 
 my father had, " I would have sworn some retrograde planet was hang- 
 ing 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," re- 
 plied Trim, **in making a bridge."—*' 'Tis very obliging in him," quolh 
 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 cer- 
 
tc£ TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. Ill, 
 
 tainly out of its place here ; for by right it should come in, either 
 amongst the anecdotes of my Uncle Toby's amours with Widow Wad- 
 man, 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 am 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. " 
 
 ye Powers ! — for powers ye are, and great ones too — which enable 
 mortal man to tell a story worth the hearing, that kindly show him 
 where he is to begin it, and where he is to cikI it ; what he is to put 
 into it, and what he is to leave out ; how much of it he is to cast into 
 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 ? 
 
 1 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 t^uide-post, in the centre of tiiem, in mere charity to 
 direct an unceriaii: acvil which of the three he is to take. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 Though the shock my Uncle Toby received the year after the demolition 
 of Dunkirk, in his affair w^th Widow Wadman, had fixed him in a 
 1 ^solution 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 ray 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 lagging of points, I am persuaded the 
 hojiest 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 tOv>k ground before 
 the maid. 
 
 IMow, my dear friend Gariick, whom I have so mucli 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 
 patterns ? 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 Madame Pompadour's vis-d-vis^ than 
 betwixt a single amour and an amour thus nobly doubled, and going 
 upon all four, piancing throughout a grand drama. Sir, a simple. 
 
VOL. iii.l TRISTRAM SHANDY. 107 
 
 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 nioiiths 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 
 aimself, 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 keeps 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 riband ; 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 ray 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 
 custoxn 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 showing 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-mouthed 
 trumpet of fame earned it from ear to ear, till at length it reached 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 broken down, and, 
 somehow or other, crushed all to pieces that very night. 
 
 My father, as you have obser\'ed, 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 
 never could 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 befallen it, it proved an inex- 
 haustible fund of entertainment to him. "We]], but dear, Toby," my 
 father would say, ** do tell me seriously how this affair of the bridge 
 happened." — " Ifow 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." — " Pr'ythee, how was it then, Corporal?" my 
 father would say, turning to Trim. — "It was a mere misfortune; an* 
 please your honour, I was showing Mrs. Bridget our fortifications, and 
 in going too near the edge of the fo-se, I unfortunately slipped in." — 
 "Very well. Trim," my father would cry, smiling mysteriously, and 
 giving a nod, but without interrupting him. — " And being linked fast, 
 an' please your honour, arm-in-arm with Mrs, Bridget, I dragged her 
 
io8 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. in. 
 
 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 unfor- 
 tunate 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 Tyre. He would tell my 
 Uncle Toby of the catapultae of the Syrians, which threw such mon- 
 strous 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 pyraboli, 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 sallyport that ever was con- 
 structed 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 smoking 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 suf- 
 focating fit of violent coughing ; my Uncle Toby leaped np 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 
 cambric handkerchief, which he pulled out of his pocket. The affec- 
 tionate and endearing manner in which my Uncle Toby did these little 
 offices, cut my father through 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," ciuoth my father to himself, "if ever I 
 insult this worthy soul more ! ' 
 
 CHArTER XXV. 
 
 The drawbridge 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 instantly 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-by, was not far out in his con- 
 jectures) ; 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 
 Tpby took i^ --{ him in the fi^ld, convinced him that if the King of 
 
VOL. III.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 109 
 
 Spain and the Emperor went together by the ears, that England and 
 France and Holland must, by force of their pre- engagements, all enter 
 the lifts 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 
 prize-fighting 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 em- 
 powered 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 construc- 
 tion were insurmountable, for by this means, he would say, I leave one 
 half of my bridge in my enemy's possession, and pray of wiiat 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 to- 
 gether, 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 forward again to gain a passage, of 
 which sorts your worships 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'Hopital's invention, 
 which the younger Bernouilli has so well and learnedly described, as 
 your worships may see. Act. Enid. Lips. an. 1695, to these a lead 
 weight is an eternal balance, and keeps watch as well as a couple of 
 sentinels, masmuch as the construction of them was a curve line ap- 
 proximating 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. 
 
 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 
 jackboots having just then raised a train of miUtary ideas in his brains — 
 took it instantly for granted that Dr. Slop was making a model of the 
 
I lo TRISTRAM SHAND K [vol. hi, 
 
 Mar'^is d'Hopital's bridge. — " 'Tis veiy ol-liging in him/' (^uotli 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 in my Uncle Toby's imagina- 
 tion than what he had ; so, notwithstanding the catapulta and batteriiig- 
 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. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVII. 
 
 *'This unfortunate drawbridge 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." 
 
 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 thickened and gomg to break, and 
 pour down full upon his head. 
 
 I enter upon this part of my story in the most pensive and melan- 
 choly 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 dipped my pen into my ink, I 
 could not help taking notice what a cautious air of sad composure and 
 solemnity there appeared in my manner of doing it. Lord ! how dif- 
 ferent from the rash jerks and hair-brained 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 
 thy furniture, cost thee nothing ! 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 I won't go about to argue the point with you. 'Tis so, and I am per* 
 suaded of it, madam, as much as car^ be, '* that both man and woman 
 
VOL. III.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, lU 
 
 bear pain and sorrow (and, for aught I know, pleasure too) best in a 
 horizontal position." 
 
 The moment my father got up into his chamber, he threw hiniself 
 prostrate across his bed in the wildest disorder imaginable, but at 
 the same time in the most lamentable attitude of a man borne down 
 with sorrows, that evta- the eye of pity dropped 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 touched 
 the quilt ; his left arm hung insensibly over the side of the bed, his 
 knuckles reclining upon the handle of a vessel which peeped 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 fixed, inflexible sorrow took 
 possession of every line of his face. He sighed once, heaved his breast 
 often, but uttered not a word. 
 
 An old set-stitched 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 pulled out a cambric handkerchief, gave a low sigh, but held 
 his peace, 
 
 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 blessed 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 doifbt 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, yet it will not account for the extravagance of his 
 affliction, nor will it justify the unchristian manner he abandoned and 
 surrendered himself up to. 
 
 To explain this, I must leave him upon the bed for half an hour, and 
 my good Uncle Toby in his old fringed chair sitting beside him. 
 
 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. 
 
a2 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. lit 
 
 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 walked along, pointing 
 with the forefinger of his right hand to the word "crevice," in tlie 
 eighty-seventh page of the second 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 triumphed over Eugenius ; but I triumphed 
 over him as I do always, like a fool. 'Tis my comfort, however, I am 
 not an obstinate one ; therefore 
 
 I define a nose as follows — entreating only beforehand and beseeching 
 my readers, both male and female, of what age, complexion, and con- 
 dition 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 oiher part of my work, where the word 
 " nose " occurs, I declare by that word I mean a nose and nothing more 
 or less. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXII. 
 
 * Because," quoth my great-grandmother, repeating the words again^ 
 *you have little or no nose, sir." 
 *' 'Sdeath ! " cried my great-grandfather, clapping his^hand upon his 
 
VOL. III.] TRISTRAM SHAND Y, 113 
 
 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 akin among 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 great-grandfather, pressing upon 
 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. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXni. 
 
 " 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 grand- 
 father 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 oetter grace than my 
 father ; and as far as the 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 entered upon the odd fifty, he generally 
 gave a loud Hem I — rubbed the side of his nose leisurely with the flat 
 part of his fore-finger, inserted his hand cautiously betwixt his head and 
 the caul of his wig, looked 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, oh never, 
 may I lie 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 sucked 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 
 
1 14 TRISTRAM SHAND V, [vOL. lit 
 
 it out against an unintemipted succession of six or seven short noses. 
 And, for the contraiy 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 
 of- en boast that the Slmndy family ranked very high in King Harry the 
 Eighth'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 indeeil, he would cry, 
 shaking his head, and as vile a one for an unfortunate family, as ever 
 turned up tmmps ! 
 
 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-pro- 
 portioned faces, should comprehend a full third ; that is, measuring 
 downwards from the setting on of the hair. 
 
 What a life of it has an author, at this pass ! 
 
 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 whisked into at once, did he read such books, and ob- 
 serve 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 picked 
 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 con/esso, he will say, things were in a state of nature. The apple is as 
 much Frank's apple as John's. Pray, Mr. Shandy, what patent has 
 he to show 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 chewed it? 
 or when he roasted it ? or when he peeled it ? or when he brought it 
 
 home? or when he digested it? 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 Tribbnius 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 further trouble about the answer).— Brotli^r 
 Didius, Tiibonius will say, it is a decreed case, as you may' find it in the 
 fragments of Gregorius' and Hermbgenes' codes, and in all the codes frorti 
 
VOL.111.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 115 
 
 Justinian's o^c^w^n to the codes of Louis and Des Eaux, that the sweat of 
 a man's brows and the exudations of a man's brains are as much a 
 man's own property as are his breeches; which said exudations, &c., 
 being dropped upon the said apple by the labour of finding it, and 
 picking it up, and being, moreover, indissolubly wasted and as iiidis- 
 solubly annexed by the picker-up to the thing picked up, carried 
 home, roasted, peeled, eaten, digested, and so on, 'tis evident that the 
 gatherer of the apple, in so doing, has mixed up something which w as 
 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 liim, moreover, as much labour in cooking 
 and digesting as in the case above, so that they might well and truly be 
 said to be his own goods and chattels. Accordingly he held fast by 
 them, 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 breastworks 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, inas- 
 much 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 alllanguages, and in all possible types and bindings, have been fabri- 
 cated 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 oftimes sport with my Uncle 
 Toby's library, which, by-the-by, 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 
 1 oby 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 ray stoiy, 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 sentiments of love for thee, and venera- 
 tion for tihe excellency of thy character, that ever virtue and nature 
 kindled in a nephew's bosom. Peace and comfort rest for evermore 
 upon thy head 1 Thou envicdst no man's comforts, insultedst no man's 
 opinions. Thou blackenedst no man's character, devouredst no man's 
 bread ; gentl)^ with faithful Trim behind thee, didst thou amble round 
 the little circle of thy plea-ures, jostling no creature in thy way ; for 
 each one's service thou hadst a tear, for each man's need thou hadst a 
 shilling. 
 
 Whilst I am worth one to pay a weeder, thy path froni thy door to 
 thy bowling-green shall never be grown up. Whilst there is a rpod and 
 
ii6 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. ill. 
 
 a half of land in the Shandy family, thy fortifications, my dear Uncle 
 Toby, shall never be demolished. 
 
 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 
 Bmscambille 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 Chris- 
 tendom," said the stall man, " except what are chained 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 Picca- 
 dilly 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-by, 
 how delightful soever it may prove to the inamorato, is of little or no 
 entertainment at all to bystanders. My father's eye was greater than 
 his appetite, his zeal greater than his knowledge. He cooled ; his 
 affections became divided ; he got hold of Prignitz ; purchased Scro- 
 derus, Andrea Parseus, 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. 
 
 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 
 Pamphagas and Codes, written by the chaste pen of the ^reat and 
 venerable Erasmus, upon the various uses and seasonable applications 
 of long noses. Now, don't long 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 anyways help it ; or, if he is so nimble as to 
 slip on, let me beg of you, like an unbacked 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 
 
 hm. 
 
VOL. III.] TRISTRAM SHA ND Y 117 
 
 And pray who was Tickletoby's mare ? 'Tis just as discreditable 
 and unscholar-like a question, sir, as to have asked what year {ab. tirb. 
 con.) the Second Punic War broke out. "Who was Tickletoby's 
 mare ? " Read, read, read, read, my unlearned reader I reader ! 
 or, by the knowledge of the great saint Paraleipomenon, I tell you 
 beforehand 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 — motley emblem of my work ! — than the world, with 
 all its sagacity, has been able to unravel the many opinions, transactions, 
 and truths, which lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the black 
 one. 
 
 [Next follows a leaf with this 
 
 DIRECTION TO THE BOOKBINDER. 
 
 The Bookbinder is desired to cover both sides of this leaf with Marbled 
 Paper ; taking particular care to keep the folios clear, and likewise 
 to leave the proper viargins, ] 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVII. 
 
 ^^ Nihil me pcenitet hujtis nasi,^^ quoth Pamphagus ; that is, *' My nose 
 has been the making of me." — " Nee est cur pceniteat^^ replied Codes ; 
 that is, " How the deuce could such a nose fail ? " 
 
 The doctrine, you see, was laid down by Erasmus, as my father wished 
 it, with the utmost plainness ; but my father's disappointment was, in 
 finding nothing more from so able a pen but the bare fact itself, without 
 any of that speculative subtlety or ambidexterity of argumentation upon 
 it which heaven had bestowed upon man on purpose to investigate truth 
 and fight for her on all sides. My father pished and pughed at first 
 most terribly ; 'tis worth something to have a good name. As the 
 dialogue was of Erasmus my father soon came to himself, and read it 
 over and over again with great application, studying every word and 
 every syllable of it through and through in its most strict and literal 
 interpretation; he could still make nothing of it that way. "Mayhaps 
 there is more meant than is said in it," quoth my father. ** Learned 
 men, Brother Toby, don't write dialogues upon long noses for nothing. 
 I'll study the mystic and the allegoric sense ; here is some room to turn 
 a man's self in, brother." 
 
 My father read on. 
 
 Now, I find it needful to inform your reverences and worships that, 
 beside the many nautical uses of long noses enumerated by Erasmus, 
 the dialogist affirmeth that a long nose is not without its domestic con- 
 veniences also, for that in a case of distress, and for want of a pair of 
 bellows, it will do excellently well ad exitandum focum (to stir up the 
 fire). 
 
 Mature had been prodigal in her gifts to my father beyond measure, 
 
Ii8 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. ill. 
 
 and had sown the seeds of verbal criticism as deep within him as she 
 had done the seeds of all other knowledge ; so that he had got out his 
 penknife, and was trying experiments upon the sentence to see if he 
 could not scratch some better sense into it. *' I've got within a single 
 letter, Brother Toby," cried my father, "of Erasmus his mystic meaning." 
 — *' You are near enough, brother," replied my uncle, *' in conscience.'* 
 — -" Pshaw ! " cned my father, scratching oh ; "I might as well be seven 
 miles off. Tve done it," said my father, snapping his fingers. ''See, 
 my dear brother Toby, how I have mende I the sense," — " But you 
 have marred a word," replied my Uncle Toby. — My father put on his 
 spectacles, bit his lip, and tore out the leaf in a passion. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVIII. 
 
 O Slawke>3BERGIUS ! thou faithful analyser of my Disgrazias— thou 
 sad foreteller of so maiiy of the whips and short turns which, in one 
 stage or other of my life, have come slap upon me from the shortness of 
 my nose, and no other cause that I am conscious of. Tell me, Siaw- 
 kenbergius, what secret impulse was it, what intonation of voice, 
 whence came it, how did it sound in thy ears— art thou sure thou 
 heardst it ? — which first cried out to thee, *' Go, go, Slawkenbergius, 
 dedicate the labours of thy life, neglect thy pastimes, call forth all the 
 powers and faculties of thy nature, macerate thyself in the service of 
 mankind, and write a grand folio for them upon the subject of their 
 noses?" 
 
 How the communication was conveyed into Slawkenbergius's senso- 
 rium, so that Slawkenbergius should know whose finger touched the 
 key, and whose hand it was that blew the bellows, as Hafen Slawken- 
 bergius has been dead and laid in his grave above fourscore and ten 
 years, we can only raise conjectures. 
 
 Slawkenbergius was played upon, for aught I know, like one of 
 Whitefield's disciples — that is, with such a distinct intelligence, sir, of 
 which of the two masters it was that had been practising upon his 
 instrument as to make all reasoning upon it needless. 
 
 For in the account which Plafen Slawkenbergius gives the world of 
 his motives and occasions for writing and spending so many years of his 
 life upon this one w^ork, towards the end of his prolegomena — which, 
 by-the-by, should have come first, but the bookbinder has most injudi- 
 ciously placed it betwixt the analytical contents of the book and the 
 book itself — he informs his reader that ever since he had arrived at the 
 age of discernment, and was able to sit down coolly and consider 
 within himself the true state and condition of man, and distinguish the 
 main end and design of his being ; or, to shorten my translation, for 
 Slawkenbergius's book is in Latin, and not a little prolix in this 
 passage, "ever since I understood," quoth Slawkenbergius, "anything, 
 or rather what was what, and could perceive that the point of long 
 noses had been too loosely handled by all who had gone before, have I, 
 Slawkenbergius, felt a strong impulse, with a mighty and irr^sistiblQ 
 call within me, to gird up myself to this undertaking," 
 
VOL. 111.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 119 
 
 And to do justice to Slawkenbergius, he has entered tlie li-t with a 
 stronger lance and taken a much larger career in it tlian any one man 
 who had ever entered it before him ; and indeed in many respects 
 deserves to be en-niched as a prototype for all writers of vuluminous 
 works at least to model their books by ; for he has taken in, sir, the 
 whole subject, examined every part of it dialectically, then brought it 
 into full day, illucidating it with all the light which either the collision 
 of his own natural parts could strike, or the profoundest knowledge of 
 the sciences had empowered him to cast upon it — collating, collecting, 
 and compiling, begging, borrowing, and stealing, as he went along, all 
 that had been wrought or wrangled thereupon in the schools and porticoes 
 of the learned ; so that Slawkenbergius^s book may properly be con- 
 sidered, not only as a model, but as a thorough- stitched digest and 
 regular institute of noses, comprehending in it all that is or can be 
 needful to be known about them. 
 
 For this cause it is that I forbear to speak of so many otherwise 
 valuable books and treatises of my father's collecting, wrote either 
 plump upon noses, or collaterally touching them— such, for instance, as 
 Prignitz, now lying upon the table before me, who, with infinite learn- 
 ing, and from the most candid and scholarlike examination of above 
 four thousand different skulls in upwards of twenty charnel-houses in 
 Silesia, which he had rummaged, has informed us that the mensuration 
 ami configuration of the osseous or bony parts of human noses in any 
 given tract of country — except Crim Tartary, where they are all crushed 
 down by the thumb, so that no judgment can be formed upon them — 
 are much nearer alike than the world imagines ; the difference amongst 
 them being, he says, a mere trifle, not worth taking notice of ; but that 
 the size and jollity of every individual nose, and by which one nose 
 ranks above another and bears a higher price, is owing to the cartilaginous 
 and muscular parts of it, into whose ducts and sinuses the blood and 
 animal spirits being impelled, and driven by the wannth and force of 
 the imagination, which is but a step from it — bating the case of idiots, 
 •vvliom Prignitz, who had lived many j-ears in Turkey, supposes under 
 the more immediate tutelage of Heaven — it so happens, and ever must, 
 says Prignitz, that the excellency of the nose is in a direct aritlimetical 
 proportion to the excellency of the wearer's fancy. 
 
 It is for the same reason — that is, because 'tis all comprehended in 
 Slawkenbergius — that I say nothing likewise of Scroderus (Andrea) 
 who, all the world knows, set himself to oppugn Priirnitz with great 
 violence, proving it in his own way, first logically, and then by a series 
 of stubborn facts, " that so far was Prignitz from the truth in afhrming 
 that the fancy begat the nose, that, on the contrary, the nose begat the 
 fancy." 
 
 The learned suspected Scroderus of an indecent sophism in this ; and 
 Prignitz cried out aloud in the dispute that Scroderus had shifted the 
 idea upon him, but Scroderus went on maintaining his thesis. 
 
 My father was just balancing within himself which of the two sides 
 he should take in this affair, when Ambrose Paroeus decided it in a 
 moment ; and by overthrowing the systems both of Prignitz and 
 Scroderus, drove my father out of both sides of the controversy at 
 once. 
 
 Be witness — 
 
I20 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. in* 
 
 I don't acquaint the learned reader ; in saying it, I mention it only to 
 show the learned I know the fact myself. 
 
 That this Ambrose Parseus was chief surgeon and nose mender to 
 Francis IX. of B>ance, and in high credit with him and the two 
 preceding or succeeding kings (I know not which), and that, except in 
 the slip he made in his story of Taliacotius's noses and his manner 
 of setting them on, he was esteemed by the whole College of Phy- 
 sicians at that time as more knowing in matters of noses than any one 
 who had ever taken them in hand. 
 
 Now, Ambrose Paraeus convinced my father that the true and efficient 
 cause of what had engaged so much the attention of the world, and upon 
 which Prignitz and Scroderus had wasted so much learning and fine parts, 
 was neither this nor that, but that the length and goodness of the nose 
 was owing simply to the softness and llaccidity in the nurse's breast ; as 
 the flatness and shortness of puisne noses was to the firmness and elastic 
 repulsion of the same organ of nutrition in the hale and lively — 
 which, though happy for the woman, was the undoing of the child, in- 
 asmuch as his nose was so snubbed, so rebuffed, so rebated, and so 
 refrigerated thereby, as never to arrive ad mensuram suam legitima?n ; 
 but that in case of the flaccidity and softness of the nurse or mother's 
 breast, ** by sinking into it," quoth Parasus, *' as into so much butter, 
 the nose was comforted, nourished, plumped up, refreshed, refociUated, 
 and set a-growing for ever.'* 
 
 I have but two things to observe of Paroeus. First, that he proves 
 and explains all this with the utmost chastity and decorum of expression, 
 for which may his soul for ever rest in peace ! 
 
 And secondly, that besides the systems of Prignitz and Scroderus, 
 which Ambrose Paroeus his hypothesis effectually overthrew, it over- 
 threw at the same time the system of peace and harmony of our family, 
 and for three days together not only embroiled matters between my 
 father and my mother, but turned likewise the whole house and every- 
 thing in it, except my Uncle Toby, quite upside down. 
 
 Such a ridiculous tale of a dispute between a man and his wife never 
 surely, in any age or country, got vent through the key-hole of a street- 
 door ! 
 
 My mother, you must know But I have fifty things more 
 
 necessary to let you know first. I have a hundred difficulties which 
 I have promised to clear up, and a thousand distresses and domestic 
 I misadventures crowding in upon me — thick and threefold, one upon 
 the neck of another. A cow broke in (to-morrow morning) to my 
 Uncle Toby's fortifications, and eat up two ratios and a half of dried 
 grass, tearing up the sods with it, which faced his hornwork and covered 
 way. Trim insists upon being tried by a court-martial — the cow to be 
 shot — Slop to be crucifixed — myself to be tristrained^ and at my very 
 baptism made a martyr of. Poor unhappy devils that we all are ! I 
 want swaddling — but there is no time to be lost in exclamations. I 
 have left my father lying across his bed, and my Uncle Toby, in his 
 old fringed chair, sitting beside him, and promised I would go back to 
 them in half an liour, and five-and-thirty minutes are lapsed already. 
 Of all the perplexities a mortal author was ever seen in, this certainly 
 is the greatest ; for I have Hafen Slawkenbergius's folio, sir, to finish ; 
 a dialogue between my father and my Uncle Toby, upon the solution 
 
VOL. lit] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 121 
 
 of Prignitz, Scroderus, Ambrose Paraeus, Ponocrates, and Grangousier 
 to relate ; a tale <mt of Slawkenbergius to translate ; and all this in 
 five minutes less than no time at all. Such a head ! Would to heaven 
 my enemies only saw the inside of it ! 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIX. 
 
 There was not any one scene more entertaining in our family. And 
 to do it justice in this point (and I here put off my cap and lay it upon 
 the table, close beside my ink-horn, on purpose to make my declaration 
 to the -world concerning this one article the more solemn), that I believe 
 in my soul, unless my love and my partiality to my understanding blinds 
 me, the hand of the Supreme Maker and First Designer of all things 
 never made or put a family together (in that period at least of it 
 which I have sat down to write the story of) where the characters of it 
 were cast or contrasted with so dramatic a felicity as oucs was, for this 
 end ; or in which the capacities of affording such exquisite scenes, and 
 the powers of shifting them perpetually from morning to night, were 
 lodged and intrusted with so unlimited a confidence as in the Shandy 
 family. 
 
 Not any one of these was more diverting, I say, in this whimsical 
 theatre of ours, than what frequently arose out of this self- same chapter 
 of long noses, especially when my father's imagination was heated 
 with the inquiiy, and nothing would serve him but to heat my Uncle 
 Toby's too. 
 
 My Uncle Toby would give my father all possible fair-play in this 
 attempt; and with infinite patience would sit smoking his pipe for 
 whole hours together, whilst my father was practising upon his head, 
 and trying every accessible avenue to drive Prignitz and Scrodenis^s 
 solutions into it. 
 
 Whether they were above my Uncle Toby^s reason, or contrary to it, 
 or that his brain was like damp tinder, and no spark could possibly 
 take hold, or that it was so full of saps, mines, blinds, curtains, and 
 such military disqualifications to his seeing clearly into Prignitz and 
 Scroderus's doctrines, I say not ; let schoolmen, scullions, anatomists, 
 and engineers fight for it amongst themselves. 
 
 'Twas some misfortune, I make no doubt, in this affair that my father 
 had every word of it to translate for the benefit of my Uncle Toby, 
 and render out of Slawkenbergius's Latin, of wliich, as he was no great 
 master, his translation was not alwavs of the purest, and generally 
 least so where it was most wanted. This naturally opened a door to a 
 second misfortune, that in the warmer paroxysms of his zeal to open 
 my Uncle Toby's eyes, my father's ideas ran on as mtich faster than 
 the translation as the translation outmoved my Uncle Toby's ; neither 
 the one nor the other added much to the perspicuity of my father's 
 lecture. 
 
12:^ TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. hi. 
 
 CHAPTER XL. 
 
 The gift of ratiocination and making syllogisms — I mean in man, for 
 in superior classes of beings, such as angels and spirits, 'tis all done, 
 may it please your worships, as they tell me, by intuition ; and beings 
 inferior, as your worships all know, syllogize by their noses. Though 
 there is an island swimming in the sea, though not altogether at its 
 ease, whose inhabitants, if my intelligence deceives me not, are so 
 wonderfully gifted as to syllogize after the same fashion, and oftimes to 
 make very well out too ; but that is neither here nor there. 
 
 The gift of doing it as it should be amongst us, or the great and prin- 
 cipal act of ratiocination in man, as logicians tell us, is the finding out 
 the agreement or disagreement of two ideas one with another by the 
 intervention of a third, called the medius terminus^ just as a man, as 
 Locke well observes, by a yard finds two men's nine-pin alleys to be of 
 the same length, which could not be brought together to measure their 
 equality by juxtaposition. 
 
 Had the same great reasoner looked on "as my father illustrated his 
 system of noses, and observed my Uncle Toby's deportment, what 
 great attention he gave to every word, and as oft as he took his pipe 
 from his mouth, with what wonderful seriousness he contemplated the 
 length of it — surveying it transversely as he held it betwixt his finger 
 and his thumb, then foreright, then this way, and then that, in all its 
 possible directions and fore-shortenings — he would have concluded my 
 Uncle Toby had got hold of the medius terminus^ and was syllogizing 
 and measuring with it the truth of each hypothesis of long noses, in 
 order as my father laid them before him. This, by-the-by, was more 
 than my father wanted ; his aim in all the pains he was at in these 
 philosophic lectures was to enable my Uncle Toby not to discuss, but 
 comprehend — to hold the grains and scruples of learning, not to weigh 
 them. My Uncle Toby, as you will read in the next chapter, did 
 neither the one nor the other. 
 
 CHAPTER XLL 
 
 *' 'Tis a pity," cried my father one winter night, after a three hours' 
 painful translation of Slawkenbergius, ** 'tis a pity," cried my father, 
 putting my mother's thread-paper into the book for a mark as he spoke, 
 •' that truth, brother Toby, should shut herself up in such impregnable 
 fa-tnes>es, and be so obstinate as not to surrender herself sometimes up 
 upon the closest siege." 
 
 Now it happened then, as indeed it had often done before, that my 
 Uncle Toby's fancy, during the time of my father's explanation ■ of 
 Prignitz to him, having nothing to stay it there, had taken a short flight 
 to the bowling-green ; his body might as v/ell have taken a turn there 
 too, so that with all the semblance of a deep schoolman, intent upon 
 the medius tei-mimis^ my Uncle Toby was in fact as ignorant of the 
 
VOL. III.] TRIST'RAM SHAND V. 1 23 
 
 whole lecture, and all its pros and cons, as if my father had been 
 translating Haferi Slawkenbergius from the Latin tongue ir.to the 
 Cherokee. But the word sie,!?e, like a talismanic power, in my father's 
 metaphor, wafting back my Uncle Toby's fancy quick as a note cotild 
 follow the touch, he opened his ears, and my father observing that he 
 took his pipe out of his mouth and shuffled his chair nearer the table, 
 as with a desire to prolit, my father with great pleasure began his 
 sentence again, changing only the plan, and dropping the metaphor of 
 the siege of it, to keep clear of some dangers my father appreliended 
 from it. 
 
 ** Tis a pity,'* said my father, **that truth can only be on one side, 
 brother Toby, considering what ingenuity these learned men have all 
 shown in their solutions of noses." — " Can noses be dissolved ? " replied 
 my Uncle Toby. 
 
 My fatlier thrust back his chair, rose up, put on his hat, took four 
 long strides to the door, jierked it open, thiust his head half-way out, 
 shut the door again, took no notice of the bad hinge, returned to the 
 table, plucked my mother's thread-paper out of Slawkenbergius's book, 
 went hastily to his bureau, walked slowly back, twisting my mother's 
 thread-paper about his thumb, unbuttoned his waistcoat, threw my 
 mother s thread-paper into the fire, bit her satin pin-cushion in two, filled 
 his mouth with bran, confounded it ; but mark, the oath of confusion was 
 levelled at my Uncle Toby's brain, which was even confused enough 
 already ; the curse came charged only with the bran ; the bran, may it 
 please your honours, was no more than powder to the ball. 
 
 'Twas well my father's passions lasted not long, for so long as they 
 did last, they led him a busy life on't ; and it is one of the most unac- 
 countable problems that ever I met with in my observations of human 
 nature, that nothing should prove my father's mettle so much, or make 
 his passions go off so like gunpowder, as the unexpected strokes his 
 science met with from the quaint simplicity of my Uncle Toby's questions. 
 Had ten dozen of hornets stung him behind in so many different places 
 all at one time, he could not have exerted more mechanical functions in 
 fewer seconds, or started half so much, as with one single qu(zre of tiiree 
 words unseasonably popping in full upon him in his hobby horsical 
 career. 
 
 'Twas all one to my Uncle Toby ; he smoked his pipe on, with un- 
 varied composure ; his heart never intended offence to his brother, and 
 as his head could seldom find out where the sting of it lay, he always 
 gave my father the credit of cooling by himself. He was five niinu:es 
 and thirty- five seconds about it in the present case. 
 
 *' By all that's good," said my father, swearing, as he came to himself, 
 and taking the oath out of Ernulphus's digest of curses (though, to do 
 my father justice, it was a fault, as he told Dr. Slop in the affiiir of 
 Ernulphus, which he as seldom committed as any man upon earth). 
 ** By all that's good and great, brother Toby," said my father, *'il it 
 was not for the aids of philosophy, which befriend one so much as they 
 do, you would put a man beside all temper. Why, by the solutions of 
 noses, of which I was telling you, I meant, as you might have known 
 had you favoured me with one grain of attention, the various accounts 
 which learned men of different kinds of knowledge have given the 
 world of the causes of short and long noses." — '' There is no cause but 
 
124 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. m. 
 
 one," replied my Uncle Toby, ** why one man's nose is longer than 
 another's, but because that God pleases to have it so." — **That is 
 Grangousier's solution," said my father. — *' 'Tis He," continued my 
 Uncle Toby, looking up, and not regarding my father's interruption, 
 *' who makes us all, and frames and puts us together in such forms and 
 proportions, and for such ends, as are agreeable to his infinite wisdom." — 
 *' 'Tis a pious account," cried my father, ** but not philosophical ; there 
 is more religion in it than sound science." — 'Twas no inconsistent part of 
 ray Uncle Toby's character that he feared God and reverenced religion. 
 So the moment my father finished his remark, my Uncle Toby fell 
 a- whistling *' Lillabullero '* with more zeal (though more out of tune) 
 than usual. 
 
 ** What is become of my wife s thread-paper ? '* 
 
 CHAPTER XLII. 
 
 No matter. As an appendage to seamstressy, the thread-paper might 
 be of some consequence to my mother; of none to my father, as a mark 
 in Slawkenbergius. Slawkenbergius, in every page of him, was a rich 
 treasury of inexhaustible knowledge to my father. He could not open 
 him amiss ; and he would often say, in closing the book, that if all the 
 arts and sciences in the world, with the books which treated of them, 
 were lost — should the wisdom and policies of governments, he would 
 say, through disuse ever happen to be forgot, and all that statesmen 
 had wrote, or caused to be written, upon the strong or the weak sides 
 of courts and kingdoms, should they be forgot also — and Slawkenbergius 
 only left — there would be enough in him, in all conscience, he would 
 say, to set the world agoing again. A treasure, therefore, was he 
 indeed ; an institute of all that was necessary to be known of noses 
 and everything else. At matins, noon, and vespers was Hafen Slaw- 
 kenbergius his recreation and delight. 'Twas for ever in his hands. 
 You would have sworn, sir, it had been a canon's prayer-book — so 
 worn, so glazed, so contrited and attrited was it with fingers and with 
 thumbs, in all its parts, from one end even to the other. 
 
 I am not such a bigot to Slawkenbergius as my father. There is a 
 fund in him, no doubt; but in my opinion the best — I don't say the 
 most profitable, but the most amusing — part of Hafen Slawkenbergius 
 is his tales ; and, considering he was a German, many of them told not 
 without fancy. These take up his second book, containing nearly one- 
 half of his folio, and are comprehended in ten decades, each decade 
 containing ten tales. Philosophy is not built upon tales ; and there- 
 fore 'twas certainly wrong in Slawkenbergius to send them into the 
 world by that name. There are a few of them in his eighth, ninth, 
 and tenth decades, which, I own, seem rather playful and sportive 
 than speculative. But in general they are to be looked upon by the 
 learned as a detail of so many independent acts, all of them turning 
 round, somehow or other, upon the main hinges of his subject, and 
 collected by him with great fidelity, and added to his work as so many 
 illustrations upon the doctrines of noses. 
 
 As we have leisure enough upon our hands, if you give me leave 
 madam, FU tell you the ninth tale of his tenth decade. 
 
VOLUME IV. 
 
 SLAWKENBERGIUS'S TALE. 
 
 [The Latin is here omitted.] 
 
 It was one cool refreshing evening, at the close of a very sultry day in 
 the latter end of the month of August, when a stranger, mounted upon 
 a dark mule, with a small cloak-bag behind him, containing a few 
 shirts, a pair of shoes, and a crimson satin pair of breeches entered 
 the town of Strasburg. 
 
 He told the sentinel, who questioned him as he entered the gates, 
 that he had been at the Promontory of Noses, was going on to Frank- 
 fort, and should be back again at Strasburg that day month, on his 
 way to the borders of dim Tartary. 
 
 The sentinel looked up into the stranger's face. Never saw such a 
 nose in his life. 
 
 ** I have made a very good venture of it," quoth the stranger. So 
 slipping his wrist out of the loop of a black ribband, to which a short 
 scimitar was hung, he put his hand into his. pocket, and with great 
 courtesy touching the forepart of his cap with his left hand as he 
 extended his right, he put a florin into the sentinel's hand and passed 
 on. 
 
 " It grieves me," said the sentinel, speaking to a little dwarfish 
 bandy-legged drummer, "that so courteous a soul should have lost his 
 scabbard ; he cannot travel without one to his scimitar, and will not be 
 able to get a scabbard to fit in all Strasburg." — " I never had one," 
 replied the stranger, looking back to the sentinel, and putting his hand 
 up to his cap as he spoke ; *' I carry it," continued he, ** thus " — holding 
 up his naked scimitar, his mule moving on slowly all the time — **on 
 purpose to defend my nose." 
 
 '* It is well worth it, gentle stranger," replied the sentinel. 
 
 *"Tis not worth a single stiver, ' said the bandy-legged drummer; 
 *"tis a nose of parchment." 
 
 ** As I am a true Catholic — except that it is six times as big — 'tis a 
 nose," said the sentinel, ** like my own." 
 
 ** I heard it crackle," said the drummer. 
 
 ** By dunder," said the sentinel, **I saw it bleed." 
 
 ** What a pity," uied the bandy-legged drummer, " we did not hotlj 
 touch it I * 
 
126 Tristram shandy, [vol. tv. 
 
 At the very time that this dispute was maintaining by the sentinel 
 and the drummer, was the same point debating betwixt a trumpeter 
 and a trumpeter's wife, who were just then coming up, and had stopped 
 to see the stranger pass by. 
 
 " Benedicite, what a nose! 'Tis as long," said the IrumpeteL's wife, 
 ** as a trumpet." 
 
 "And of the same metal," said the trumpeter, "as you liear hj \\z 
 sneezing." 
 
 " 'Tis as soft as a flute," said slie. \ 
 
 "'Tis brass," said the trumpeter. 
 
 " 'Tis a pudding's end," said his wife. 
 
 *' I tell thee again," said the trumpeter ; '' 'tis a brazen nose." 
 
 " I'll know the bottom of it," said the trumpeter's wife, " for I will 
 touch it with my finger before I sleep." 
 
 The stranger's mule moved on at so slow a rate that he heard every 
 word of the dispute, not only betwixt the sentinel and the drummer, 
 but betwixt the trumpeter and the trumpeter's wife. 
 
 " No," said he, dropping his reins upon his mule's neck, and laying 
 both his hands upon his breast, the one over the other in a saint -like 
 position, his mule going on easily all the time; "no," said he, looking 
 up, " I am not such a debtor to the world, slandered and disappointed 
 as I have been, as to give it that conviction. No," said he, " my no.-e 
 
 shall never be touched whilst heaven gives me strength " — " To do 
 
 what ? " said a burgomaster's wife. 
 
 Tlie stranger took no notice of the burgomaster's wife— he was 
 making a vow to St. Nicolas : which done, having uncrossed his arms 
 with the same solemnity with which he crossed them, he took up the 
 reins of his bridle with his left hand, and putting his right hand mto his 
 bosom, with his scimitar hanging loosely to the wrist of it, he rode on 
 as slowly as one foot of the mule could follow another through the 
 principal streets of Strasburg, till chance brought him to the great inn 
 in the market-place, over against the church. 
 
 The moment the stranger alighted he ordered his mule to be led 
 into tlie stable, and his cloak-bag to be brought in ; then opening and 
 taking out of it his crimson satin breeches, put them on, and forthwith, 
 with his short scimitar in his hand, walked out to the grand parade. 
 
 The stranger had just taken three turns upon the parade when he 
 perceived the trumpeter's wife at the opposite side of it, so turning 
 short, in pain lest his nose should be attempted, he instantly went back 
 to his inn, undressed himself, packed up his crimson satin breeches, &c. , 
 in his cloak-bag, and called for his mule. 
 
 " I am going forwards," said the stranger, " iot Frankfort, and shall 
 be back at Strasburg this day month'" 
 
 " I hope," continued the stranger, stroking down the face of his mule 
 with his left hand as he was going to mount if, ** that you have been 
 kind to this faithful slave of mine ; it has carried me and my cloak-bag," 
 continued he, tapping the mule's back, * * above six hundred leagues." 
 
 " 'Tis a long journey, sir, replied the master of the inn, unless a man 
 has great business." — "Tut ! tut! " said the stranger, " I have been at 
 the Promontory of Noses, and have got me one of the goodliest and 
 jolliest, thank heaven, that ever fell to a single man's lot." 
 
 Whilst the stranger was giving this odd account of himself, the master 
 
VOL.Tv;] TRISTF.AM SHANDY, 127 
 
 of the imi and his wife kept both their eyes fixed full upon the stranger's 
 nose. "By St. Radagunda,'' said the Innkeeper's wife to herself, 
 ** there is more of it then in any dozen of the largest noses put together 
 in all Strasburg. Is it not," said she, whispering her husband in his 
 ear — *' is it not a noble nose? " 
 
 *' 'Tis an imposture, my dear," said the master of the inn ; " 'tis a false 
 nose." 
 
 " 'Tis a true nose," said his wife. 
 
 "'Tis made of fir-tree," said he; "I smell the turpentine.'* 
 
 *' There's a pimple on it," said she. 
 
 *"Tis a dead nose," replied the innkeeper. 
 
 * "Tis a live nose; and if I am alive myself," said the innkeeper's 
 wife, "I will touqh it." 
 
 " I have made a vow to St. Nicolas this day," said the stranger, " that 
 
 my nose shall not be touched till " Here the stranger, suspending his 
 
 voice, looked up. — " Till when ? " said she hastily. 
 
 *' It never shall be touched," said he, clasping his hands and bringing 
 
 them close to his breast, till that hour "—"What hour?" cried 
 
 the innkeeper's wife. — "Never, never!" said the stranger, "never 
 
 till I am got- " — " For heaven's sake, into what place ? '' said she. 
 
 The stranger rode away without saying a word. 
 
 The stranger had not got half a league on his way towards Frankfort 
 before all the -city of Strasburg was in an uproar alDOUt his nose. The 
 Compline bells were just ringing to call the Strasburgers to their 
 devotions, and shut up the duties of the day in prayer ; no soul in all 
 Strasburg heard them. The city was like a swarm of bees, men. women, 
 and children — the Compline bells tinkling all the time — flying here and 
 there, in at one door, out at another, this way and that way, long ways 
 and cross ways, up one street, down another street, in at this alley, out 
 at that. * ' Did you see it ? Did you see it ? Did you see it ? O did 
 you see it ? Who saw it ? Who did see it ? For mercy's sake, who 
 saw it?" 
 
 " Alack o' day ! I was at vespers. I was washing. I was starch- 
 ing. I was scourging. I was quilting. God help me, I never saw it. 
 I never touched it. Would I had been a sentinel, a bandy-legged 
 drummer, a trumpeter, a trumpeter's wife," was the general cry and 
 lamentation in every street and corner of Strasburg. 
 
 Whilst all this confusion and disorder triumphed throughout the great 
 city of Strasburg, was the courteous stranger going on as gently upon 
 his mule in his way to Frankfort as if he had no concern at all in the 
 affair ; talking all the way he rode in broken sentences, sometimes to 
 his mule, sometimes to himself, spmetimes to his Julia : — 
 
 " O Julia, my lovely Julia ! — nay, I cannot stop to let thee bite that 
 thistle — that ever the suspected tongue of a rival should have robbed me 
 of enjoyment when I was upon the point of tasting it, 
 
 * ' Pugh ! 'tis nothing but a thistle ; never mind it, thou shalt have 
 a better supper at night. 
 
 " Banished from my country, my friends, from tliee. 
 
 " Poor devil, thou'rt sadly tired with thy journey! Come, get on a 
 little faster. There's nothing in my cloak-bag but two shirts, a crimson 
 satin pair of breeches, and a fringed Dear Julia ! 
 
 "But why to Frankfort? Is it that there is a hand unfelt which 
 
128 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [VOL. IV. 
 
 secretly is conducting me througU tliese meanders and unsuspected 
 tracts ? 
 
 " Stumbling, by St. Nicolas, every step ! Why, at this rate we 
 shall be all night in getting in 
 
 ** To happiness. Oram I to be the sport of fortune and slander; 
 destined to be driven forth unconvicted, unheard, untouched. If so, 
 why did I not stay at Strasburg, where justice — but I had sworn ! — 
 Come, thou shalt drink — to St. Nicolas — O Julia ! — What dost thou 
 prick up thy ears at ? 'Tis nothing but a man," &c. 
 
 The stranger rode on communing in this manner with his mule and 
 Julia, till he arrived at his inn, where, as soon as he arrived, he alighted, 
 saw his mule, as he had promised it, taken good care of, took off his 
 cloak-bag, with his crimson satin breeches, &c., in it, called for an 
 omelet to his supper, went to his bed about twelve o'clock, and in five 
 minutes fell fast asleep. 
 
 It was about the same hour when the tumult in Strasburg being 
 abated for thaV night, the Strasburgers had got all quietly into their 
 beds, but not like the stranger, for the rest either of their minds or 
 bodies. Queen Mab, like an elf as she was, had taken the stranger's 
 nose, and, without reduction of its bulk, had that night been at the 
 pains of slitting and dividing it into as many noses of different cuts and 
 fashions as there were heads in Strasburg to hold them. The abbess of 
 Quedlingberg, who, with the four great dignitaries of her chapter, the 
 prioress, the deaness, the sub-chantress, and senior canon ess, had that 
 week come to Strasburg to consult the University upon a case of con- 
 science, was ill all the night. 
 
 The courteous stranger's nose had got perched upon the top of the 
 pineal gland of her brain, and made such rousing work in the fancies of 
 the four great dignitaries of her chapter, they could not get a wink of 
 sleep the whole night through for it ; there was no keeping a limb still 
 amongst them ; in short, they got up like so many ghosts. 
 
 The penitentiaries of the third order of St. Francis, the nuns of 
 Mount Calvary, the Prsemonstratenses, the Clunienses,* the Carthusians, 
 and all the severer orders of nuns who lay that night in blankets or 
 haircloth, were still in a worse condition than the Abbess of Quedling- 
 berg : by tumbling and tossing, and tossing and tumbling from one side 
 of their beds to the other the whole night long, the several sisterhoods 
 had scratched and mauled themselves all to death ; they got out of 
 their beds almost flayed alive ; everybody thought St. Antony had visited 
 them for probation with his fire ; they had never once, in short, shut 
 their eyes the whole night long from vespers to matins. 
 
 The nuns of St. Ursula acted the wisest : they never attempted to go 
 to bed at all. 
 
 The Dean of Strasburg, the prebendaries, the capitulars and domici- 
 liars (capitularly assembled in the morning to consider the case of 
 buttered buns), all wished they had followed the nuns of St Ursula's 
 example. In the hurry and confusion everything had been in the night 
 before, the bakers had all forgot to lay their leaven ; there were no 
 buttered buns to be had for breakfast in all Strasburg ; the whole close 
 of the cathedral was in one eternal commotion ; such a cause of restless- 
 
 * Hafen Slawkenbergius means the Benedictine nuns of Cluny founded in the 
 year 940 by Odo, Abbe de Cluny. 
 
VOL. IV.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 
 
 129 
 
 ness and disquietude, and such a zealous inquiry into the cause of that 
 restlessness had never happened in Strasburg since Martin Luther with 
 his doctrines had turned the city upside down. 
 
 If the stranger^s nose took this liberty of thrusting itself thus into the 
 dishes* of religious orders, &c., what a carnival did his nose make of it 
 in those of the laity, 'tis more than my peii, worn to the stump as it is, 
 has power to describe ; though I acknowledge [cries Slawkenbergius, 
 with more gaiety of thought than I could have expected from him], that 
 there is many a good simile now subsisting in the world which might 
 give my countrymen some idea of it ; but at the close of such a folio as 
 this, wrote for their sakes, and in which I have spent the greatest part of 
 my life, though I own to them the simile is in being, yet would it not be 
 unreasonable in them to expect I should have either time or inclination 
 to search for it? Let it suffice to say, that the riot and disorder it 
 occasioned in the Strasburghers' fantasies was so general, such an over- 
 powering mastership had it got of all the faculties of the Strasburghers' 
 minds, so many strange things with equal confidence on all sides, and 
 with equal eloquence in all places, were spoken and sworn to concern- 
 ing it, that turned the whole stream of all discourse and wonder towards 
 it ; every soul, good and bad, rich and poor, learned and unlearned, 
 doctor and student, mistress and maid, gentle and simple, nun's flesh 
 and woman's flesh in Strasburg, spent their time in hearing tidings 
 about it ; every eye in Strasburg languished to see it ; every finger, 
 every thifmb in Strasburg burned to touch it. 
 
 Now what might add, if anything may be thought necessary to add, 
 to so vehement a desire was tiiis, that the sentinel, the bandy-legged 
 drummer, the trumpeter, the trumpeter's wife, the burgomaster's 
 widow, the master of the inn, and the master of the inn's wife, how 
 widely soever they all differed every one from another in their testimo- 
 nies and descriptions of the stranger's nose, they all agreed together 
 in two points — namely, that he was gone to Frankfort, and would not 
 return to Strasburg till that day month ; and secondly, whether his nose 
 was true or false, that the stranger himself was one of the most perfect 
 paraf;;ons of beauty — the finest- made man, the most genteel, the most 
 generous of his purse, the most courteous in his carriage, that had ever 
 entered the gates of Strasburg ; that as he rode, with his scimetar slung 
 loosely to his wrist, through the streets, and walked with his crimson 
 satin breeches across the ])arade, 'twas with so sweet an air of careless 
 modesty, and so manly withal, as would have put the heart in jeopardy 
 {had his nose not stood in the way) of every virgin who had cast her 
 eyes upon him. 
 
 I call not upon that heart which is a stranger to the throbs and 
 yearnings of curiosity so excited, to justify the Abbess of Quedlingberg, 
 the prioress, the deaness, and sub-chantress, for sending at noonday for 
 the trumpeter's wife. She went through the streets of Strasburg with 
 her husband's trumpet in her hand — the best apparatus the straitness of 
 the time would allow her for the illustration of her theory. She stayed 
 no longer than three days. 
 
 • Mr. Shandy's compliments to orators : is very sensible that Slawkenbergius has 
 here changed his metaphor, which he is very guilty of; that as a translator Mr. 
 Shandy has all along done what be could to make him stick to it, but that here 'twas 
 inipossible. 
 
 I 
 
I30 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. iv. 
 
 Tlie sentinel and bandy -legjed drummer — nothing on this side of 
 old Athens could equal them ! They read their lectures under the city 
 gates to comers and goers, with all the pomp of a Chrysippus and a 
 Grantor in their porticoes. 
 
 The master of the inn, with his ostler on his left hand, read liis also 
 in the same style, under the portico or gateway of his stable-yard ; his 
 wife, hers more privately in a back room. All flocked to their lectures, 
 not promiscuously, but to this or that, as is ever the way, as faith and 
 credulity marshalled them. In a word, each Strasburger came crowd- 
 ing for intelligence, and every Sirasburgher had the intelligence he 
 wanted. 
 
 'Tis worth remarking, for the benefit of all demonstrators in natural 
 philosophy, &c., that as soon as the trumpeter's wife had finished the 
 Abbess of Quedlingberg's private lecture, and had begun to read in 
 /)ublic (which she did upon a sool in the middle of the great parade), she 
 mcommoded the other demonstrators mainly by gaining incontinently 
 the most fashionable part of the city of Strasburg for her auditory. 
 *' But when a demonstrator in philosophy," cries Slawkenbergius, 
 " has a trumpet for an apparatus, pray what rival in science can pretend 
 to be heard besides him ?" 
 
 Whilst the unlearned, through these conduits of intelligence, were 
 all busied in getting down to the bottoni of the well where Tmth 
 keeps her little court, were the learned in their way as busy in pumping 
 her up through the conduits of dialect induction. They concerned them- 
 selves not with facts — they reasoned. 
 
 Not one profession had thrown more light upon this subject than the 
 faculty, had not all their disputes about it run into the affair of wens 
 and oedematous swellings. They could not keep clear of them for their 
 bloods and souls. The stranger's nose had nothing to do with either 
 wens or oedematous swellings. 
 
 And if a suitable provision of veins, arteries, &c. , said they, was 
 not laid in for the due nourishment of such a nose, in the very first 
 stamina and rudiments of its formation, before it came into the world 
 (bating the case of wens), it could not regularly grow and be sustained 
 afterwards. 
 
 This was all answered by a dissertation upon nutriment, and the 
 effect which nutriment had in extending the vessels, and in the increase 
 and prolongation of the muscular parts to the greatest growth and ex- 
 pansion imaginable. In the triumph of which theory they went so 
 far as to affirm that there .was no cause in nature why a nose might not 
 grow to the size of a man himself. 
 
 The respondents satisfied the world this event could never happen to 
 them, so long as a man had but one stomach and one pair of lungs. For 
 the stomach, said they, being the only organ destined for the reception 
 of food, and turning it into chyle, and the lungs the only engine of san- 
 guification, it could possibly work off no more than what the appetite 
 brought it; or, admitting the possibility of a man's overloading his 
 stomach, nature had set bounds, however, to his lungs ; the engine was 
 of a determined size and strength, and could elaborate but a certain 
 quantity in a given time — that is, it could produce just as much blood as 
 was sufficient for one single man, and no more ; so that, if there was as 
 much nose as man, they proved a mortification must necessarily ensue. 
 
VOL. IV.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 131 
 
 and forasmuch as there could not be a support for both, that the nose 
 must either fall off frgm the man, or the man inevitably fall off from 
 his nose. r 
 
 Nature accommodates herself to these emergencies, cried the oppo- 
 nents, else what do you say to the case of a whole stomach, a whole pair 
 of lungs, and but half a man, when both his legs have been unfoiui- 
 nately shot off ? 
 
 He dies of a plethora, said they, or must spit blood, and in a foi't- 
 night or three weeks go off in a consumption. 
 
 It happens otherwise, replied the opponents. 
 
 It ought not, said they. 
 
 The more curious and intimate inquirers after Nature and her doings, 
 though they went hand in hand a <^ood way together, yet they ail 
 divided about the nose at last, almost as much as the faculty itseif. 
 
 They amicably laid it down that there was a just and geometrical 
 arrangement and proportion of the several parts of the human frame to 
 its several destinations, offices, and functions, which could not be 
 transgressed but within certain limits ; that Nature, though she sported, 
 she sported within a certain circle, and they could not agree about the 
 diameter of it. 
 
 The logician stuck much closer to the point before them than any of 
 the classes of the literati ; they began and ended with the word nc^se, 
 and had it not been for a pditio principii, which one of the ablest 
 of them ran his head against in the beginning of the combat, the whole 
 controversy had been settled at once. 
 
 A nose, argued the logician, cannot bleed without blood, and not 
 only blood, but blood circulating in it, to supply the phenomenon with 
 a. succession of drops — a stream being but a quicker succession of drops, 
 that is included, said he. Now death, continued the logician, being 
 nothing but the stagnation of the blood 
 
 I deny the definition. Death is the separation of the soul from the 
 body, said his antagonist. — Then we don't agree about our weapon, 
 said the logician. — Then there is an end of the dispute, replied the 
 antagonist. 
 
 The civilians were still more concise ; what they offered being more 
 in the nature of a decree than a dispute. 
 
 Such a monstrous nose, said they, had it been a true nose, could not 
 possibly have been suffered in civil society, and if false, to impose upon 
 society with such false signs and tokens was a still greater violation of 
 its rights, and must have had still less mercy shown it. 
 
 The only objection to this was, that if it proved anything, it proved 
 the stranger^s nose was neither true nor false. 
 
 This left room for the controversy to go on. It was maintained by 
 the advocates of the Ecclesiastic Court, that there was nothing to inhibit 
 a decree, since the stranger, ex ma'o motu^ had confessed he had 
 been at the Promontory of Noses, and had got one of the goodliest, &c. 
 &c. To this it was answered it was impossible there should be such a 
 ])lace as the Promontory of Noses, and the learned be ignorant where it 
 lay. The commissary of the Bishop of Strasburg undertook the advo- 
 cates' part, and explained this matter in a treatise upon proverbial 
 phrases, showing them that the Promontory of Noses was a mere 
 allegoric expression, importing no more than that Nature had given him 
 
132 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. iv." 
 
 a long nose : in proof of which, with great learning, he cited the under- 
 written authorities,* which had decided the point incontestibly, had it 
 not appeared that a dispute about some franchises of dean and chapter 
 lands had been determined by it nineteen years before. 
 
 It happened— I must not say unluckily for Truth, because they were 
 giving her a lift another way in so doing — that the two universities of 
 Strasburg (the Lutheran, founded in the year 1538 by Jacobus Sturmius, 
 counsellor of the Senate ; and the Popish, founded by Leopold, Arch- 
 duke of Austria), were during all this time employing the whole depth 
 of their knowledge (except just what the affair of the Abbess of 
 Quedlingberg required) in determining the point of Martin Luther's 
 damnation. 
 
 The Popish doctors had undertaken to demonstrate <i /r/t?^ that, 
 from the necessary influence of the planets on the twenty-second day of 
 October 1483 — when the moon was in the twelfth house ; Jupiter, 
 Mars, and Venus in the third ; the Sun, Saturn, and Mercury all got to- 
 gether in the fourth — he must in course and unavoidably be a damned 
 man, and that his doctrines, by a direct corollary, must be damned 
 doctrines too. 
 
 By inspection into his horoscope, where five planets were in union all 
 at once with Scorpio (in reading this my father would always shake his 
 head) in the ninth house, which the Arabians allotted to religion, it 
 appeared that Martin Luther did not care one sliver about the matter ; 
 and that from the horoscope directed to the conjunction of Mars they 
 made it plain likewise he must die cursing and blaspheming, with the 
 blast of which his soul (being steeped in guilt) sailed before the wind in 
 the lake of hell-fire. i 
 
 The little objection of the Lutheran doctors to this was, that it must 
 certainly be the soul of another man, bom October 22, '83, which was 
 forced to sail down before the wind in that manner, inasmuch as it 
 appeared from the register of Islaben, in the county of Mansfelt, that 
 Luther was not born in the year 1483, but in '84; and not on the 22nd 
 day of October, but on the loth of November, the eve of Martinmas- 
 day, from whence he had the name of Martin. 
 
 [I must break off my translation for a moment ; for if I did not, I 
 know I should be no more able to shut my eyes in bed than the Abbess 
 of Quedlingberg. It is to tell the reader that my father never read this 
 passage of Slawkenbergius to my Uncle Toby but with triumph — not 
 over my Uncle Toby, for he never opposed him in it, but over the 
 whole world. 
 
 Now you see, brother Toby, he would say, looking up, '*that 
 christian names are not such indifferent things.*' Had Luther here been 
 called by any other name but Martin, he would have been damned to 
 
 * Nonnulli ex nostratibus eadem loquendi formula utun. Quinimo et Logistae et 
 Canonistae— Vid. Parce Bar. e Jas. in d. L. Provincial. Constitut. de conjee, vid. Vol. 
 Lib. 4. Titul. I, N. 7, q[ua etiam in re conspir. On. de Promontorio Nas. 'J'ickmack. 
 ff. d. tit. 3, fol. 189, passim. Vid. Glos. de contrahend. empt. &c. necnon J. Scrudr. 
 in cap, § refut. ff. per totum, cum his cons. Rever. J. Tubal, Sentent. et prov. 
 cap. 9, fF. II, 12, obiter. V. et Librum, cui Tit. de Terris et Phras. Belg. ad fijiera, 
 cum Comment. N, Bardy Belg. Vid. Scrip. Argentotarens. de Antiq. Ecc. in Episc. 
 Archiv. fid. coll. per Van Jacobum Koinshoven Folio Argent. 1583, praecip. ad finem. 
 Quibus add. Rebuff, in L. obvenire de Signif. Nom. ff. fol. et de Jure, Gent, et 
 Civil, de protib. aliena feud, per federa, test Joha. Luxius in prol«gom. quera veltm 
 yideas^ de Analy. cap. i, a, 3. Vid. Idea. 
 
VOL. IV.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 133 
 
 all eternity. Not that I look upon Martin, he would add, as a good 
 name — far from it : 'tis something better than a neutral, and but a little ; 
 yet little as it is, you see it was of some service to him. 
 
 My father knew the weakness of this prop to his hypothesis as well 
 as the best logician could show him ; yet so strange is the weakness of 
 man, at the same time as it fell in his way he could not for his life 
 but make use of it ; and it was certainly for this reason, that though 
 there are many stories of Hafen Slawkenbergius's decades full as enter- 
 taining as this I am translating, yet there is not one amongst them 
 which my father read over with half the delight ; it flattered two of his 
 strangest hypotheses together — his names and his voses. I will be bold 
 to say, he might have read all the books in the Alexandrian library, 
 had not fate taken other care of them, and not have met with a book 
 or a passage in one which hit two such nails as these upon the head at 
 one stroke. 
 
 The two universities of Strasburg were hard tugging at this affair of 
 I/Uther's navigation. The Protestant doctors had demonstrated that he 
 had not sailed right before the wind, as the Popish doctors had pre- 
 tended ; and as every one knew, there was no sailing full in the teeth 
 of it, they were going to settle, in case he had sailed, how many points 
 he was off — whether Martin had doubled the cape, or had fallen upon 
 a lee-shore. And no doubt, as it was an inquiry of much edification, 
 at least to those who understood this sort of navigation, they had gone 
 on with it in spite of the size of the stranger's nose, had not the size of 
 the stranger's nose drawn off the attention of the world from what they 
 were about. It was their business to follow. 
 
 The Abbess of Quedlingberg and her four dignitaries was no stop, 
 for the enormity of the stranger's nose running full as much in their 
 fancies as their case of conscience. That kept cold. In a word, the 
 printers were ordered to distribute their types — all controversies dropped. 
 
 'Twas a square cap with a silk tassel upon the crown of it — to a nut- 
 shell — to have guessed on which side of the nose the two universities 
 would split. 
 
 '* 'Tis above reason," cried the doctors on one side. 
 
 ** 'Tis below reason," cried the others. 
 
 ** 'Tis faith," cried the one. 
 
 *' 'Tis a fiddlestick," said the other. 
 
 *"Tis possible," cried the one. 
 
 ** 'Tis impossible," said the other. 
 
 " God's power in infinite," cried the Nosarians ; " he can do anything." 
 
 " He can do nothing," replied the Antinosarians, ** which implies 
 contradictions." 
 
 " He can make matter think," said the Nosarians. 
 
 **As certainly as you can make a velvet-cap out of a sow's ear," 
 replied the Antinosarians. 
 
 ** He cannot make two and two five," replied the Popish doctors. — • 
 ** 'Tis false," said their other opponents. 
 
 ** Infinite power is infinite power," said the doctors who maintained 
 ih^ reality oi the nose. — "It extends only to all possible things," re- 
 plied the Lutherans. 
 
 "By God in heaven," cried the Popish doctors, "he can make a 
 nose if he thinks fit, as big as the .=^' ieple of Steasburg." 
 
134 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. iv. 
 
 Now the steeple of Strasburg being the biggest and the tallest church 
 steeple to. be seen in the whole world, the Antinosarians denied that 
 a nose of 575 geometrical feet in length could be worn — at least by a 
 middle-sized man. The Popish doctors swore it could. — The Lutheran 
 doctors said, " No ; it could not." 
 
 This at once started a new dispute, which they pursued a great way, 
 upon the extent and limitation of the moral and natural atttibutes of 
 God. That controversy led them naturally into Thomas Aquinas, and 
 Thomas Aquinas to the devil. 
 
 The stranger's nose was no more heard of in the dispute ; it just 
 served as a frigate to launch them into the gulf of school divinity, and 
 then they all sailed before the wind. 
 
 Heat is in proportion to the want of true knowledge. 
 
 The controversy about the attributes, &c., instead of cooling, on the 
 contrary, had inflamed the Strasburgers' imagination to a most inor- 
 dinate degree. The less they understood of the matter the greater was 
 their wonder about it ; they were left in all the distresses of desire 
 unsatisfied : saw tiieir doctors, the Parchmentarians, the Brassarians, 
 the Turpentarians on the one side, the Popish doctors on the other, like 
 Pantagruel and his companions in quest of the oracle of the bottle, all 
 embarked and out of siglit. 
 
 The poor Strasburgers left upon the beach ! 
 
 What was to be done ? No delay — the uproar increased — every one 
 in disorder — the city gates set open. 
 
 Unfortunate Strasburgers ! was there in the storehouse of nature — 
 was there in the lumber-rooms of learning — was there in the great 
 arsenal of chance, one single engine left undrawn for to torture your 
 curiosities and stretch your desires which was not pointed by the hand 
 of fate to play upon your hearts ? I dip not my pen into my ink to 
 excuse the surrender of yourselves — 'tis to write your panegyric. Show 
 me a city so macerated with expectation, who neither eat, nor drank, nor 
 slept, nor prayed, nor hearkened to the calls either of religion or nature 
 for seven-and-twenty days together, who could have held out one day 
 longer. 
 
 On the twenty-eighth the courteous stranger had promised to return to 
 Strasburg. 
 
 Seven thousand coaches (Slawkenbergius must certainly have made 
 some mistake in his numerical characters) — 7,000 coaches, 15,000 single- 
 horse chairs, 20,000 waggons, crowded as full as they could all hold 
 with senators, counsellors, syndics, bcguines, widows, wives, virgins, 
 canons, concubines, all in their coaches. The Abbess of Quedlingberg, 
 with the prioress, the deaness, and sub-chantress leading the procession 
 in one coach, and the dean of Strasburg, with the four great dignitaries 
 of his chapter on her left hand, the rest following higgledy-piggledy as 
 they could — some on horseback, some on foot, some led, some driven, 
 some down the Rhine, some this way, some that—all set out at sunrise 
 to meet the courteous stranger on the road. 
 
 Haste we now towards the catastrophe of my tale. I say catastrophe 
 (cries Slawkenbergius), inasmruch as a tale, with parts rightly disposed, 
 not only rejoiceth {gaudet) in the catastrophe and peripeitia of a 
 drama, but rejoiceth, moreover, in all the essential and integral parts of 
 it : it has its protasis, epitasis, catastasis, its catastrophe or peripeitia, 
 
VOL. IV.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, I35 
 
 growing one out of the other in it in the order Aristotle first planted 
 them, without which a tale had better never be told at all, says Slaw- 
 kenbergius, but be kept to a man's self. 
 
 In all my ten tales, in all my ten decades, have I, Slawkenbergius, 
 tied down every tale of them as tightly to this rule as I have done this 
 of the stranger and his nose. 
 
 From his first parley with the sentinel to his leaving the city of Stras- 
 burf^, after pulling off his crimson satin pair of breeches, is the protasis 
 or first entrance, where the characters of the personce dramatis are just 
 touched in and the subject slightly began. 
 
 The e[)itasis, wherein the action is more fully entered upon and 
 heightened, till it arrives at its state or height, called the catastasis, and 
 M'hich usually takes up the second and third act, is included within that 
 .busy period of my tale betwixt the first night's uproar about the nose to 
 the conclusion of the trumpeter's wife's lectures upon it in the middle of 
 the grand parade, and from the first embarking of the learned in the 
 dispute to the doctors finally sailing away and leaving the Strasburgers 
 upon the beach in distress, is the catastasis, or the ripening of the inci- 
 dents and passions for their bursting forth in the fifth act. 
 
 This commences with the setting out of the Strasburgers in the 
 Frankfort road, and terminates in unwinding the labyrinth and bringing 
 the hero out of a state of agitation (as Aristotle calls i[) to a state of rest 
 and quietness. 
 
 This, says Hafen Slawkenbergius, constitutes the catastrophe or 
 peripeitia of my tale, and that is the part of it I am going to relate. 
 
 We left the stranger behind the curtain asleep — he enters now upon 
 the stage. 
 
 ** What dost thou prick up thy ears at ? — 'tis nothing but a man upon a 
 horse," was the last word the stranger uttered to his mule. It was not 
 proper then to tell the reader that the mule took his master's word for 
 it, and, without any more ifs or ands, let the traveller and his horse 
 pass by. 
 
 The traveller was hastening with all diligence to get to Strasburg 
 that night. *' What a fool am I," said the stranger to himself, when 
 he had rode about a league further, *' to think of getting into Strasburg 
 this night. Strasburg, the great Strasburg ! Strasburg, the capital 
 of all Alsatia ! Strasburg, an imperial city ! Strasburg, a sovereign 
 state ! Strasburg, garrisoned with five thousand of the best troops in 
 all the world ! Alas ! if I was at the gates of Strasburg tl)is moment, I 
 could not gain admittance into it for a ducat — nay, a ducat and half. 
 'Tis too much ; betier go back to the last inn I passed than lie I know 
 not where, or give I know not what." — The traveller, as he made these 
 reflections in his mind, turned his horse's head about, and three minutes 
 after the stranger had been conducted into his chamber he arrived at 
 the same inr^. 
 
 "We have bacon in the house," said the host, **and bread and till 
 eleven o'clock this night had three eggs in it ; but a stranger, who 
 arrived an hour ago, has had them dressed into an omelet, and we have 
 nothing." 
 
 *' Alas ! " said the traveller, " harassed as I am, I want nothing but 
 a bed." — *' I have one as soft as is in Alsatia," said the host. 
 
 "The stranger," continued he, "should have slept in it, for 'tis my 
 
tZ6 TRISTRAM SHAND V. [voU iv. 
 
 best bed, but upon the score of his nose "—"He has got a 
 
 defluxion/' said the traveller. — '* Not that I know," cried the host; 
 **but 'tis a camp-bed, and Jacinta," said he, looking towards the maid, 
 "imagined there was not room in it to turn his nose in." — " Why so ?" 
 cried the traveller, starting back. — " It is so long a nose," cried the 
 host. The traveller fixed his eyes upon Jacinta, then upon the ground, 
 kneeled upon his right knee, had just got his hand laid upon his breast — 
 ** Trifle not with my anxiety,*' said he, rising up again. — '* 'Tis no 
 trifle," said Jacinta, '* 'tis the most glorious nose !" — The traveller fell 
 upon his knee again, laid his hand upon his breast : *' Tlien," said he, 
 looking up to heaven, "thou hast conducted me to the end of my 
 pilgrimage. 'Tis Diego ! " 
 
 The traveller was the brother of the Julia so often invoked that 
 night by the stranger as he rode from Strasburg upon his mule, and 
 was come, on her part, in quest of him. He had accompanied his sister 
 from Valladolid across the Pyrenean mountains through France, and 
 had many an entangled skein to wind off in pursuit of him, through the 
 many meanders and abrupt turnings of a lover's thorny tracts. 
 
 Julia had sunk under it, and had not been able to go a step further 
 than to Lyons, where, with the many disquietudes of a tender heart, 
 which all talk of but few feel, she sickened, but had just strength to 
 write a letter to Diego ; and having conjured her brother never to see 
 her face until he had found him out and put the letter into his hands, 
 Julia took to her bed. 
 
 Fernandez (for that was her brother's name), though the camp-bed 
 was as soft as any one in Alsace, yet he could not shut his eyes in it. 
 As soon as it was day he rose, and hearing Diego was risen too, he 
 entered his chamber, and discharged his sister's commission. 
 
 The letter was as follows : — 
 
 **Seig. Diego, 
 
 ** Whether my suspicions of your nose were justly excited or 
 not, 'tis not now to inquire ; it is encjugh I have not had firmness to 
 put them to further trial. 
 
 ** How could I know so little of myself when I sent my duenna to 
 forbid your coming more under my lattice ? or how could I know so 
 little of you, Diego, as to imagine you would not have stayed one day in 
 Valladolid to have given ease to my doubts? Was I to be abandoned, 
 Diego, because I was deceived ? or was it kind to take me at my 
 word, whether my suspicions were just or no, and leave me, as you did, 
 a prey to much uncertainty and sorrow ? 
 
 ** In what manner Julia has resented this, my brother, when he puts 
 this letter into your hands, will tell you. He will tell you in how few 
 moments she repented of the rash message she had sent you, in what 
 frantic haste she flew to her lattice, and how many days and nights 
 together she leaned immovably upon her elbow, looking through it 
 towards the way which Diego was wont to come. 
 
 " He will tell you, when she heard of your departure, how her spirits 
 deserted her, how her heart sickened, how piteously she mourned, 
 •how low she hung her head. O Diego 1 how many weary steps has 
 my brother's pity led me by the hand, languishing, to trace out yours I 
 hovf far has desire carried me beyond strength I and how oft have I 
 
VOL. IV.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 137 
 
 fainted by the way, and sunk into his arms, with only power to cry 
 out, * O my Diego ! * 
 
 " If the gentleness of your carriage has not belied your heart, you 
 will fly to me almost as fast as you fled from me. Haste as you will, 
 you will arrive but to see me expire. 'Tis a bitter draught, Diego, 
 but oh ! 'tis embittered still more by dying un " 
 
 She could proceed no further. 
 
 Slawkenbergius supposes the word intended was unconvinced , but her 
 strength would not enable her to finish her letter. 
 
 The heart of the courteous Diego overflowed as he read the letter. 
 He ordered his mule forthwith, and Fernandez's horse to be saddled. 
 And as no vent in prose is equal to that of poetry in such conflicts, 
 chance, which as often directs us to remedies as to diseases, having 
 thrown a piece of charcoal into the window, Diego availed himself of 
 it, and whilst the ostler was getting ready his mule, he eased his mind 
 against the wall as follows :— 
 
 ODE. 
 
 Harsh and untnneful are the notes of love 
 
 Unless my Julia strikes the key_. 
 Her hand alone can touch the part, 
 Whose dulcet movement charms the heart, 
 
 And governs all the man with sympathetic sway. 
 
 SECOND. 
 
 O Julia ! 
 
 The lines were very natural, for they were nothing at all to the pur- 
 pose, says Slawkenbergius, and 'tis a pity there were no more of them. 
 But whether it was that Signor Diego was slow in composing verses, or 
 the ostler quick in saddling mules, is not averred. Certain it was that 
 Diego's mule and Fernandez's horse were ready at the door of the inn 
 before Diego was ready for his second stanza. So, without staying to 
 finish his ode, they both mounted, sallied forth, passed the Rhine, 
 traversed Alsace, shaped their course towards Lyons, and before the 
 Strasburgers and the Abbess of Quedlingberg had set out on their 
 cavalcade, had Fernandez, Diego, and his Julia crossed the Pyrenean 
 mountains and got safe to Valladolid. 
 
 'Tis needless to inform the geogiaphical reader that when Diego 
 was in Spain it was not possible to meet the courteous stranger in 
 the Frankfort road. It is enough to say that of all restless desires, 
 curiosity being the strongest, the Strasburgers felt the full force of it, 
 and that for three days and nights they were tossed to and fro in the 
 Frankfort road with the tempestuous fury of this passion before they 
 could submit to return home ; when, alas ! an event was prepared 
 for them, of all others the most grievous that could befall a free 
 people. 
 
 As this revolution of the Strasburgers' affairs is often spoken of and 
 little understood, ** I will in ten words," says SliN\'Ke ibergius, ** give 
 the world an explanation of it, and with it put an end to my tale." 
 
 li^verybody knows of the grand " System of Universal Monarchy,'' 
 
138 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. iv. 
 
 wrote by order of Monsieur Colbert, and put in manuscript into the 
 hands of Louis XIV. in the year 1664. 
 
 'Tis as well known that one branch out of many of that system was 
 the gettinq^ possession of Strasburg, to favonr an entrance at fell times 
 into Suabia, in order to disturb the quiet of Geunany ; and that, in 
 consequence of this plan, Strasburg unhappily at length fell into their 
 hands. 
 
 It is the lot of few to trace out the true springs of this and such like 
 revolutions. The vulgar look too high for them ; statesmen look too 
 low. Tnith, for once, lies in the middle. 
 
 What a fatal thing is the popular pride of a free city! cries one his- 
 torian. The Strasburgers deemed it a dimiimtion of tlieir freedom to 
 receive an imperial garrison, and so fell a prey to a French one. 
 
 The fate, says another, of the Strasburgers may be a warning to all 
 free people to save their money. They anticipated their revenues, 
 brought themselves under taxes, exhausted their strength, and in the 
 end became so weak a people, they had not strength to keep their 
 gates shut, and so the French pushed them open. 
 
 ** Alas ! alas !" cries Slawkenbergius, ** 'twas not the French, 'twas 
 curiosity pushed them open. The French, indeed, who are ever upon 
 the catch, when they saw the Strasburgers, men, women, and chil- 
 dren, all marched out to follow the stranger's no.^e, each man followed 
 hi^ own, and matched in." 
 
 Trade and manufactures have decayed and gradually grown dowu ever 
 since, but not from any cause whicli commercial heads have assigned, 
 for it is owing to this only that noses have ever so run in their heads, 
 that the Strasburgers could not follow their business. 
 
 "Alas! alas !" cries Slawkenbergius, making an exclamation, "it is 
 not the first, and I fear will not be the last fortress that has been either 
 won or lost by noses.'*' 
 
 THE END OF SLAWKENBERGIUS S TALE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 With all this learning upon noses running perpetually in my father's 
 fancy, with so many family prejudices, and ten decades of such tales 
 running on for ever along with them, how was it possible, with such 
 exquisite — was it a true nose ? — that a man v.dth such exquisite 
 feelings as my father had could bear the shock at all below stnirs, or 
 indeed above stairs, in any other posture but the very po-ture I have 
 described. 
 
 Throw yourself down upon the bed a dozen times, taking care only t<l 
 place a looking-glass first in a chair on one side of it before you do it 
 — But was the stranger's nose a true nose, or was it a false one ? — 
 
 To tell that beforehand, madam, would be to do injury to one of the 
 best tales in the Christian world ; and that is the tenth of the tenth 
 decade, which immediately follows this. 
 
 *' This tale," cried Slawkenbergius, somewhat exultingly, ** has been 
 
VOL. IV.] TRISTRAM SHAND Y. \ 39 
 
 reserved by me for the concluding tale of my work, knowing right well 
 that M'hen 1 shall have told it, and my reader shall have read it through, 
 'iwould be even high time for boih of us to shut up the book, inas- 
 much,*' continues Slawkenbergius, *'as I know of no tale which could 
 possibly ever go down after it." 
 
 'Tis a tale indeed ! 
 
 This sets out with the first interview in the inn at Lyon?, when Fer- 
 nandez left the courteous stranger and his sister Julia alone in her 
 chamber, and is over-written, 
 
 THE INTRICACIES OF DIEGO AND JULIA. 
 
 Heavens! thou art a strange creature, Slawkenbergius ! What a 
 whimsical view of the involutions of the heart of woman hast thou 
 opened ! how this can ever be translated! and yet if this specimen of 
 Slawkenbergius's tales and the exquisiteness of his moral should please 
 the world, translated shall a couple of volumes be. Else how this can 
 ever be translated into good English I have no sort of conception. 
 There seems in some passages to want a sixth sense to do it rightly. 
 What can he mean by the lambent pupilability of slow, low, dry chat, 
 five notes below the natural tone, which you know, madam, is little 
 more than a whisper ? The moment I pronounced the words, I could 
 perceive an attempt towards a vibration in the strings about the region 
 of the heart. The brain made no acknowledgment. There's often no 
 good understanding betwixt them. I felt as if I understood it. I had 
 no ideas. The movement could not be without cause. I'm lost. I can 
 make nothing of it, unless, may it please your worships, the voice in that 
 case being little more than a whisper, unavoidably forces the eyes to 
 approach, not only within six inches of each other, but to look into the 
 pupils : is not that dangerous ? But it can't be avoided, for to look up 
 to the ceiling, in that case the two chins unavoidably meet ; and to look 
 dowTi into each other's laps, the foreheads come into immediate contact, 
 which at once puts an end to the conference — I mean to the sentimental 
 part of it. What is left, madam, is not worth stooping for. 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 My father lay stretched across the bed, as still as if the hand of death 
 had pushed him down, for a full hour and a half, before he began to 
 play upon the floor with the toe of that foot which hung over the bed- 
 side ; my Uncle Toby's heart was a pound lighter for it. In a few 
 moments, his left hand came to its feeling— he thrust it a little more 
 within the valance, drew up his hand, when he had done, into his 
 bosom— gave a " Hem ! " My good Uncle Toby, with infinite pleasure, 
 answered it ; and full ;>ladly would have ingrafted a sentence of consola- 
 tion upon the opening it afforded ; but having no talents, as I said, that 
 way, and fearing, moreoYer,jthat he might set out with something which 
 
140 TRtSTkAM SHANDY. [vol. IV. 
 
 might make a bad matter worse, he contented himself with resting his 
 chin placidly upon the cross of his crutch. 
 
 Now, whether the compression shortened my Uncle Toby's face into 
 a more pleasurable oval, or that the philanthropy of his heart, in 
 seeing his brother beginning to emerge out of the sea of his afflictions, 
 had braced up his muscles, so that the compression upon his chin only 
 doubled the benignity which was there before, is not hard to decide. 
 My father, in turning his eyes, was struck with such a gleam of suq- 
 j^hme in his face as melted down the suUenness of bis grief in a 
 moment. 
 
 He broke silence as follows. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 **DiD ever man, brother Toby," cried my father, raising himself upon 
 his elbow, and turning himself round to the opposite side of the bed, 
 where my Uncle Toby was sitting in his old fringed chair, with 
 his chin resting upon his crutch — *'did ever a poor unfortunate man, 
 brother Toby," cried my father, "receive so many lashes?" — "The 
 most I ever saw given," quoth my Uncle Toby (ringing the bell 
 at the bed's head for Trim), "was to a grenadier, I think, in M 'Kay's 
 regiment." 
 
 Had my Uncle Toby shot a bullet through my father's heart, he 
 could not have fallen down with his nose upon the quilt more 
 suddenly. 
 
 * * Bless me ! " said my Uncle Toby. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 **Was it M 'Kay's regiment," quoth my Uncle Toby, "where the poor 
 grenadier was so unmercifully wliipped at Bruges about the ducats?" — " O 
 Christ ! he was innocent," cried Trim, with a deep sigh. " And he was 
 whipped, may it please your honour, almost to death's door. They had 
 better have shot him outright, as he begged, and he had gone directly 
 to heaven, for he was as innocent as your honour." — " I thank thee, 
 Trim," quoth my Uncle Toby. — " I never think of his," continued Trim, 
 "and my poor brother Tom's misfortune:^ — ^for we were all three school- 
 fellows — but I cry like a coward." — " Tears are no proof of cowardice. 
 Trim ; I drop them oftinies myself," cried my Uncle Toby. — " I know 
 your honour does," replied Trim, " and so I am not ashamed of it my- 
 self. But to think, may it please your honour,'* continued Trim, a tear 
 stealing into the corner of his eye as he spoke, " to think of two virtuous 
 lads, with hearts as warm in their bodies and as honest as God could 
 make them, the children of honest people, going forth with gallant 
 spirits to seek their fortunes in the world, and fall into such evils ! 
 Poor Tom ! to be tortured upon a rack for nothing but marrying a Jew's 
 
VOL. iV.j TRISTRAM SHANDY. 14! 
 
 widow who sold sausages ! Honest Dick Johnson's soul to be scourged 
 out of his body for the ducats another man put into his knapsack ! Oh, 
 these are misfortunes 1 " cried Trim, pulling out his handkerchief, 
 "these are misfortunes, may it please your honour, worth lying down 
 and crying over." 
 
 My father could not help blushing. 
 
 " 'Twould be a pity, Trim," quoth my Uncle Toby, '* thou shouldst 
 ever feel sorrow of thy own, thou feelest it so tenderly for others." — 
 " Alack-a-day," replied the corporal, brightening up his face, " your 
 honour knows I have neither wife or child. I can have no sorrows in 
 this world." My father could not help smiling. **As few as any 
 man, Trim," replied my Uncle Toby ; *'nor can I see how a fellow 
 of thy light heart can suffer but from the distress of poverty in thy old 
 age, when thou art past all services, Trim, and thou hast outlived thy 
 friends." — ** An' please your honour, never fear," replied Trim cheerily. 
 — " But I would have thee never fear, Trim," replied my uncle. *' And 
 therefore," continued my Uncle Toby, throwing down his crutch, and 
 getting up upon his legs as he uttered the word therefore, "in recom- 
 pense, Trim, of thy long fidelity to me, and that goodness of thy heart I 
 have had such proofs of, whilst thy master is worth a shilling tliou shalt 
 never ask elsewhere, Trim, for a penny." — Trim attempted to thank 
 my Uncle Toby, but had not power. Tears trickled down his cheeks 
 faster than he could wipe them off. He laid his hand upon his breast, 
 made a bow to the ground, and shut the door. 
 
 " I have left Trim my bowling-green," cried my Uncle Toby. My 
 father smiled. ** I have left him, moreover, a pension," continued my 
 Uncle Toby. My father looked grave. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 " Is this a fit time," said my father to himself, " to talk of pensions and 
 grenadiers ? " 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 When my Uncle Toby first mentioned the grenadier, my father, I 
 said, fell down with his nose flat to the quilt, and as suddenly as if 
 my Uncle Toby had shot him. But it was not added that every other 
 member of my father instantly relapsed, with his nose, into the same 
 precise attitude in which he lay first described. So that when Corporal 
 Trim left the room, and my father found himself disposed to rise off the 
 bed, he had all the little preparatory movements to run over again 
 before he could do it. Attitudes are nothing, madam ; 'tis the transi- 
 tion from one attitude to another, like the preparation and resolution of 
 the discord into harmony, which is all in all. 
 
 For which reason my father played the same jig over again with his 
 toe upon the floor, gave a " Hem," raised himself up upon his elbow. 
 
142 TRISTRAM SHAND K [vol IV. 
 
 and was just beginning to address himself to my Uncle Toby, when 
 recollecting the unsuccessfulness of his first effort in that attitude, 
 he got up upon his legs, and in making the third turn across the 
 room, he stopped short before my Uncle Toby, and laying the three 
 first fingers of his right hand in the palm of his left, and stooping a 
 little, he addressed himself to my Uncle Toby as follows. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 ** When I reflect, brother Toby, upon man, and take a view of that 
 dark side of him which represents his life as open to so many causes 
 of trouble — when I consider, brother Toby, how oft we eat the bread 
 of affliction, and that we are born to it, as to the portion of our in- 
 heritance " — '*I was bprn to nothing," quoth my Uncle Toby, 
 
 interrupting my father, "but my commission." — "Zooks!" said my 
 father, "did not my uncle leave you a hundred and twenty pounds a 
 year?" — " What could I have done without it?" replied my Uncle 
 Toby. — "That's another conceni," said my father, testily. "But I say, 
 Toby, when one runs over the catalogue of all the cross reckonings 
 and soiTowful items with which the heart of man is overcharged, 
 'lis wonderful by what hidden resources the mind is enabled to stand 
 it out and bear itsftJ/ up as it does against the impositions laid upon 
 
 our nature — " — " ^^fis by the assistance of Almighty God," cried my 
 
 Uncle Toby, lookiiig up, and pressing the palms of his hands close 
 together — '"tis not from our own strength, brother Shandy. A sentinel 
 in a wooden sentry-box might as well pretend to stand it out against a 
 detachment of fifty men. We are upheld by the grace and the assistance 
 of tlie Best of Beings." 
 
 " That is cutting the knot, said my father, " instead of untying it. 
 But give me leave to lead you, brother Toby, a litile deeper into this 
 mystery." 
 
 ''With all my heart," replied my Uncle Toby. 
 
 My father instantly exchanged the attitude he was in for that in 
 which Socrates is so finely painted by Raphael in his School of Athens, 
 which your connoisseurship knows is so exquisitely imagined that even 
 the particular manner of the reasoning of Socrates is expressed by it ; 
 for he holds the forefinger of his left hand between the forefinger and 
 the thumb of his right, and seems as if he was saying to the libertine he 
 is reclaiming, " You grant me this and this ; and this and this I don't 
 ' ask of you — they follow of themselves in course." 
 
 So stood my father, holding fast his forefinger betwixt his finger and 
 his thumb, and reasoning with my Uncle Toby as he sat in his old 
 fringed chair, valanced around with parti-coloured worsted bobs. O 
 Garrick ! what a rich scene of this would thy exquisite powers make ; 
 and how gladly would I write such another, to avail myself of thy 
 immortality and secure my own behind it 1 
 
VOL. IV.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 143 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 "Though man is of all others the most curious vehicle," said my 
 father, "yet at the same time 'tis of so slight a frame, and so totteringly 
 put together, that the sudden jerks and hard jostlings it unavoidably 
 meets with in this rugged journey, would overset and tear it to pieces a 
 dozen times a day, was it not, brother Toby, that there is a secret 
 spring within us." — "Which spring," said my Uncle Toby, " I take to 
 be religion." — "Will that set my child's nose on?" cried my father, 
 letting go his finger, and striking one hand against the other. — "It 
 makes everything straight for us," answered my Uncle Toby. — • 
 "Figuratively speaking, dear Toby, it may, for aught I know," said 
 my father ; " but the spring I am speaking of is that great and elastic 
 power within us of counterbalancing evil, which, like a secret spring in 
 a well-ordered machine, though it cannot prevent the shock, at least it 
 imposes upon our sense of it." 
 
 "Now, my dear brother," said my father, replacing his forefinger 
 as he was coming closer to the point, "had my child arrived safe into 
 the world, unmartyred in that precious part of him — fanciful and extrava- 
 gant as I may appear to the world in my opinion of Christian names, 
 and of that magic bias which good or bad names irresistibly impress 
 upon our characters and conducts — heaven is witness, that in the 
 warmest transports of my wishes for the prosperity of my child, I 
 never once wished to crown his head with more glory and honour than 
 what George or Pldward would have spread around it, 
 
 " But alas ! " continued my father, " as ihe greatest evil has befallen 
 him, I must counteract and undo it with the greatest good. 
 
 "He shall be christened Trismegistus, brother." 
 
 " I wish it may answer," replied my Uncle Toby, rising up. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 "What a chapter of chances," said my father, turning himself about 
 upon the first landing, as he and my Uncle Toby were going down 
 stairs, " what a long chapter of chances do the events of this world lay 
 open to us. Take pen and ink in hand, brother Toby, and calculate it 
 fairly." — " I know no more of calculations than this balluster," said my 
 Uncle Toby, striking short of it with his crutch, and hitting my father 
 a desperate blow souse upon his shin-bone.— " 'Twas a hundred to one," 
 cried my Uncle Toby. — " I thought," quoth my father, rubbing his shin, 
 " you had known nothing of calculations, brother Toby." — '*'Twas a 
 mere chance," said my Uncle Toby. — " Then it adds one to the chapter," 
 replied my father. 
 
 The double success of my father's repartees tickled off the pain of his 
 shin at once. It was well it so fell out — chance again ! — or the world to 
 this day had never known the subject of my father's calculation ; to 
 
144 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. iv. 
 
 guess it, there was no chance. What a lucky chapter of chances has this 
 turned out ! for it has saved me the trouble of writing one express, 
 and in truth I have enough already upon my hands without it Have not 
 I promised the world a chapter of knots ; two chapters upon the right 
 and the wrong end of a woman ; a chapter upon whiskers ; a chapter 
 upon wishes ; a chapter of noses ? — no, I have done that — a chapter 
 upon my Uncle Toby's modesty ? to say nothing of a chapter upon 
 chapters, which I will finish before I sleep. By my great grandfather's 
 whiskers, I shall never get half of 'em through this year. 
 
 *'Take pen and ink in hand, and calculate it fairly, brother Toby," 
 said my father, ** and it will turn out a million to one that of all parts 
 of the body the edge of the forceps should have the ill luck just to fall 
 upon and break down that one Dart which should break down the 
 fortunes of our house with it." 
 
 ** It might have been worse," replied my Uncle Toby. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 Is it not a shame to make two chapters of what passed in going down 
 one pair of stairs ? — for we are got no further yet than the first landing, 
 and there are fifteen more steps down to the bottom ; and, for aught I 
 know, as my father and my Uncle Toby are in a talking humour, there 
 may be as many chapters as steps. Let that be as it will, sir, I can no 
 more help it than my destiny. A sudden impulse comes across me : 
 *' Drop the curtain, Shandy." I drop it. ** Strike a line here across 
 the paper, Tristram." I strike it ; and hey for a new chapter. 
 
 The deuce of any other rule have I to govern myself by in this affair ; 
 and if I had one — as I do all things out of all rule — I would twist it 
 and tear it to pieces, and throw it into the fire when I had done. Am 
 I warm ? I am, and the cause demands it. A pretty story ! Is a man 
 to follow rules, or rules to follow him ? 
 
 Now this, you must know, being my chapter upon chapters, which I 
 promised to write before I went to sleep, I thought it meet to ease my 
 conscience entirely before I lay down by telling the world all I knew 
 about the matter at once. Is not this ten times better than to set out 
 dogmatically with a sententious parade of wisdom, and telling the world 
 a story of a roasted horse ; that chapters relieve the mind ; that they 
 assist or impose upon the imagination ; and that in a work of this 
 dramatic cast they are as necessary as the shifting of scenes ; with fifty 
 other cold conceits, enough to extinguish the fire which roasted him. 
 O ! but to understand this — which is a puff at the fire of Diana's temple — 
 you must read Longinus. Read away. If you are not a jot the wiser 
 by reading him the first time over, never fear, read him again. 
 Avicenna and Licetus read Aristotle's metaphysics forty times through 
 apiece, and never understood a siagle word. But mark the conse- 
 quence. Avicenna turned out a desperate writer at all kinds of writing, 
 for he wrote books de omni scribili; and for Licetus (Fortunio), though 
 all the world knows he was born a foetus, of no more than five inches 
 and a half in length, yet he grew to that astonishing height in literature 
 
VOL. IV.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 145 
 
 as to write a book with a title as long as himself — the learn'cd know I 
 mean his Gonopsychanthropologia upon the origin of the human soul. 
 
 So much for my chapter upon chapters, which I hold to be the best 
 chapter in my whole work ; and, take my word, whoever reads it is full 
 as well employed as in picking straws. 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 "We shall bring all things to rights," said my father, setting his foot 
 upon the first step from the landing. "This Trismegislus," continued 
 my father, drawing his leg back, and turning to my Uncle Toby, ** was 
 the greatest (Toby) of all earthly beings. He was the greatest king, the 
 greatest lawgiver, the greatest philosopher, and the greatest priest—" 
 — *' And engineer," said my Uncle Toby. 
 *' In course," said my father. 
 
 CHAPTER Xn. 
 
 *' And how does your mistress ? " cried my father, taking the same step 
 over again from the landing, and calling to Susannah, whom he saw 
 passing by the foot of the stairs with a huge pincushion in her hand. 
 ** How does your mistress ? " — "As well," said Susannah, tripping by, 
 but without looking up, "as can be expected." — " What a fool am I ! " 
 said my father, drawing his leg back again. **Let things be as they 
 will, brother Toby, 'tis ever the precise answer : and how is the child, 
 pray?** — No answer. — "And where is Dr. Slop?" added my father, 
 raising his voice aloud and looking over the ballusters. Susannah was 
 out of hearing. 
 
 " Of all the riddles of a married life," said my father, crossing the 
 landing, in order to set his back against the wall whilst he propounded 
 it to my Uncle Toby, **of all the puzzling riddles," said he, "in a 
 married state — of which you may trust me, brother Toby, there are 
 more asses' loads than all Job's stock of asses could have carried — there 
 is not one that has more intricacies in it than this, that from the very 
 moment the mistress of the house is brought to bed, every female in it, 
 from my lady s gentlewoman down to the cinder-wench, becomes an 
 inch taller for it, and give themselves more airs upon that single inch 
 than all their other inches put together." 
 
 ** I think rather," replied my Uncle Toby, ** that 'tis we who sink an 
 inch lower. If I meet but a woman with child — I do it — 'tis a heavy 
 tax upon that half of our fellow-creatures, brother Shandy," said 
 my Uncle Toby — **'tis a piteous burden upon 'em," continued he, 
 shaking his head. — "Yes, yes, 'tis a painful thing," said my father, 
 shaking his head too — but certainly, since shaking of heads came into 
 fas^hion, never did two heads shake together in concert fvom two such 
 different springs. 
 
1 46 TRISTRAM SHAND K [vol. IV 
 
 *'God bless \ 'em all," said my Uncle Toby and my father, each 
 ** Deuce take \ to himself. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 Hallo ! you chairman ! here's sixpence — do step into that bookseller's 
 shop and call me a day- tall critic. I am very wdlling to give any one of 
 'em a crown to help me with his tackling to get my father and my 
 Uncle Toby off the stairs, and to put them to bed. 
 
 'Tis even high time ; for except a short nap which they both got 
 whilst Trim was boring the jackboots, and which, by-the-by, did my 
 father no sort of good upon the score of the bad hinge, they have not 
 else shut their eyes since nine hours before the time that Dr. Slop was 
 led into the back-parlour in that dirty pickle by Obadiah. 
 
 Was every day of my life to be as busy a day as this, and to take np— 
 truce 
 
 I will not finish that sentence till I have made an oI:)servation upon 
 the strange stale of affairs between the reader and myself, just as things 
 stand at present, an observation never applicable before to any one 
 biographical writer since the creation of the world, but to myself, and I 
 believe will never hold good to any other until its final destruction, and 
 therefore for the very novelty of it alone, it must be worth your wor- 
 ships attending to. 
 
 I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelve- 
 month ; and having got, as you perceive, almost into the middle of my 
 fourth volume, and no farther than to my first day's life, 'tis demonstra- 
 tive that I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write 
 just now than when I first set out ; so that instead of advancing;, as a 
 common writer, in my work, with what I have ben doing at it, on the 
 contrary, I am just tiirown so many volumes back. Was every day of 
 my life to be as busy a day as this — (and why not ?) — and the transac- 
 tions and opinions of it to take up as much description — (and for what 
 reason should they be cut short? as at this rate I should just live 364 
 times faster than I should write) — it must follow, an'pieas^e your wor- 
 ships, that the more I write, the more I shall have to write ; and con- 
 sequently, the more your worships read the more your woi ships will 
 have to read. 
 
 Will this be good for your worships' eyes ? 
 
 It will do well for mine ; and were it not that my opinions will be 
 the death of me, I perceive I shall lead a fine life of it out of this self- 
 same life of mine ; or, in other words, shall lead a couple of fine lives 
 together. 
 
 As for the proposal of twelve volumes a-year, or a volume a month, 
 it no way alters my prospect : write as I will, and rush as I may into 
 the middle of things, as Horace advises, I shall never overtake myself. 
 Whipped and driven to the last pinch, at the worst I shall have one day 
 the start of my pen, and one day is enough for two volumes, and two 
 volumes will be enough for one year. 
 
 Heaven prosper the manufacturers of paper under this propitious 
 
VOL. IV.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 147 
 
 reign which is now opened to us, as I trust its providence will prosper 
 everything else in it that is taken in hand. 
 
 As for the propagation of geese, I give myself no concern : nature is 
 all- bountiful. I shall never want tools to work with. 
 
 So then, friend, you have got my father and my Uncle Toby off the 
 stairs, and seen them to bed. And how did you manage it ? You 
 dropped a curtain at the stairs foot. I thought you had no other way 
 for it. Here's a crown for your trouble. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 **Then reach me my breeches off the chair," said my father to 
 Susannah, — " There's not a moment's time to dress you, sir," cried 
 
 Susannah; " the child is as black in the face as my " — "As your 
 
 what?" said my father; for, like all orators, he was a dear searcher 
 into comparisons. — ** Bless me, sir," said Susannah, "the child's in a 
 fit." — '*And Where's Mr. Yorick?" — ** Never where he should be,** 
 said Susannah ; " but his curate's in the dressing-room, with the child 
 upon his arm, waiting for the name ; and my mistress bid me run as 
 fast as I could to know, as Captain Shandy is the godfather, whether it 
 should not be called after him." 
 
 ** Were one sure," said my father to himself, scratching his eyebrow, 
 " that the child was expiring, one might as well compliment my 
 brother Toby as not, and 'twould be a pity, in such a case, to throw 
 away so great a name as Trismegistus upon him. But he may recover. 
 
 ** No, no," said my father to Susannah, '* I'll get up." — '' There's no 
 time,'' cried Susannah, ** the child's as black as my shoe." — ** Trisme- 
 gistus," said my father. " But stay ; thou art a leaky vessel, Susannah," 
 added my father ; " canst thou cairy Trismegistus in thy head the length 
 of the gallery without scattering ? " — " Cun I ?" cried Susannah, shutting 
 the door in a huff. — " If she can, I'll be shot," said my father, bouncing 
 out of bed in the dark, and groping for his breeches. 
 
 Susannah ran with all speed along the gallery. 
 
 My father made all possible speed to find his breeches. 
 
 Susannah got the start and kept it. *' 'Tis Tris something," cried 
 Susannah. — " There is no Christian name in the world," said the curate, 
 "beginning with Tris but Tristram." — **Then 'tis Tristram -gistus," 
 quoth Susannah. 
 
 '* There is no gistus to it, noodle; 'tis my own name," replied tlie 
 curate, dipping his hand as he spoke into the basin. ** Tristram," said 
 he, &c. &c. So Tristram was I called, and Tristram shall I be to the 
 day of my death. 
 
 My father followed Susannah with his nightgown across his arm, 
 with nothing more than his breeches on, fastened through haste with 
 but a single button, and that button through haste thrust only half into 
 the button-hole. 
 
 *' She has not forgot the name," cried my father, half opening the 
 door.— "No, no," said the curate, w4th a tone of intelligence. — "And 
 the child is better,*' cried Susannah. — " And how does your mistress ?'' 
 
X4S TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. IV, 
 
 — **As well," said Susannah, "as can be expected." — ** Pish ! " said 
 my father, the button of his breeches slipping out of the button-hole. 
 So that whether the interjection was levelled at Susannah, or the button- 
 hole — whether " Pish *',was an interjection of contempt or an interjection 
 of modesty is a doubt, and must be a doubt till I shall have time to write 
 the three following favourite chapters ; that is, my chapter of chamber- 
 maids, my chapter of pishes, and my chapter of button-holes. 
 
 All the light I am able to give the reader at present is this, that tha 
 moment my father cried " Pish ! " he whisked himself about, and with 
 his breeches held up by one hand, and his nightgown thrown across 
 the arm of the other, he returned along the gallery to bed, something 
 slower than he came. 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 I WISH I could write a chapter upon sleep. 
 
 A fitter occasion could never have presented itself than what this 
 moment offers, when all the curtains of the family are drawn, the candles 
 put out, and no creature's eyes are open but a single one — for the other 
 has been shut these twenty years — of my mother's nurse. 
 
 It is a fine subject! 
 
 And yet, as fine as it is, I would undertake to write a dozen chapters 
 upon button-holes, both quicker and with more fame, than a single 
 chapter upon this. 
 
 Button-holes ! There is something lively in the very idea of 'em ; 
 and trust me, when I get among 'em, you gentry with great beards, 
 look as grave as you will, I'll make merry work with my button-holes ; 
 I shall have 'em all to myself — 'tis a maiden subject — I shall run foul 
 of no man's wisdom or fine sayings in it. 
 
 But for sleep, I know I shall make nothing of it before I begin. I 
 am no dab at your fine sayings, in the first place ; and in the next 
 place, I cannot for my soul set a grave face upon a bad matter, and tell 
 the world 'tis the refuge of the unfortunate, the enfranchisement of the 
 prisoner, the downy lap of the hopeless, the weary, and the broken- 
 hearted ; nor could I set out with a lie in my mouth, by affirming that 
 of all the soft and delicious functions of our nature, by which the great 
 Author of it, in His bounty, has been pleased to recompense the suffer- 
 ings wherewith His justice and His good pleasure has wearied us, that 
 this is the chiefest (I know pleasures worth ten of it) ; or what a happi- 
 ness it is to man, when the anxieties and passions of the day are over, 
 and he lies down upon his back, that his soul shall be so seated within 
 him that, whichever way she turns her eyes, the heavens shall look 
 calm and sweet above her ; — no desire, or fear, or doubt that troubles 
 the air, nor any difficulty past, present, or to come, that the imagina- 
 tion may not pass over without ofTence in that sweet secession. 
 
 ** God's blessing," said Sancho Panza, " be upon the man who first 
 invented this self-same thing called sleep ; it covers a man all over like 
 a cloak." Now, there is more to me in this, and it speaks warmer to 
 my heart and affections, than all the dissertations squeezed out of the 
 heads of the learned together upon the subject. 
 
vouiv.] Tristram SHANDY. 149 
 
 Not that I altogether disapprove of what Montaigne advailties Upon it 
 — 'tis admirable in its way (I quote by memory). 
 
 **The world enjoys other pleasures," says he, "as they do that of 
 sleep, without tasting or feeling it as it slips and passes by. We should 
 study and ruminate upon it in order to render proper thanks to Him 
 who grants it to us. For this end I cause myself to be disturbed in my 
 sleep, that I may the better and more sensibly relish it.'* *' And yet 1 
 see few,'* says he again, " who live with less sleep when need requires. 
 My body is capable of a firm but not of a violent and sudden at^ntation. 
 I evade, of late, all violent exercises, I am never weary with walking, 
 but from my youth I never liked to ride upon pavements, I love to lie 
 hard and alone, and even without my wife." This last word may stagger 
 the faith of the world ; but remember, ** La vraisemblance (as Bayie 
 says in the affair of Liceti) n'est pas toujours du cote de la verite.' And 
 so much for sleep." 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 ** If my wife will but venture him, brother Toby, Trismegistus shall be 
 dressed and brought down to us whilst you and I are getting our break- 
 fa.sts together. Go, tell Susannah, Obadiah, to step here." 
 
 " She is run upstairs," answered Obadiah, ** this very instant, sobbing 
 and crying and wringing her hands as if her heart would break." 
 
 '* We shall have a rare month of it," said my father, turning his head 
 from Obadiah and looking wistfully in my Uncle Toby's face for some 
 time ; " we shall have a devilish month of it, brother Toby," said my 
 father, setting his arms akimbo, and shaking Itn head ; " fire, water, 
 women, wind, brother Toby!" — *"Tis some misfortune," quoth my 
 Uncle Toby. — ** That it is," cried my father, " to have so many jarring 
 elements breaking loose, and riding triumph in every corner of a gentle- 
 man's house. Little boots it to the peace of a family, brother Toby, 
 that you and I possess ourselves, and sit here silent and unmoved whilst 
 such a storm is whistling over our heads." 
 
 ** And what's the matter, Susannah?" — ** They have called the child 
 Tristram, and my mistress is just got out of aa hysteric fit about it." — 
 **No!" — '*'Tis not my fault," said Susaimah; **I told him it was 
 Tristram-gistus.'* 
 
 " Make tea for yourself, brother Toby," said my father, taking down 
 his hat ; but how different from the sallies and a^jitations of voice and 
 members which a common reader wouhi imagine ! 
 
 For he spake in the sweetest modulation, and took down his hat 
 with the genteelest movement of limbs that ever affliction harmonized 
 and attuned together. 
 
 *' Go to the bowling-green for Corporal Trim," said my Uncle Toby, 
 speaking to Obadiah as soon as my father left the room. 
 
1 50 TRISTRAM SHAND K [yol. IV. 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 When the misfortune of my nose fell so heavily upon my father's 
 head, the reader remembers that he walked instantly upstairs, and cast 
 himself dowTi upon the bed ; and from hence, unless he has a great 
 insight into human nature, he will be apt to expect a rotation of the 
 same ascending and descending movements from him upon this misfor- 
 tune of my name. No. 
 
 The different weight, dear sir, nay, even the different package of 
 two vexations of the same weight, makes a very wide difference in our 
 manners of bearing and getting through with them. It is not half an 
 hour ago when, in the great hurry and precipitation of a poor devil's 
 writing for daily bread, I threw a fair sheet, which I had just finished 
 and carefully wrote out, slap into the fire, instead of the foul one. 
 
 Instantly I snatched off my wig and threw it perpendicidarly, with 
 all imaginable violence, up to the top of the room ; indeed I caught it 
 as it fell : but there was an end of the matter. Nor do I think any- 
 thing else in nature would have given such immediate ease. She, dear 
 goddess, by an instantaneous impulse, in all provoking cases, deter- 
 mines us to a sally of this or that member, or else she thrusts us into 
 this or that place or posture of body, we know not why. But mark, 
 madam, we live amongst riddles and mysteries — the most obvious things, 
 which come in our way have dark sides, which the quickest sight 
 cannot penetrate into, and even the clearest and most exalted under- 
 standings amongst us find ourselves puzzled and at a loss in almost 
 every cranny of Nature's works; so that this, like a thousand other 
 things, falls out for us in a way which, though we cannot reason upon 
 it, yet we find the good of it, may it please your reverences and your 
 worships, and that's enough for us. 
 
 Now, my father could not lie down with this affliction for his life, nor 
 could he carry it upstairs like the other. He walked composedly out 
 with it to the fish-pond. 
 
 Had my father leaned his head upon his hand, and reasoned an hour 
 which way to have gone. Reason, with all her force, could not have 
 directed him to anything like it. There is something, sir, in fish-ponds, 
 but what it is I leave to system-builders and fish-pond diggers betwixt 
 'em to find out ; but there is something, under the first disorderly tran- 
 sport of the humours, so unaccountably becalming in an orderly and a 
 sober walk towards one of them, that I have often wondered that 
 neither Pythagoras, nor Plato, nor Solon, nor Lycurgus, nor Mahomet, 
 nor any of your noted lawgivers, ever gave order about them. 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 ** Your honour," said Trim, shutting the parlour door before he began 
 to speak, *' has heard, I imagine, of this unlucky accident ? " — *' O yes, 
 
VOL. IV.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 151 
 
 Trim ! " said my Uncle Toby, ** and it gives me great concern." — ** I am 
 heartily concerned too ; but I hope your honour," replied Trim, ** will 
 do me the justice to believe that it was not in the least owing to me." 
 — " To thee, Trim," cried my Uncle Toby, looking kindly in his face ; 
 *' 'twas Susannah's and the curate's folly betwixt them." — **What busi- 
 ness could they have together, an' please your honour, in the garden ? " — 
 ** In the gallery, thou meanest," replied my Uncle Toby. 
 
 Trim found he was upon a wrong scent, and stopped short with a 
 low bow. **Two misfortunes," quoth the corporal to himself, "are 
 twice as many at least as are needful to be talked over at one time : 
 the mischief the cow has done in breaking into the fortifications 
 may be told his honour hereafter." Trim's casuistry and address, 
 under the cover of his low bow, prevented all suspicion in my 
 Uncle Toby. So he went on with what he had to say to Trim as 
 follows : 
 
 ^Tor my own part, Trim, though I can see little or no difference 
 betwixt my nephew's being called Tristram or Trismegistus, yet, as the 
 thing sits so near my brother's heart, Trim^ I would freely have given a 
 hundred pounds rather than it should have happened." — '* A hundred 
 pounds, an' please your honour," replied Trim. " I would not give a 
 cherry-stone to boot." — " Nor would I, Trim, upon my own account," 
 quoth my Uncle Toby. ** But my brother, whom there is no arguing 
 with in this case, maintains that a great deal more depends. Trim, upon 
 Chistian names than what ignorant people imagine. ' For,' he says, 
 * there never was a great or heroic action performed, since the world 
 began, by one called Tristram.' Nay, he will have it, Trim, that a 
 
 man can neither be learned or wise or brave " — ** 'Tis all fancy, an' 
 
 please your honour. I fought just as well," replied the corporal, "when 
 the regiment called me Trim as when they called me James Butler."^ — 
 ** And for my own pa*rt," said my Uncle Toby, " though I should blush 
 to boast of myself, Trim, yet had my name been Alexander I could have 
 done no more at Naiaur than my duty." — *' Bless your honour," cried 
 Trim, advancing three steps as he spoke, ** does a man tiiiuk C)f his 
 Christian name when he goes upon the attack?" — "Or when he 
 stands in the trench, Trim ? '' cried my Uncle Toby, looking firm. — 
 "Or when he enters a breach ? " said Trim, pushing in between two 
 chairs. — " Or forces the lines ?" cried my uncle, rising up and pushing 
 his crutch like a pike. — " Or facinc^ a platoon?" cried Trim, present- 
 ing his stick like a firelock. — '* Or when he marches up the glacis ? " 
 cried my Uncle Toby, looking warm, and setting his foot upon his 
 stool. 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 My father was returned from his walk to the fish-pond, and opened 
 the parlour-door in the very height of the attack, just as my Unc'e 
 Toby was marching up the glacis. Trim recovered his arm>. Never was 
 my Uncle Toby caught riding at such a desperate rate in liis life. Alas ! 
 my Uncle Toby, had not a weightier matter called forth all the ready 
 
IS2 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. vt. 
 
 eloquence of my father, how hadst thou then, and thy poor hobby-horse 
 too, have been insulted ! 
 
 My father hung up his hat with the same air he took it down ; and 
 after a slight look at the disorder of the room, he took hold of one of 
 the chairs which had formed the corporal's breach, and placing it 
 over against my Uncle Toby, he sat down in it, and as soon as the 
 tea-things were taken away, and the door shut, he broke out in a 
 lamentation as follows : 
 
 My Father's Lamentation. 
 
 **It is in vain longer,*' said my father, addressing himself as much to 
 Ernulphus's curse (which was laid upon the corner of the chimney-piece) 
 as to my Uncle Toby, who sat under it — ** it is in vain longer, said 
 my father, in the most querulous monotony imaginable, **to struggle as 
 I have done against this most uncomfortable of human persuasions. I 
 see it plainly, that either for my own sins, brother Toby, or the sins and 
 follies of the Shandy family, heaven has thought fit to draw forth the 
 heaviest of its artillery agamst me, and that the prosperity of my child 
 is the point upon which the whole force of it is directed to play. " — 
 " Such a thing would batter the whole universe about our ears, brother 
 Shand)%" said my Uncle Toby, " if it was so." — " Unhappy Tristram ! 
 child of wrath ! child of decrepitude, interruption, mistake, and dis- 
 content ! What one misfortune or disaster in the book of embryotic 
 evils, that could unmechanize thy frame or entangle thy filaments, which 
 has not fallen upon thy head ere thou earnest into the world ! What 
 evils in thy passage into it — what evils since ! 
 
 *' But what was all this, my dear Toby, to the injuries done us by my 
 child's coming head foremost into the world, when all I wished in this 
 general wreck of his frame was to have saved this little casket unbroke, 
 unrifled ? 
 
 " With all my precautions, how was my system turned topsy-turvy ! 
 his head exposed to the hand of violence and a pressure of 470 pounds 
 avoirdupois weight acting so perpendicularly upon its apex, that at this 
 hour it is ninety per cent, insurance that the fine network of the 
 intellectual web be not rent and torn to a thousand tatters. 
 
 " Still we could have done : fool, coxcomb, puppy — give him but a 
 nose — cripple, dwarf, driveller, goosecap (shape him as you will) — the 
 door of fortune stands open. O Licetus ! Licetus ! had I been blest with 
 a foetus five inches and a half long, like thee, fate might have done her 
 worst. 
 
 *' Still, brother Toby, there was one cast of the die left for our child 
 after all. O Tristram ! Tristram ! Tristram ! " 
 
 ** We will send for Mr. Yorick," said my Uncle Toby. 
 
 ♦ * You may send for whom you will, " replied my father. 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 What a rate have I gone on at, curveting and frisking it away, two up 
 and two down, for four volumes together, without looking once behind, 
 
VOL. IV.1 TRISTRAM SHANDY. IJJ 
 
 or even on one side of me, to see whom I trod upon ! ** 1*11 ti-ead upon 
 no one," quoth I to myself when I mounted ; " I'll take a good rattling 
 gallop, but I'll not hurt the poorest jackass upon the road." So off I 
 set, up one lane, down another, through this turnpike, over that, as if 
 the arch-jockey of jockeys had got behind me. 
 
 Now ride at this rate with what good intention and resolution yoii 
 may, 'tis a million to one you'll do some one a mischief, if not yourself. 
 ** He's flung, he's off, he's lost his seat, he's down, he'll break his neck ; 
 see, if he has not galloped full amongst the scaffolding of the under- 
 taking critics ; he'll knock his brains out against some of their post« 5 
 he's bounced out ; look, he's now riding like a madcap full tilt through 
 a whole crowd of painters, fiddlers, poets, biographers, physicians, 
 lawyers, logicians, players, schoolmen, churchmen, statesmen, soldiers, 
 casuists, connoisseurs, prelates, popes, and engineers." — " Don't fear," 
 said I, "I'll not hurt the poorest jackass upon the king's highway." — 
 ** But your horse throws dirt ; see, you've splashed a bishop." — ** I hope 
 in God 'twas only Ernulphus," said I. — *' But you have squirted full in 
 the faces of Messrs. Le Moyne, De Romigny, and De Marcilly, doctors 
 of the Sorbonne." — ** That was last year," replied I. — " But you have 
 trod this moment upon a king." — " Kings have bad times on't," said I, 
 ** to be trod upon by such people as me." 
 
 ** You have done it," replied my accuser. 
 
 *' I deny it," quoth I, *'and so have got off; and here am I standing, 
 with my bridle in one hand and with my cap in the other, to tell my 
 story." — " And what is it ?" — ** You shall hear in the next chapter.'* 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 As Francis the First of France * was one winterly night warming him- 
 self over the embers of a wood fire, and talking with his first minister 
 of sundry things for the good of the state, ** it would not be amiss," said 
 the king, stirring up the embers with his cane, "if this good under- 
 standing betwixt ourselves and Switzerland was a little streni,^thened." — 
 "There is no end, sire," replied the minister, "in giving money to 
 these people ; they would swallow up the treasury of France." — '* Pooh ! 
 pooh ! " answered the king ; * * there are more ways, Mons. le Premier, 
 of bribing states besides that of giving money. I'll pay Switzerland the 
 honour of standing godfather for my next chiid." — *' Your majesty," said 
 the minister, "in so doing would have all the grammarians of Europe 
 upon your back. Switzerland, as a republic, being a female, can in no 
 construction be godfather " — "She maybe godmother," cried Francis 
 hastily ; " so announce my intentions by a courier to-morrow morning. " 
 " I am astonished," said Francis the First (that day fortnight), 
 speaking to his minister as^he entered his closet, "that we have no 
 answer from Switzerland." — " Sire, I wait upon you this moment," 
 said Mons. le Premier, " to lay before you my dispatches upon that 
 business." — ''They take it kindly?" said the king. — "They do, sire," 
 replied the. minister, ** and have the highest sense of the honour your 
 
 * Vide Menagiana, voU i. 
 
154 Tristram shandy. [vol. iv. 
 
 majesty has done them : but the republic, as godmother, claims her right 
 in this case of naming the child." 
 
 " In all reason," quoth the king. *' She will chriaten him Francis, or 
 Henry, or Louis, or some name that she knows will be agreeable to us." 
 — "Your majesty is deceived," replied the minister. ** I have this hour 
 received a dispatch from our resident, with the determination ot the 
 republic on that point also." — •" And what name has the republic fixed 
 upon for the Dauphin?" — ''Shadrach, Meshech, Abednego," replied 
 the minister. — '* By St. Peter's girdle, I will have nothing to do with 
 the Swiss," cried Francis the First, palling up his breeches and walking 
 hastily across the floor. 
 
 "Your majesty," replied the minister calmly, ''cannot bring your- 
 self off." 
 
 " We'll pay them in money," said the king. 
 
 *' Sire, there are not sixty thousand crowns in the treasury,'* tJib'Asred 
 the minister. — **I'll pawn the best jewel in my crown," quoth Francis 
 the First. 
 
 "Your honour stands pawned already in this matter," answered 
 Mons. le Premier. 
 
 **Then, Mons. le Premier, " said the king, ** we'll go to war with 
 them." 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 Albeit, gentle reader, I have lusted earnestly and endeavoured care- 
 fully (according to the measure of such slender skill as God has vouch- 
 safed me, and as convenient leisure from other occasions of needful 
 profit and healthful pastime have permitted) that these little books, 
 which I here put into thy hands, might stand instead of many bigger 
 books ; yet have I carried myself towards thee in such fanciful guise of 
 careless disport, that right sore am I ashamed now to entreat tliy lenity 
 seriously, in beseeching thee to believe it of me, that in the story of my 
 fither and his Christian names I had no thou'^hts of treading upon 
 Francis the First ; nor, in the affair of the nose, upon F rancis the Ninth ; 
 iior, in the character of my Uncle Toby, of characterizing the militiating 
 spirits of my country — the wound upon his groin is a wound to every 
 comparison of that kind ; nor by Trim, that I meant the Duke of 
 Ormond ; or that my book is wrote against predestination, or free- 
 Vvi.l, or taxes. If 'tis wrote against anything, 'tis wrote, an' please 
 your worships, against the spleen, in order, by a more frequent and a 
 more convulsive elevation and depression of the diaphragm, and the 
 succussations of the intercostal and abdominal muscles in laughter, to 
 drive the gall and the other bitter juices from the gall-bladder, liver, and 
 sweetbread of his Majesty's subjects, with all the inimicitious passions^ 
 which belong to them, down into their du .d:;nums. 
 
VOL. IV.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 155 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 " But can the thing be undone, Yorick? " said my father ; " for in my 
 opinion," continued he, " it cannot." — ** I am a viJe canonist," replied 
 Yorick, " but of all evils holding suspense to be the most tormenting, 
 we shall at least know the worst of this matter." — " I hate these great 
 dinners," said my father. — *'The size of the dinner is not the point," 
 answered Yorick; " we want, Mr. Shandy, to dive into the bottom of 
 this doubt, whether the name can be changed or not ; and as the beards 
 of so many commissaries, officials, advocates, proctors, registers, and 
 of the most able of our school divines, and others, are all to mtet in 
 the middle of one table, and Didius has so pressingly invited you, who 
 in your distress would miss such an occasion? All that is requisite," 
 continued Yorick, "is to apprise Didius, and let him manage a con- 
 versation after dinner so as to introduce the subject." — "Then my 
 brother Toby," cried my father, clapping his two hands togeiher, "shall 
 go with us.'* 
 
 "Let my old tie-wig," quoth my Uncle Toby, "and my laced regi- 
 mentals, be hung to the fire all night, Trim." 
 
158 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. W- 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 No doubt, sir, there is a whole chapter wanting here, and a chasm of 
 two pages made in the book by it ; but the bookbinder is neither a fool, 
 nor a knave, nor a puppy ; nor is the book a jot more imperfect — at least 
 upon that score ; but, on the contrary, the book is more perfect and 
 complete by wanting the chapter than having it, as I shall demonstrate 
 to your reverences in this manner. I question first, by-the-by, whether 
 the same experiment might not be made as successfully upon sundry 
 other chapters; but there is no end, and please your reverences, in 
 trying experiments upon chapters; we have had enough of it. So 
 there's an end of that matter. 
 
 But before I begin my demonstration, let me only tell you that the 
 chapter which I have torn out, and whicli otherwise you would all 
 have been reading just now, instead of this, was the description of my 
 father^s, my Uncle Toby's, Trim's, and Obadiah's setting out and 
 journeying to the visitations at . 
 
 ** We'll go in the coach," said my father. ** Pr'ythee, have the arms 
 been altered, Obadiah?" — It would have made my story much better 
 to have begun with telling you that at the time my mother's arms were 
 added to the Shandy^s, when the coach was repainted upon my father^s 
 marriage, it had so fallen out that the coach- painter, whether by per- 
 forming all his works with the left hand, like Turpelius the Roman or 
 Hans Holbein of Basle, or whether it was more for the blunder of his 
 head than hand, or whether, lastly, it was from the sinister turn which 
 everything relating to our family was apt to take, it so fell out, however, 
 to our reproach, that instead of the bend-dexter, which since Harry the 
 Eighth's reign was honestly our due, a bend-sinister, by some of these 
 fatalities, had been drawn quite across the field of the Shandy arms. 
 'Tis scarce credible that the mind of so wise a man as my father was, 
 could be so much incommoded with so small a matter. The word 
 coach — let it be whose it would — or coachman, or coach-horse, or coach- 
 hire could never be named in the family, but he constantly complained 
 of carrying this vile mark of illegitimacy upon the door of his own. 
 He never once was able to step into the coach or out of it, without 
 turning round to take a view of the arms, and makmg a vow at the 
 same time that it was the last time he would ever set his foot in it again 
 till the bend-sinister was taken out. But, like the affair of the hinge, 
 it was one of the many things which the Destinies had set down in 
 their books, ever grumbled at (and in wiser families than ours), but 
 never to be mended. 
 
 ** Has the bend-sinister been brushed out, I say?" said my father. — 
 *' There has been nothing brushed out, sir," answered Obadiah, " but 
 the lining." — *' We'll go on horseback," said my father, turning to 
 Yorick." — "Of all things in the world, except politics, the clergy know 
 the least of heraldry," said Yorick.— ** No matter for that," cried my 
 father ; * * 1 should be sorry to appear with a blot in my escutcheon 
 before them." — ** Never mind the bend-einister," said my Uncle Toby, 
 putting on his tie-wig. — ** No indeed," said my father, ** you may gQ 
 
VOL. IV.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 159 
 
 with my aunt Dinah to a visitation with a bend-sinii^ter, if you think 
 fit." — [My poor Uncle Toby blushed. My father was vexed at himself.] 
 — " No, my dear brother Toby," said my father, changing his tone, " but 
 the damp of the coach lining about my loins may give me the sciafica 
 again, as it did in December, January, and February last winter ; so, if 
 you please, you shall ride my wife's pad, and as you are to preach, 
 Yorick, you had better make the best of your way before, and leave 
 me to take care of my brother Toby, and to follow at our own rates." 
 
 Now the chapter I was obliged to tear out was the description of 
 this cavalcade, in which Corporal Trim and Obadiah, upon two coach- 
 horses abreast, led the way as slow as a patrol ; whilst my Uncle 
 Toby, in his laced regimentals and tie-wig, kept his rank with my 
 father, in deep roads, and dissertations ahemately upon the advantage 
 of learning and arms, as each could get the start. 
 
 But the painting of this journey, upon reviewing it, appears to be so 
 much above the style and manner of anything else I have been able to 
 paint in this book, that it could not have remained in it without depre- 
 ciating every other scene, and destroying at the same time that neces- 
 sary equipoise and balance (whether of good or bad) betwixt chapter and 
 chapter, from whence the just proportions and harmony of the whole 
 work result. For my own part, I am but just set up in the business, 
 so know little about it ; but, in my opinion, to write a book is for all 
 the world like humming a song — be but in tune with yourself, mad^m, 
 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it. 
 
 This is the reason, may it please your reverences, that some of the 
 lowest and flattest compositions pass off very well (as Yorick told my 
 Uncle Toby one night) by siege. My Uncle Toby looked brisk at the 
 sound of the word siege, but could make neither head nor tail of it. 
 
 ** I am to preach at court next Sunday," said Homenas ; " run ov^r 
 my notes." So I hummed over Dr. Homenas's notes. ** The modula- 
 tion's very well ; 'twill do, Homenas, if it holds on at this rate." So on 
 I hummed, and a tolerable tune I thought it was ; and to this hour, 
 may it please your reverences, had never found out how low, how flat, 
 how spiritless and jejune it was ; but that all of a sudden up started an 
 air in the middle of it, so fine, so rich, so heavenly, it carried my soul 
 up with it into the other world. Now had I (as Montaigne complained 
 in a parallel accident) — had I found the declivity easy or the ascent 
 accessible, certes I had been outwitted. Your notes, FftDmenas, I 
 should have said, are good notes, but it was so perpendicular a preci- 
 pice, so wholly cut off from the rest of tht^work, that by the first note 
 I hummed I found myself flying into the other world, and from thence 
 discovered the vale from whence I came so deep, so low, and dismal, 
 that I shall never have the heart to descend into it again. 
 
 A dwarf who brings a standard along with him to measure his own 
 size, take my word, is a dwarf in more articles than one. And so much 
 for tearing out of chapters. 
 
l6o TRISTRAM SHANDY. [VOL. IV, 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 " See if he is not cutting it all into slips, and giving them about him to 
 light their pipes I " — ** 'Tis abominable," answered Didius. — " It should 
 not go unnoticed," said Doctor Kysarcius : he was of the Kysarcii of 
 the Low Countries. 
 
 " Methinks," said Didius, half rising from his chair in order to 
 remove a bottle and a tall decanter which stood in a direct line betwixt 
 him and Yorick, " you might have spared this sarcastic stroke, and have 
 hit upon a more proper place, Mr. Yorick, or at least upon a more 
 proper occasion, to have shown your contempt of what we have been 
 about. If the sermon is of no better worth than to light pipes with, 
 *twas certainly, sir, not good enough to be preached before so learned 
 a body ; and if 'twas good enough to be ]:»reached before so learned 
 a body, 'twas certainly, sir, too good to light their pipes with after- 
 wards." 
 
 *' I have got him fast hung up," quoth Didius to himself, " upon one 
 of the two horns of my dilemma — let him get off as he can." 
 
 " I have undergone such unspeakable torments in bringing forth the 
 sermon," quoth Yorick, "upon this occasion, that I declare, Didius, 
 I would suffer martyrcic«, and, if it was possible, my horse with me, a 
 thousand times over, before I would sit down and make such another. 
 I was deHvered of it at the wrong end of me — it came from my head 
 instead of my heart — and it is from the pain it gave me, both in the 
 -writing and preaching of it, that I revenge myself of it in this manner. 
 To preach, to show the extent of our reading or the subtleties of our 
 wit — to parade it in the eyes of the vulgar, with the beggarly accounts 
 of a little learning tinselled over with a few words which glitter, but 
 convey little light and less warmth — is a dishonest use of the poor single 
 half-hour in a week which is put into our hands. 'Tis not preaching 
 the gospel, but ourselves. For my own part," continued Yorick, "I 
 had rather direct five words point-blank to the heart " 
 
 As Yorick pronounced the word " point-blank,'* my Uncle Toby rose 
 up to say something upon projectiles, when a single word, and no more, 
 uttered from the opposite side of the table, drew every one's ears towards 
 it — a word of all others in the dictionary the last in that place to be 
 expected — a word I am ashamed to write, yet must be written, must be 
 read ; illegal, uncanonical ; guess ten thousand guesses multiplied into 
 themselves— rack, torture your invention for ever, you're where you were. 
 In short, I'll tell it in the next chapter. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVII. 
 
 "Zounds ! Z ds ! " cried Phutatorius, partly to himself, and yet high 
 
 enough to be heard, and, what seemed odd, 'twas uttered in a construc- 
 tion of look and in a tone of voice somewhat between that of a man in 
 amazement and one in bodily pain. 
 
VOL. IV.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, i6i 
 
 One or two who had very nice ears, and could distinguish the expres- 
 sion and mixture of the two tones as plainly as a third or a fifth, or any 
 other chord in music, were the most puzzled and perplexed with it. 
 The concord was good in itself, but then 'iwas quite out of the key, 
 and no wny applicable to the subject started ; so that with all their 
 kno^^ ledge they could not tell what in the world to make of it. 
 
 Others who knew nothing of musical expression, and merely lent 
 their ears to the plain import of the word, imagined that Phutatorius, 
 who was somewhat of a choleric spirit, was just going to snatch the 
 . cudgels out of Didius's hands in order to bemaul Yorick to some pur- 
 pose, and that the desperate inonosylla.ble *'Z ds " was the exordium 
 
 to an oradou, which, as they judged from the sample, presaged but a 
 roui^ii kind of handling of him, so that my Uncle Toby's good nature 
 felt a j)ang fur ^v'hat Yorick was about to undergo. But seeing Phuta- 
 torius s;op short, without any attempt or desire to go on, a third party 
 began to suppose th^t it was no more than an involuntary respiration 
 casually forming itself into the shape of a twelvepenny oath, wiihout the 
 sin or substance of one. 
 
 Others, and especially one or two who sat next him, looked upon 
 it, on the contrary, as a real and substantial oath propensely formed 
 against Yorick, to whom he was known to bear no good liking — 
 which said oath, as my father philosophized upon it, actually lay 
 fretting and fuming at that veiy time in the upper regions, and so 
 was naturally, and according to the due course of things, first 
 squeezed out by the sudden influx of blood, which was driven into 
 the right ventricle of Phutatorius's heart, by the stroke of surprise 
 v/hich so strange a theory of preaching had excited. 
 
 P<ow finely we argue upon mistaken facts ! 
 
 There was not a soul busied in all these various reasonings upon 
 the monosyllable which Phutatorius uttered, who did not take this 
 for granted, proceeding upon it as from an axiom — namely, that 
 Phutatorius's mind was intent upon the subject of debate which was 
 arising between Didius and Yorick ; and indeed, as he looked first 
 towards the one and then towards the other, with the air of a man 
 listening to what was going forwards, who would not have thought 
 the same? But the truth was, that Phutatorius knew not one word 
 or one syllable of what was passing ; but his whole thouj^hts and 
 attention were taken up with a transaction which was going forward 
 at that very instant within the precincts of his own galligaskins, and in 
 a part of them where, of all others, he st od most interested to watcli 
 accidents. So tliat, notwithstanding he looked with all the attention in 
 the world, and had gradually screwed up every nerve and muscle of his 
 face to the utmost pitch the instrument would bear, in order, as it was 
 thought, to give a sharp *reply to Yorick, who sat over against him ; 
 yet, I say, was Yorick never once in any one domicile of Phutatorius's 
 brain. But the true cause of his exclamation lay at least a yard below. 
 
 This I will endeavour to explain to you with all i^naginable 
 decency. 
 
 You must be informed then that Gastiipheres, who had taken a turn 
 into the kitchen a little before dinner to see how things went on, 
 ol)serving a wicker-basket of fine chestnuts standing upon the dresser, 
 had ordered that a hundred or two of them might be roasted and sent 
 
162 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vOL. m 
 
 in as soon as dinner was over, Gastripheres enforcing his orders about 
 them that Didius, but Phutatorius especiaJly, were particularly fond 
 of them. 
 
 About two minutes after the time that my Uncle Toby interrupted 
 Yorick's harangue, Gastripheres's chestnuts were brought in, and as 
 Phutatorius's fondness for them was uppermost in the waiter's head, he 
 laid them directly before Phutatorius, wrapt up hot in a clean damask 
 napkin. 
 
 Now whether it was physically impossible, with half a dozen hands 
 all thrust into the napkin at a time, but that some one chestnut, of 
 more life and rotundity than the rest must be put in motion, it so 
 fell out, however, that one was actually sent rolling off the table, and 
 as Phutatorius sat straddling under, it fell perpendicularly into an 
 aperture of Phutatorius's breeches. 
 
 All that concerns me, as an historian, is to represent the matter of 
 fact, and render it credible to the reader, that the hiatus was sufficiently 
 wide to receive the chestnut ; and that the chestnut, somehow or 
 other, did fall perpendicularly and piping hot into it, without Phuta- 
 torius's perceiving it, or any one else at that time. 
 
 The genial warmth which the chestnut imparted was not undelectable 
 for the first twenty or five- and- twenty seconds, and did no more than 
 gently solicit Phutatorius's attention towards the part. But the heat 
 gradually increasing, and in a few seconds more getting beyond the 
 point of all sober pleasure, and then advancing with all speed into the 
 regions of pain, the soul of Phutatorius, together with all his ideas, his 
 thoughts, his attention, his imagination, judgment, resolution, delibera- 
 tion, ratiocination, memory, fancy, with ten battalions of animal spirits, 
 ail tumultuously crowded down, through different defiles and circuits, 
 to the place in danger, leaving all his upper regions, as you may 
 imagine, as empty as my purse. 
 
 With the best intelligence which all these messengers could bring 
 him back, Phutatorius was not able to dive into the secret of what was 
 going forwards below, nor could he make any kind of conjecture. How- 
 ever, as he knew not what the true cause might turn out, he deemed it most 
 prudent, in the situation he was in at present, to bear it if possible like 
 a stoic ; which, with the help of some wry faces and compressions of the 
 mouth, he had certainly accomplished, had his imagination continued 
 neuter ; but the sallies of the imagination are ungovernable in things 
 of this kind — a thought instantly darted into his mind, that though the 
 anguish had the sensation of glowing heat, it might, notwithstanding 
 that, be a bite as well as a burn ; and if so, that possibly a newt or an 
 asker, or some such detested reptile, had crept up, and was fastening his 
 teeth — the horrid idea of which, with a fresh glow of pain arising that 
 instant from the chestnut, seized Phutatorius with a sudden panic, and 
 in the first terrifying disorder of the passion it threw him, as it has 
 done the best generals upon earth, quite off his guard ; the effect of 
 which was thi.-, that he leaped incontinently up, uttering as he rose 
 that interjection of surprise so much descanted upon, with the aposio- 
 
 pestic break after it, marked thus, *' Z ds," which, though not strictly 
 
 canonical, was still as little as any man could have said upon the 
 occasion ; and wliich, by-the-by, whether canonical or not, Phutatorius 
 could no more help tlian he could the cause of it. 
 
VOL. IV.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, i6j' 
 
 Though this has taken up some time in the narrative, it took up 
 little more time in the transaction than just to allow time for Phuta- 
 torius to draw forth the chestnut and throw it down with violence upon 
 the floor, and for Yorick to rise from his chair and pick the chestnut up. 
 
 It is curious to observe the triumph of slight incidents over the mind. 
 "What incredible weight they have in forming and governing our 
 opinions, both of men and things, that trifles light as air shall waft a 
 belief into the soul, and plant it so immovably within it, that Euclid's 
 demonstrations, could they be brought to batter it in breach, should 
 not all have power to overthrow it. 
 
 Yorick, I said, picked up the chestnut which Phutatorius's wrath had 
 flung down : the action was trifling, I am ashamed to account for it : 
 he did it for no reason but that he thought the chestnut not a jot worse 
 for the adventure, and that he held a good chestnut worth stooping for. 
 But this incident, trifling as it was, wrought differently in Phutatorius's 
 head. He considered this act of Yorick's in getting off his chair and 
 picking up the chestnut as a plain acknowledgment in him that the 
 chestnut was originally his, and, in course, that it must have been the 
 owner of the chestnut, and no one else, who could have played him such 
 a prank with it. What greatly confirmed him in this opinion was this, 
 that the table being parallelogramical and very narrow, it afforded a 
 fair opportunity for Yorick, who sat directly over against Phutatorius, 
 of slipping the chestnut in, and consequently that he did it. The look 
 of something more than suspicion which Phutatorius cast full upon 
 Yorick as these thoughts arose, too evidently spoke his opinion, and as 
 Phutatorius was naturally supposed to know more of the matter than 
 any person besides, his opinion at once became the general one ; and 
 for a reason very different from any which have been yet given, in a 
 little time it was put out of all manner of dispute. 
 
 When great or unexpected events fall out upon the stage of this 
 sublunary world, the mind of man, which is an inquisitive kind of a 
 substance, naturally takes a flight behind the scenes, to see what is the 
 cause and first spring of them. The search was not long in this 
 instance. 
 
 It was well knov/n that Yorick had never a good opinion of a treatise 
 which Phutatorius had wrote, as a thing which he feared had done hurt 
 in the world, and 'twas easily found out that there was a mystical 
 meaning in Yorick's prank. 
 
 This, as the reader has seen from one end to the other, was as ground- 
 less as the dreams of philosophy ; Yorick, no doubt, as Shakespeare 
 said of his ancestor, "wasa^man of jest," but it was tempered with 
 something which withheld him from that and many other ungracious 
 pranks, of which he as undeservedly bore the blame ; but it was his 
 misfortune, all his life long, to bear the imputation of saying and doing 
 a thousand things of which (unless my esteem blinds me) his nature 
 was incapable. All I blame him for, or rather all I blame and alternately 
 like him for, was that singularity of his temper which would never 
 suffer him to take pains to set a story right with the world, however in 
 his power. In every ill usage of that sort he acted precisely as in 
 the affair of his lean horse — he could have explained it to his honour, 
 but his spirit was above it ; and besides, he ever looked upon the 
 inventor, the propagator, and believer of an illiberal report alike so 
 
 F 
 
|i64 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. iv. 
 
 injurious to him, he could not stoop to tell his story to them, and so 
 trusted to time and truth to do it for him. 
 
 This heroic cast produced him inconveniences in many respects : 
 in the present it was followed by the fixed resentmenx of Phutatorius, 
 who, as Yovick had just made an end of his chestnut, rose up from 
 his chair a second time to let him know it, which indeed he did 
 with a smile, saying only that he would endeavour not to forget the 
 obligation. 
 
 But you must mark and carefully separate and distinguish these two 
 things in your mind : 
 
 The smile was for the company. 
 
 The threat was for Yorick. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 *'Now," quoth Didius, rising up, and laying his right hand with his 
 fingers spread upon his breast, ** had such a blunder about a Christian 
 name happened before the Reformation" — [" It happened the day before 
 yesterday," quoth my Uncle Toby to himself] — "and when baptism was 
 administered in Latin — [** 'Twasallin English," said my uncle] — " many 
 things might have coincided with it, and upon the authority of sundry 
 decreed cases, to have pronounced the baptism null, with the power of 
 giUng the child a new name. Had a priest, for instance, which was no 
 uncommon thing, through ignorance of the Latin tongue, baptized a 
 child of Tom o' Siles in nomine patricB d filla et spiritum sanctos^ the 
 baptism was held null." — ** I beg your pardon," replied Kysarcius ; " in 
 fhat case, as the mistake was only in the terminations, the baptism was 
 valid J and to have rendered it null the blunder of the priest should 
 have fallen upon the first syllable of each noun, and not, as in your case, 
 upon the last." 
 
 My father delighted in subtleties of this kind, and listened with infinite 
 attention. 
 
 " Gastripheres, for example," continued Kysarcius, *' baptizes a child 
 of John Stradling's in gomine gatriSy &c., instead of in nomine 
 patrisy 8cc. Is this a baptism ? No, says the ablest canonists ; inasmuch 
 as the radix of each word is hereby torn up, and the sense and meaning 
 of th^m removed and changed quite to another object ; for gomifu does 
 not signify a name, nor gatris a father." — " What do they sif^mify ? " said 
 my Uncle Toby. — "Nothing at all," quoth Yorick. — "Ergo, such a 
 baptism is null," said Ky^jarcius. — " In course," answered Yorick, in a 
 tone two parts jest and one part earnest. 
 
 " But in the case cited," continued Kysarciu?, "where patrim is put 
 for patrisy filia {oxfilii, and so on, as it is a fauN only in the declension, 
 and the roots of the words continue untouched, the inflections of their 
 branches either this way or that do not in any sort hinder the baptism, 
 inasmuch as the same sense continues in the words as before." — "But 
 then," said Didius, " the intention of the priest's pronouncing them 
 grammatically must have been proved to have gone along with it."—? 
 
VOL. iv.j TRISTRAM SHANDY. 165 
 
 ** Right," answered Kysarcius ; " and of this, brother Didius, we have 
 an instance in a decree of the decretals of Pope Leo III." — **But my 
 brother's child," cried my Uncle Toby, **has nothing to do with the 
 Pope ; 'tis the plain child of a Protestant gentleman, christened Tris- 
 tram ai^ainst the wills and wishes both of its father and mother, and all 
 who are akin to it." 
 
 "If ihe wills and wishes," said Kysarcius, interrupting my Uncle 
 To!>y, *■ ' of those only who stand related to Mr. Shandy's child were 
 to have weight in this matter, Mrs. Shandy, of all people, has the least 
 to do in it." — My Uncle Toby laid down his pipe, and my father drew 
 his chair still closer to the table to hear the conclusion of so strange an 
 introduction. 
 
 ** It has not only been a question. Captain Shandy, amongst the 
 best lawyers and civilians* in this land," continued Kysarcius, "whether 
 the mother be of kin to her child, but after much dispassionate inquiry 
 and jactitation of the arguments on all sides, it has been adjudged for 
 the negative — namely, "That the mother is not of kin to her child." f 
 — My father instantly clapped his hand upon my Uncle Toby's mouth, 
 under cover of whispering in his ear. The truth was, he was alarmed for 
 " Lillabullero," and having a great desire to hear more of so curious sun 
 argument, he begged my Uncle Toby, for heaven's sake, not to dis- 
 appoint him in it. My Uncle Toby gave a nod, resumed his pipe, and 
 contenting himself with whistling " Lillabullero " inwardly, Kysarcius, 
 Didius, and Triptolemus went on with the discourse as follows : 
 
 "This determination," continued Kysarcius, "however contrary 
 foever it may seem to run to the stream of vulgar ideas, yet had 
 reason strongly on its side, and has been put out of all manner of dis- 
 pute from the famous case known commonly by the name of the Duke 
 of Suffolk's case." — " It is cited in Brook," said Triptolemus. — "And 
 taken notice of by Lord Coke," added Didius. — "And you may find it 
 in Swinburn on Testaments," said Kysarcius. 
 
 "The case, Mr. Shandy, was this: 
 
 "In the reign of Edward VI., Charles, Duke of Suffolk, having 
 issue a son by one venter, and a daughter by another venter, made his 
 last will, wherein he devised goods to his son, and died, after whose death 
 the son died also— but without will, without wife, and without child — 
 his mother and his sister by the father's side (for she was born of tlie 
 former venter) then living. The mother took the administration of her 
 son's goods, according to the statute of the 21st of Harry tlie Eighth, 
 wliereby it is enacted, *That, in case any person die intestate, the 
 administration of his goods shall be committed to the next of kin.' 
 
 " The administration being thus (siirreptitiously) granted to the 
 mother, the sister by the father's side commenced a suit before the 
 Ecclesiastical Judge, alleging firstly, that she herself was next of kin ; 
 and secondly, that the mother was not of kin at all to the party 
 deceased ; and therefore prayed the court that the administration 
 granted to the mother might be revoked, and be committed unto her, 
 as next of kin to the deceased, by force of the said statute. 
 
 " Hereupon, as it was a great cause and much depending upon its 
 issue, and many causes of great property likely to be decided in times 
 
 * Vide Swinburn on Testaments, part vii. § 8. 
 •'i Vide Brook, Abridg. TJt. Adtninstr. N. 47. 
 
i66 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. iv. 
 
 to come by the precedent to be then made, the most learned, as well 
 in the laws of this realm as in the civil law, were consulted together 
 whether the mother was of kin to her son or no. Whereunto not only 
 the temporal lawyers, but the church lawyers, the jurisconsulti^ the 
 jurisprudentesy the civilians, the advocates, the commissaries, the judges 
 of the Consistory and Prerogative courts of Canterbury and York, with 
 the master of the faculties, were all unanimously of opinion that the 
 mother was not of kin to her child." * 
 
 ** And what said the Duchess of Suffolk to it ? " said my Uncle Toby. 
 
 The unexpectedness of my Uncle Toby's question confounded Ky- 
 sarcius more than the ablest advocate. He stopped a full minute, 
 ieoking in my Uncle Toby's face without replying, and in that single 
 minute Triptolemus put by him, and took the lead as follows : — 
 
 *' 'Tis a ground and a principle in the law," said Triptolemus, " that 
 things do not ascend, but descend in it ; and I make no doubt 'tis for 
 this cause that, however true it is that the child may be of the blood of its 
 parents, that the parents, nevertheless, are not of the blood and seed of 
 it ; inasmuch as the parents are not begot by the child, but the child 
 by the parents. For so they write, Liberi sunt de sanguine patris et 
 matrisy sed pater et mater nan sunt de sanguine liberorum" 
 
 CHAPTER XXX. 
 
 ** And pray,*' said my Uncle Toby, leaning upon Yorick, as he and my 
 father were helping him leisurely down the stairs — [Don't be terrified, 
 madam ; this staircase conversation is not so long as the last] — "and 
 pray, Yorick," said my Uncle Toby, " which way is this said affair of Tris- 
 tram at length settled by these learned men ?" — " Very satisfactorily," 
 replied Yorick ; " no mortal, sir, has any concern with it, for Mrs. 
 Shandy, the mother, is nothing at all akin to him, and as the mother's 
 is the surest side, Mr. Shandy, in course, is still less than nothing ; 
 in short, he is not as much akin to him, sir, as I am." 
 
 ** That may well be," said my fether, shaking his head. 
 
 *' Let the learned say what they will, there must certainly," quoth 
 my Uncle Toby, " have been some sort of consanguinity betwixt the 
 Duchess of Suffolk and her son. 
 
 **The vulgar are of the same opinion," quoth Yorick, '*to this 
 hour." 
 
 CHAPTER XXXI. 
 
 Though my father was hugely tickled with the subtleties of these 
 discourses, 'twas still but like the anointing of a broken bone. The 
 moment he got home the weight of his afflictions returned upon him 
 but so muoh the heavier, as is ever the case when the staff we lean on 
 
 * Mater non numcratur ijtiter consanguineos. — Bald, in ult. Ct de Verb, signlfic. 
 
VOL. IV.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, i6l 
 
 slips from under us. He became pensive, walked frequently forth to 
 the fish-pond, let down one loop of his hat, sighed often, forbore to 
 snap, and as the hasty sparks of temper which occasion snapping so 
 much assist perspiration and digestion — as Hippocrates tells us — he had 
 certainly fallen ill with the extinction of them had not his thoughts 
 been critically drawn off, and his health rescued, by a fresh train of 
 disquietudes left him, with a legacy of a thousand pounds, by my aunt 
 Dinah. 
 
 My father had scarce read the letter, when takini^ the thing by the 
 right end, he instantly be<^an to plague and puzzle his head how to lay 
 it out mostly to the honour of his family. A hundred and fifty odd pro- 
 jects took possession of his brain by turns. He would do this, and 
 that, and t'other. He would go to Rome ; he would go to law ; he 
 would buy stock ; he would buy John Hobson's farm ; he would new 
 fore-front his house, and add a new wing to make it even. There was 
 a fine water-mill on this side, and he would build a wind -mill on the 
 other side of the river in full view, to answer it. But above all things 
 in the world, he would enclose the great Oxmoor, and send out my 
 brother Bobby immediately upon his travels. 
 
 But as the sum was finite, and consequently could not do everything 
 (and in truth very few of these to any purpose), of all the projects 
 which offered themselves on this occasion, the two last seemed to 
 make the deepest impression ; and he woidd infallibly have determined 
 upon both at once but for the small inconvenience hinted at above, 
 which absolutely put him under a necessity of deciding in favour of the 
 one or the other. 
 
 This was not altogether so easy to be done ; for though ^tis certain 
 my father had long before set his heart upon this necessary part of my 
 brother's education, and, like a prudent man, had actually determined 
 to carry it into execution with the first money that returned from the 
 second creation of actions in the Mississippi scheme, in which he was 
 an adventurer ; yet the Oxmoor, which was a fine, large, whinny, un- 
 drained, unimproved common belonging to the Shandy estate, had 
 almost as old a claim upon him. He had long and affectionately set 
 his heart upon turning it likewise to some account. 
 
 But having never hitherto been pressed with such a conjuncture of 
 things as made it necessary to settle either the priority or justice of 
 their claims, like a wise man he had refrained from entering into any 
 nice or critical examination about them. So that upon the dismission of 
 every other project at this crisis, the two old projects — the Oxmoor and 
 my brother — divided him again ; and so equal a match were they for 
 each other as to become the occasion of no small contest in the old 
 gentleman's mind which of the two should be set a-going first. 
 
 People may laugh as they will, but the case was this : 
 
 It had been ever the custom of the family, and by length of time 
 was almost a matter of common right, that the eldest son of it should 
 have free ingress, egress, and regress into foreign parts before marriage ; 
 not only for the sake of bettering his own private parts by the benefit 
 of exercise and change of so much air, but simply for the mere delec- 
 tation of his fancy by the feather put into his cap of having been 
 abroad. ** Tantum valet^'' my father would say, ** quantum sonat^ 
 
 Now as this was a reasonable and in course a most Christian indul* 
 
i6S Tristram SHANDY. tvoL.iv, 
 
 gence, to deprive him of it without why or wherefore, and thereby 
 make an example of him as the first Shandy unwhirled about Europe 
 in a post-chaise, and only because he was a heavy lad, would be using 
 him ten times worse than a Turk. 
 
 On the other hand, the case of the Oxmoor was fully as hard. 
 
 Exclusive of the original purchase -money, which was eight hundred 
 pounds, it had cost the family eight hundred pounds more in a lawsuit 
 about fifteen years before, besides tJie Lord knows what trouble and 
 vexation. 
 
 It had been, moreover, in possession of the Shandy family ever since 
 the middle of the last century ; and though it lay full in view before the 
 house, bounded on one extremity by the water-mill and on the other by 
 the projected wandmill spoken of above, and for all these reasons 
 seemed to have the fairest title of any part of the estate to the care and 
 protection of the family ; yet by an unaccountable fatality, common to 
 men as well as to the ground they tread on, it had all along most 
 shamefully been overlooked, and, to speak the truth of it, had suffered 
 so much by it, " that it would have made any man's heart have bled," 
 Obadiah said, who understood the value of land, **to have rode over 
 it, and only seen the c«idition it was in." 
 
 However, as neither the purchasing this tract of ground, nor indeed 
 the placing of it where it lay, were cither of them, properly speaking, 
 of my father's doing, he had never thou<^ht himself anyway concerned 
 in the affair till the fifteen years before, when the breaking out: of that 
 cursed lawsuit mentioned above, and which had arose ai < ut its 
 boundaries, which being altogether my father's own act and deed, it 
 naturally awakened every other argument in its favour; and upon 
 summing them all up together, he saw, not merely in interest but in 
 honour, he was bound to do something for it, and that now or never was 
 the time. 
 
 I think there must certainly have been a mixture of ill-luck in it, 
 that the reasons on both sides should happen to be so equally balanced 
 by each other ; for though my fatiier weighed them in all humours and 
 conditions — spent many an anxious hour in the most profound and 
 abstracted meditation upon what was best to be done, reading books of 
 farming one day, books of travels another; laying aside all passion 
 whatever ; viewing the arguments on both sides in all their lights and 
 circumstances ; communing every day with my Uncle Toby, arguing 
 with Yorick, and talking over the whole affair of the Oxmoor with 
 Obadiah ; yet nothing in all that time appeared so strongly in behalf of 
 the one which was not either strictly applicable to the other, or at least 
 so far counterbalanced by some consideration of equal weight as to 
 keep the scales even. 
 
 For to be sure, vrith proper lielps, and in the hands of some people, 
 though the Oxmoor would undoubtedly have made a different appear- 
 ance in the world from what it did or ever could do in the condition it 
 lay, yet every tittle of this was true with regard to my brother Bobby, 
 let Obadiah say what he would. 
 
 In point of interest, the contest, I own, at first sight did not appear 
 so undecisive betwixt them ; for whenever my father took pen and ink 
 in hand, and set about calculating the simple expense of paring, and 
 laiming, and fencing in the Ojynoor, &c., with the certain profit it 
 
VOL. IV.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 169 
 
 would bring him in return ; the latter turned out so prodigiously in his 
 way of working the account that you would have sworn the Oxnioor 
 would have carried all before it. For it was platn he should reap a 
 hundred lasts of rape, at twenty pounds a last, the very first year, 
 besides an excellent crop of wheat the year following, and the year after 
 that, to sjxiak within bounds, a hundred — but in all likelihood a hundred 
 and fifty, if not two hundred — quarters of pease and beans, besides 
 potatoes without end. But then, to think he was all this while breed- 
 ing up my brother like a hog to eat them, knocked all on the head 
 again, and generally left the old gentleman in such a state of suspense 
 that, as he often declared to my Uncle Toby, he knew no more than Iws 
 heels what to do. 
 
 Nobody but he who has felt it, can conceive what a plaguing thing it 
 is to have a man's mind torn asunder by two projects of equal strength, 
 both obstinately pulling in a contrary direction at the same time. For 
 to say nothing of the havoc which by a certain consequence is un- 
 avoidably made by it all over the finer system of the nerves, which ycu 
 know convey the animal spirits and more subtle juices from the heart to 
 the head, and so on, it is not to be told in w^hat a degree such a wayward 
 kind of friction works upon the more gross and solid parts, wasting the 
 fat, and impairing the strength of a man every time as it goes backwards 
 and forwards. 
 
 My father had certainly sunk under this evil as certainly as he had 
 done under that of my Christian name, had he not been rescued out of 
 it, "as he was out of that, by a fresh evil — the misfortune of my brother 
 Bobby's death. 
 
 What is the life of man ? Is it not to shift from side to side, from 
 sorrow to sorrow ? — to button up one cause of vexation and unbutton 
 another ? 
 
 CHAPTER XXXII. 
 
 From this moment I am to be considered as heir-apparent to the 
 Shandy family ; and it is from this point properly that the story of my 
 life and my opinions sets out. With all my hurry and precipitation I 
 have but been clearing the ground to raise the building ; and such a 
 building do I foresee it will turn out as never was planned and as neve*' 
 was executed since Adam. In less than five minutes I shall have thro v»'n 
 my pen into the fire and the little drop of thick ink which is left re- 
 maining at the bottom of my inkhom after it. I have but half a score 
 things to do in the time-^I have a thing to name, a thing to lament, a 
 thing to hope, a thing to promise, and a thing to threaten ; I have a 
 thm:^ to suppose, a thing to declare, a thing to conceal, a thing to 
 choose, and a thing to pray for. This chapter therefore I name the 
 chapter of things ; and my next chapter to it — that is, the first chapter 
 of my next volume, if I live — shall be my chapter upon whiskers, in 
 order to keep up some sort of connection in my works. 
 
 The thing I lament is, that thing.s have crowded in so thick upon me 
 that I have not been able to get into that part of my work towards 
 
I70 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. iv. 
 
 which I have all the way looked forwards with so much earnest desire ; 
 and that is the campaigns, but especially the amours, of my Uncle Toby, 
 the events of which are of so singular a nature and so Cervantic a cast, that 
 if I can so manage it as to convey but the same impressions to every 
 othei: brain which the occurrences themselves excite in my own, I will 
 answer for it the book shall make its way in the world much better than 
 its master has done before it. Oh, Tristram, Tristram ! can this but 
 be once brought about, the credit which will attend thee as an author 
 shall counterbalance the many evils which have befallen thee as a man ; 
 thou wilt feast upon the one when thou hast lost all sense and remem- 
 brance of the other. 
 
 No wonder I itch so much as I do to get at these amours. They 
 are the choicest morsel of my whole story, and when I do get at them, 
 assure yourselves, good folks (nor do I value whose squeamish stomach 
 takes offence at it), I shall not be at all nice in the choice of my words ; 
 and that's the thing I have to declare, I shall never get all through in 
 five minutes, that I fear ; and the thing I hope is, that your worships 
 and reverences are not offended ; if you are, depend upon it I'll give you 
 something, my good gentr}^, next year to be offended at : that's my dear 
 Jenny's way, but who my Jenny is, and which is the right and which 
 the wrong end of a woman, is the thing to be concealed — it shall be told 
 you the next chapter but one to my chapter of button-holes, and not 
 one chapter before. 
 
 And now that you have just got to the end of these four volumes, 
 the thing I have to ask is, how you feel your heads ? My own aches 
 dismally. As for your hanlths, I know they are much better. True 
 Shandeism, think what you will against it, opens the heart and lungs, 
 and like all those affections which partake of its nature, it forces the 
 blood and other vital fluids of the body to run freely through their 
 channels, and makes the wheel of life run long and cheerfully round. 
 
 Was I left like Sancho Panza to choose my kingdom, it should not 
 be maritime, or a kingdom of blacks to make a penny of ; no, it should 
 be a kingdom of hearty laughing subjects. And as the bilious and more 
 saturnine passions, by creating disorders in the blood and humours, have 
 as bad an influence, I see, upon the body politic as body natural, and as 
 nothing but a habit of virtue can fully govern those passions and 
 subject them to reason, I should add to my prayer, that God would 
 give my subjects grace to be as wise as they were merry ; and then 
 should I be the happiest monarch and they the happiest people under 
 heaven. 
 
 And so, with this moral for the present, may it please your worships 
 and your reverences, I take my leave of you till this time twelvemonth, 
 when (unless this vile cough kills me in the meantime) I'll have another 
 pluck at your beards, an4 lay open a story to the world you little 
 dream of. 
 
VOLUME V. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 If it had not been for those two mettlesome tits and that madcap of a 
 postilion who drove them from Stilton to Stamford, the thought had 
 never entered my head. He flew like %htning — there was a slope of 
 three miles and a half — we scarce touched the ground, the motion was 
 most rapid, most impetuous ; 'twas communicated to my brain, my heart 
 ])artook of it. ** By the great god of day," said I, looking towards the 
 sun and thrusting my arm out of the fore-window of the chaise as l 
 made my vow, *' I will lock up my study-door the moment I get home, 
 and thiow the key of it ninety feet below the surface of the earth, into 
 the draw-well at the back of my house." 
 
 The London waggon confirmed me in my resolution ; it hung 
 tottering upon the hill, scarce progressive, dragged, dragged up by eight 
 heavy beasts, " by main strength " quoth t, nodding ; ** but your betters 
 draw the same way, and something of everybody's ! Oh rare ! " 
 
 Tell me, ye learned, shall we for ever be adding so much to the bulk, 
 so little to the stock ? 
 
 Shall we for ever make new b'>oks, as apothecaries make new mix- 
 tures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another ? 
 
 Are we for ever to be twisting and untwisting the same rope, for 
 ever in the same tract, for ever at the same pace ? 
 
 Shall we be destined to the days of eternity, on holidays as well as 
 working-days, to be showing the relics of learning, as monks do tlie 
 relics of their saints, without working one — one single miracle with them ? 
 
 Who made man, with powers which dart him from earth to heaven 
 in a moment, that great, that most excellent and most noble creature of 
 the world, the miracle of nature, as Zoroaster in his book irept (pi>(Teio<; 
 called him ; theShekinah of the divine presence, asChrysostom; the image 
 of God, as Moses; the ray of divinity, as Plato ; the marvel of marvels, 
 as Aristotle ; — ^^to go sneaking on at this pitiful, pimping, pettifogging rate ? 
 
 I scorn to be as abusive as Horace upon the occasion, but if there is 
 no catachresis in the wish, and no sin in it, I wish from my soul that 
 every imitator in Great Britain, France, and Ireland had the farcy for 
 his pains ; and that there was a good farcical house large enough to hold, 
 ay, and sublimate them, tag-rag and bob-tail, male and female, all 
 together; and this leads me to the affair of whiskers, but by what 
 
172 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. V. 
 
 chain of ideas I leave as a legacy in mortmain to Prudes and Tartufls, 
 to enjoy and make the most of. 
 
 Upon Whiskers. 
 
 I am sorry I made it; 'twas as inconsiderate a promise as ever entered 
 a man's head. A chapter upon whiskers — alas ! the world will not bear 
 it ; 'tis a delicate world, but I knew not of what metal it was made, nor 
 had I ever seen the underwritten fragment ; otherwise, as surely as noses 
 are noses and whiskers are whiskers, still (let the world say what it will 
 to the contrary) so surely would I have steered clear of this dangerous 
 chapter. 
 
 llie Fragment. 
 
 ***** ''You are half asleep, my good lady, " said the old gentle- 
 man taking hold of the old lady's hand, and giving it a gentle squeeze, as 
 he pronounced the word whiskers ; "shall we change the subject?" — " By 
 no means," replied the old lady. ** I like your account of those matters." 
 So throwing a thin gauze handkerchief over her head, and leaning it back 
 upon the chair with her face turned towards him, and advancing her 
 two feet as she reclined herself. — " I desire," continued she, *' you will 
 go on." 
 
 The old gentleman went on as follows : 
 
 "Whiskers!" cried the Queen of Navarre, dropping her knotting- 
 bali as La Fosseuse uttered the word. — "Whiskers! madam," said 
 \j3i. Fosseuse, pinning the ball to the Queen's apron, and making a 
 courtesy as she repeated it. 
 
 La Fosseuse's voice was naturally soft and low, yet 'twas an articulate 
 voice, and every letter of the word whiskers fell distinctly upon the 
 Queen of Navarre's ear. "Whiskers!" cried the Queen, laying a 
 greater stress upon the word, and as if she had still distrusted her ears. 
 ** Whiskers !'* replied La Fosseuse, repeating the word a third time. — 
 " There is not a cavalier, madam, of his age in Navarre," continued the 
 mnid of honour, pressing the page's interest upon the Queen, " that 
 has so gallant a pair." — "Of what?" cried Margaret, smiling. — "Of 
 whiskers," said I^ Fosseuse with infinite modesty. 
 
 The word whiskers still stood its ground, and continued to be made 
 use of in most of the best companies throughout the little kingdom of 
 Navarre, notwithstanding the indiscreet use which La P'osseuse had 
 made of it. The truth was. La Fosseuse had pronounced the word, not 
 only before the Queen, but upon sundry other occasions at court, with an 
 accent which always implied something of a mystery. And as the court 
 of Margaret, as all the world knows, was at that time a mixture o ' 
 gallantry and devotion, and whiskers being as applicable to the one 
 as the other, the world naturally stood its ground — it gained full as much 
 as it lost ; that is, the clergy were for it, the laity were against it, 
 and for the women, they were divided. 
 
 The excellency of the figure and mien of the young Sieur de Croix 
 was at that time beginning to draw the attention of the maids of 
 honour towards the terrace before the palace gate, where the guard was 
 mounted. The Lady de Baussiere fell deeply in love with him, La 
 Battarelle did the same ; it was the finest weather for it that ever was 
 
VOL. v.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 173 
 
 remembered in Navarre. La Guyol, La Maronette, La Sabatiere fell 
 in love with the Sieur de Croix also ; La Rebours and La Fosseuse 
 knew better. De Croix had failed in an attempt to recommend himself 
 to La Reljours ; and La Rebours and La Fosseuse were inseparable. 
 
 The Queen of Navarre was sitting with her ladies in the painted bow- 
 window, facinjT the gate of the second court, as De Croix passed through 
 it. — " He is liandsome," said the Lady Baussiere. — " He has a good 
 mien," said La Battarelle. — *' He is finely shaped,'* said LaGuyol. — " I 
 never saw an officer of the horseguards in my life," said La Maronette, 
 "with two such legs." — "Or who stood so well upon them,*' said La 
 Sabatiere. — ** But he has no whiskers," cried La Fosseuse. — "Not a 
 pile/' said La Rebours. 
 
 The Queen went directly to her oratory, musing all the way, as she 
 walked through the gallery, upon tiie subject ; turning it this way and 
 that way in her fancy. "Ave Maria ! what can La Fosseuse mean?'* 
 said she, kneeling down upon the cushion. 
 
 La Guyol, La Battarelle, La Maronette, La Sabatrere retired in- 
 stantly to their chambei-s. "Whiskers!" said all four of them to 
 themselves, as they bolted their doors on the inside. 
 
 The Lady Caniavalette was counting iier beads with both hands, un- 
 suspected, under her farthingal — from St. Anthony down to St. Ursula 
 inclusive, not a saint passed through her fingers without whiskers : Sr. 
 Francis, St. Dominic, St. Bennet, St. Basil, St. Bridget, had aiJ 
 whiskers. 
 
 The Lady Baussiere had got into a wilderness of conceits with 
 moralizing too intricately upon La FosFeuse's text. She mounted her 
 palfrey, her page followed her, the host passed by, the Lady Baussiere 
 rode on. 
 
 '* One denier," cried the order of mercy, "one single denier in behalf 
 of a thousand patient captives, whose eyes look towards heaven and 
 you for their redemption." 
 The Lady Baussiere rode on. 
 
 "Pity the unhappy," said a devout, venerable, hoary-headed , man, 
 meekly holding up a box, begirt with iron, in his withered hands. " I 
 beg for the unfortunate ; good, my lady, 'tis for a prison, for an 
 hospital, 'tis for an old man, a poor man undone by shipwreck, by 
 suretyship, by fire ; I call God and all his angels to witness, 'tis to 
 clothe the naked, to feed the hungry, 'tis to comfort the sick and Ihe 
 broken-hearted. " 
 The Lady Baussiere rode on. 
 A decayed kinsman bowed himself to the ground. 
 The Lady Baussiere rode on. 
 
 He ran begging, bare-headed, on one side of her palfrey, conjuring 
 her by the former bonds of friendship, alliance, consanguinity, &c. 
 " Cousin, aunt, sister, mother, for virtue's sake, for your own, for mine, 
 for Christ's sake, remember me — pity me." 
 The Lady Baussiere rode on. 
 
 "Take hold of my whiskers," said the Lady Baussiere. The page 
 took hold of her palfrey. She dismounted at the end of the terrace. 
 
 There are some trains of certain ideas which leave prints of them- 
 selves about our eyes and eyebrows ; and there is a consciousness of 
 it, somewhere aboiit the heart, which serves but to m^ke these itchings 
 
1 74 TRISTRAM SHAND Y. [vol. v. 
 
 the stronger; we see, spell, and put them together without a dic- 
 tionary. 
 
 ** Ha, ha ! Hee,hee ! " cried La Guyol and La Sabatiere, looking close 
 at each other's prints. " Ho, ho ! " cried La Battarelle and Maronette, 
 doing the same. ** Whist!" cried one. ** St — st ! " said a second. 
 *' Hush ! " quoth a third. " Pooh, pooh ! " replied a fourth. ** Gram- 
 mercy ! " cried the Lady Carnavalette ; 'twas she who bewhiskered 
 St. Bridget. 
 
 La Fosseusse drew her bodkin from the knot of her hair, and having 
 traced the outline of a small whisker with the blunt end of it upon one 
 side of her upper lip, put it into La Rebours's hand. La Rebours 
 shook her head. 
 
 The Lady Baussiere coughed thrice into the inside of her muff. La 
 Guyol smiled. " Fie! " said the Lady Baussiere. The Queen of Navarre 
 touched her eye with the tip of her fore-finger, as much as to say, " I 
 understand you all." 
 
 'Twas plain to the whole court the word was ruined. La Fosseusse 
 had given it a wound, and it was not the better for passing through all 
 these defiles. It made a faint stand, however, for a few months, by 
 the expiration of which, the Sieur de Croix, finding it high time to 
 leave Navarre for want of whiskers, the word in course became inde- 
 cent, and after a few efforts absolutely unfit for use. 
 
 The best word in the best language of the best world must have 
 suffered under such combinations. The curate of D'Estella wrote a 
 book against them, setting forth the dangers of accessory ideas, and 
 warning the Navarois against them. 
 
 ** Does not all the world know," said the Curate d'Estella, at the 
 conclusion of his work, "that noses ran the same fate some centuries 
 ago in most parts of Europe, which whiskers have now done in the 
 kingdom of Navarre. The evil indeed spread no further then ; but 
 have not beds and bolsters and night-caps stood upon the brink of 
 destruction ever since ? Chastity, by nature the gentlest of all affections, 
 give it but its head, 'tis like a ramping and a roaring lion. 
 
 CHAPTER n. 
 
 When my father received the letter which brought him the mel^- 
 choly account of my brother Bobby's death, he was busy calculating 
 the expense of his riding post from Calais to Paris, and so on to Lyons. 
 'Twas a most inauspicious journey, my father having had every foot 
 of it to travel over again, and his calculation to begin afresh, when he 
 had almost got to the end of it, by Obadiah's opening the door to 
 acquaint him the family wj)s out of yeast, and to ask whether he might 
 not take the great coach-horse early in the morning, and ride in search 
 of some. ** With all my hearr, Obadiab," said my father, pursuing his 
 journey, ** take the coach-h<orse, and welcome.'' — "But he wants a 
 shoe, poor creature," said Obadi ah. — " Poor creature," said my Uncle 
 Toby, vibrating the note back again, like a string in unison. — "Then 
 j-idc the Scotch horse," quoth my father h?vstily,™" lie cannot bear a 
 
VOL. v.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 175 
 
 saddle upon his back," quoth Obadiah, "for the whole world.'*— 
 '* The devil's in that horse ; then take Patriot," cried my father, and 
 shut the door. — "Patriot is sold," said Obadiah. — "Here's for you," 
 cried my father, making a pause, and looking in my Uncle Toby's 
 face as if the thing had not been a matter ot fact. — ** Your worship 
 ordered me to sell him last April,'* said Obadiah. — " Then go on 
 foot for your pains," cried my father. — **I had much rather walk than 
 ride," said Obadiah, shutting the deor. 
 
 *' What plagues ! " cried my father, going on with his calculation. — 
 " But the waters are out," said Obadiah; opening the door again. 
 
 Till that moment my father, who had a map of Sanson's and a book 
 of the post-roads before him, had kept his hand upon the head of his 
 compasses, with one foot of them fixed upon Nevers, the last stage he 
 had paid for, purposing to go on from that pomt with his journey and 
 calculation as soon as Obadiah quitted the room ; but this second attack 
 of Obadiah 's, in opening the door and laying the whole country under 
 water, was too much. He let go his compasses, or rather, with a mixed 
 motion betwixt accident and anger, he threw them upon the table; 
 and then there was nothing for him to do but to return back to Calais, 
 like many others, as wise as he had set out. 
 
 When the letter was brought into the parlour which contained the 
 news of my brother's death, my father had got forwards again upon his 
 journey to within a stride of the eompasses of the very same stage of 
 Nevei-s. — '* By your leave, Mons. Sanson," cried my father, striking 
 the point of his compasses through Nevers into the table, and nodding 
 to my Uncle Toby, to see what was in the letter, *' twice of one night 
 is too much for an English gentleman and his son, Mons. Sanson, to be 
 turned back from so lousy a town as Nevers ; what thinkest thou, 
 Toby ? " added my father in a sprightly tone. — " Unless it be a garrison 
 
 town," said my Uncle Toby, '*for then " — " I shall be a fool," 
 
 said my father, smiling, **as long as I live." So, giving a second nod 
 and keeping his compasses still upon Nevers with one hand, and holding 
 his book of the post-roads in the other, half calculating and half 
 listening, he leaned forwards upon the table with both elbows, as my 
 Uncle Toby hummed over the letter. — **He's gone," said my Uncle 
 Toby. — ** Where ? Who ? " cried my father. — *' My nephew," said my 
 Uncle Toby. — " What, without leave, without money, without 
 governor?" cried my father in amazement. — *'No; he is dead, my 
 dear brother," quoth my Uncle Toby in a low voice, and fetching a 
 deep sigh from the bottom of his heart ; " he has been ill enough, poor 
 lad ! I'll answer for him, for he is dead." 
 
 When Agrippina was told of her son's death, Tacitus informs us that, 
 not being able to moderate the violence of her passions, she abruptly 
 broke off her work. My father struck his compasses into Nevers but 
 so much the faster. What contrarieties ! His, indeed, was matter of 
 calculation ; Agrippina's must have been quite a different affair. Who 
 else could pretend to reason from history ? 
 
 JJow my father went on, in my opinion, deserves a chapter to itself. 
 
176 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. V, 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 And a chapter it shall have, and a devil of a one too ; so look to 
 yourselves. 
 
 *Tis either Plato, or Plutarch, or Seneca, or Xenophon, or Epictetu-^, 
 or Theophrastus, or Lucian ; or some one perhaps of later date, either 
 Cardan or Budaeus, or Petrarch or Stella ; or possibly it may be some 
 divine or father of the church, St. Austin, or St. Cyprian, or B-rrnard ;— • 
 who affirms that it is an irresistible and natural passion to weep for the 
 loss of our friends or cluldren ; and Seneca, I'm positive, tells us some- 
 where that such griefs evacuate themselves best by that particular 
 channel. And accordingly we find that David wept for his son Absalom, 
 Adrian for his Antinous, Niobe for her children, and that Apollodoni;5 
 and Crito both shed tears for Socrates before his death. 
 
 My father managed his affliction otherwise, and indeed differently from 
 most men, either ancient or modem ; for he neither wept it away, as 
 the Hebrews and the Romans ; or slept it off, as the Laplanders ; or 
 hanged it, as the English ; or drowned it, as the Germans ; nor did 
 he curse it, or damn it, or excommunicate it, or rhyme it, cr lilla- 
 buUero it. 
 
 He got rid of it, however. 
 
 Will your worshios give me leave to squeeze in a story between 
 these two pages ? 
 
 When Tully was bereft of his dear daughter Tullia, at first he laid 
 it to his heart ; he listened to the voice of Nature, and modulated 
 his own unto it. " O my Tullia ! my daughter ! my child ! " Still, 
 still, still 'twas, " O my Tullia ! my Tullia ! Methinks I see my 
 Tullia, I hear my Tullia, I talk with my Tullia ! " But as soon as he 
 began to look into the stores of philosophy, and consider how many 
 excellent things might be said upon the occasion, " nobody upon 
 earth can conceive," says the great orator "how happy, how joyful, it 
 made me." 
 
 My father was as proud of his eloquence as Marcus Tullius Cicero 
 could be for his life, and, for aught I am convinced of to the contrary 
 at present, with as much reason. It was indeed his strength, and his 
 weafcness too : his strength, for he was by nature eloquent ; and his 
 weakness, for he was hourly a dupe to it, and, provided an occasion in 
 life would but permit him to show his talents, or say either a wise 
 thing, a witty or a shrewd one (bating the case of a systematic mis- 
 fortune), he had all he wanted. A blessing M^hich tied up my father's 
 tongue, and a misfortune which set it loose with a good grace, were 
 pretty equal. Sometimes, indeed, the misfortune was the better 
 of the two. For instance, where the pleasure of the harangue was 
 as ten, and -the pain of the misfortune but as five, my father gained 
 half in half, and consequently was as v/ell again off as if it never had 
 befallen him. 
 
 This clue will urwavel what otherwise would seem very inconsistent 
 in my father's domest'ic character ; and it is this — that in the provo- 
 cations arising from the neglects and blunders of sei-vants, or other 
 
VOL. v.] TRISTRAM SHAND K 177 
 
 mishaps unavoidable in a family, his an^jer, or rather the duration of 
 it, eternally ran counter to all conjecture. 
 
 My father had a favourite little laiare which he had consigned over 
 to a most beautiful Arabian horse, in order to have a pad out of her for 
 his own riding. He was sanguine in all his projects ; so talked about 
 his pad every day with as absolute a security as if it had been reared, 
 broke, and bridled and saddled at his door, ready for mounting. By 
 some neglect or other in Obadiah it so fell out that my father's ex- 
 pectations were answered with nothing better than a mule, and as 
 ugly a beast of the kind as ever was produced. 
 
 My mother and my Uncle Toby expected my father would be the 
 death of Obadiah, and that there would never be an end of the 
 disaster. " See here, you rascal ! " cried my father, pointing to the 
 mule, " what you have done." — ** It was not I," said Obadiah. — 
 ** How do I know that ? *' replied my father. 
 
 Triumph swam in my father's eyes at the repartee ; the Attic salt 
 brought water into them. And so Obadiah heard no more about it. 
 
 Now let us go back to my brother's death. 
 
 Philosophy has a fine saying for everything. For death it has an 
 entire set. The misery was, they all at once rushed into my fatker's 
 head, that 'twas difficult to string them together, so as to make any- 
 thing of a consistent show out of them. He took them as they came. 
 
 " 'Tis an inevitable chance — the first statute in Magna Charta ; it is 
 an everlasting Act of Parhament, my dear brother — all must die." 
 
 " If my son could not have died it had been matter of wonder — not 
 that he is dead. 
 
 ** Monarchs and princes dance in the same ring with us. 
 
 *' To die is the great debt and tribute due unto nature. Tombs and 
 monuments, which should perpetuate our memories, pay it themselves ; 
 and the proudest pyramid of them all, which wealth and science have 
 erected, has lost its apex, and stands obtruncated in the travellers' 
 horizon." (My father found he got great ease, and went on.) " King- 
 doms and provinces, and towns and cities, have they not their periods ? 
 And when those principles and powers w^hich at first cemented and put 
 them together have performed their several evolutions, they fall back." — 
 ** Brotlier Shandy," said my Uncle Toby, laying down his pipe at the 
 word evolutions. — "Revolutions, I meant, quoth my father; "by 
 heaven! I meant revolutions, brother Toby; evolutions is nonsense." 
 — " 'Tis not nonsense," said my Uncle Toby. — ■** But is it not nonsense 
 to break the thread of such a discourse upon such, an occasion ? " cried 
 my father. **Do not, dear Toby," continued he, taking him by the 
 hand, "do not — do not, I beseech thee, interrupt me at this crisis." — 
 My Uncle Toby put his pipe into his mouth. 
 
 " Where is Troy and Mycene, and Thebes and Delos, and Persepolis 
 and Agrigentum?" continued my father, taking up his book of post- 
 roads which he had laid down. " What is become, brother Toby, of 
 Nineveh and Babylon, of Cyzicum and Mitylene ? The fairest towns 
 that ever the sun rose upon are now no more ; the names only are left, 
 and those (for many of them are wrong spelt) are falling themselves by 
 piecemeal to decay, and in length of time will be forgotten and involved 
 with everything in a perpetual night j the world itself, brother Toby, 
 must — must come to an end. 
 
178 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [voL.V. 
 
 ** Returning out of Asia, when I sailed from ^gina towards Megara ** 
 — [When can this have been ? thought my Uncle Toby] — " I began to 
 view t^e country round about, ^gina was behind me, Megara was 
 before, Piraeus on the right hand, Corinth on the left. What flourishing 
 towns now prostrate upon the earth ! * Alas, alas ! ' said I to myself, 
 * that man should disturb his soul for the loss of a child when so much 
 as this lies awfully buried in his presence.* * Remember,' said I to 
 myself again, * remember thou art a man.' " 
 
 Now, my Uncle Toby knew not that this last paragraph was an 
 extract of Servius Sulpicius's consolatory letter to Tully. He had as 
 little skill, honest man, in the fragments as he had in the whole pieces 
 of antiquity. And as my father, whilst he was concerned in the Turkey 
 trade, had been three or four different times in the Levant, in one of 
 which he had stayed a whole year and a-half at Zant, my Uncle Toby 
 naturally concluded that, in some one of those periods he had taken a 
 trip across the Archipelago into Asia ; and that all this sailing affair, 
 with ^gina behind, and Megara before, and Piraeus on the right hand, 
 &c. &c., was nothing more than the true course of my father's voyage 
 and reflections. 'Twas certainly in his manner, and many un under- 
 taking critic would have built two stories higher upon worse founda- 
 tions. — *' And pray, brother," quoth my Uncle Toby, laying the end of 
 his pipe upon my father's hand in a kindly way of interruption, but 
 waiting till he finished the account, " what year of our Lord was this ? " 
 — ***Twas no year of our Lord/' replied my father. — ** That's impos- 
 sible," cried my Uncle Toby. — " Simpleton! " said my father ; " 'twas 
 forty years before Christ was born." 
 
 My Uncle Toby had but two things for it : either to suppose his 
 brother to be the Wandering Jew, or that his misfortunes had disordered 
 his brain. ** May the Lord God of heaven and earth protect him and 
 restore him," said my Uncle Toby, praying silently for my father, and 
 with tears in his eyes. 
 
 My father placed the tears to a proper account, and went on with his 
 harangue with great spirit. 
 
 "There is not such great odds, brother Toby, betwixt good and 
 evil as the world imagines." — [This way of setting off, by-the-by, was 
 not likely to cure my Uncle Toby's suspicions.] — ** Labour, sorrow, 
 grief, sickness, want, and woe are the sauces of life." — ** Much good 
 may it do them," said my Uncle Toby to himself. 
 
 " My son is dead ! So much the better ; 'tis a shame in such a 
 tempest to have but one anchor. 
 
 ** But he is gone for ever from us. Be it so. He is got from under 
 the hands of his barber before he was bald ; he is but risen from a 
 feast before he was surfeited — from a banquet before he had got 
 drunken. 
 
 ** The Thracians wept when a child was born "—["And we were very 
 near it," quoth my Uncle Toby] — ** and feasted and made meriy when a 
 man went out of the world ; and with reason. Death opens the gate 
 of fame, and shuts the gate of envy after it ; it unlooses the chain of 
 the captive, and puts the bondsman's task into another man's hands. 
 
 ** Show me the man who knows what life is, who dreads it, and I'll 
 show thee a prisoner who dreads his liberty. 
 
 ** Is it not better, my dear brother Toby — for mark, our appetites are 
 
VOL. v.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 179 
 
 but diseases — is it not better not to hunger at all, than to eat ? not to 
 thirst, than to take physic to cure it ? 
 
 ** Is it not better to be freed from care and agues, from love and 
 melancholy, and the other hot and cold fits of life, than, like a galled 
 traveller, who comes weary to his inn, to be bound to begin his journey 
 afresh ? 
 
 ** There is no terror, brother Toby, in its looks, but what it borrows 
 from groans and convulsions ; and the blowing of noses, and the wiping 
 away of tears with the bottoms of curtains in a dying man's room. 
 Strip it of these, what is it?" — ["'Tis better in battle than in bed," said 
 my Uncle Toby.] — " Take away its hearses, its mutes, and its mourn- 
 ing — its plumes, scutcheons, and other mechanic aids — what is it? 
 ** Better in battle ! " continued my father, smiling ; for he had absolutely 
 forgot my brother Bobby. " 'Tis terrible no way ; for consider, brother 
 Toby, when we are, death is not ; and when death is, we are not." My 
 Uncle Toby laid down his pipe to consider the proposition ; my father's 
 eloquence was too rapid to stay for any man ; away it went, and 
 hurried my Uncle Toby's ideas along with it. 
 
 " For this reason, " continued my father, " 'tis worthy to recollect 
 how little alteration in great men the approaches of death have made. 
 Vespasian died in a jest upon his close-stool ; Galba with a sentence ; 
 Septimius Severus in a dispatch ; Tiberius in dissimulation ; and Caesar 
 Augustus in a compliment.'' — " I hope 'twas a sincere one," quoth my 
 Uncle Toby. 
 
 " 'Twas to his wife," said my father. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ** And lastly, for of all the choice anecdotes which history canprcxluce 
 of this matter," continued my father, ** this, like the gilded dome which 
 covers in the fabric, crowns all. 
 
 "'Tis of Cornelius Gallus, the praetor, which, I dare say, brother 
 Toby, you have read." — " I dare say I have not," replied my uncle. — 
 " He died," said my father, '* as * * * * " 
 
 *' And if it was with his wife," said my uncle Toby, ** there could be 
 no hurt in it." — ** That's more than I know," replied my father. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 My mother was going very gingerly in the dark, along the passage 
 which led to the parlour, as my Uncle Toby pronounced the word wite. 
 'Tis a shrill, penetrating sound of itself, and Obadiah had helped it 
 by leaving the door a little ajar, so tliat my mother heard enough of 
 it to imagine herself the subject of the conversation ; so layini^ the 
 edge of her finger across her two lips, holding in her breath, and bend- 
 ing her head a little downward?^, with a twist of her neck (not towards 
 
l8o TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. V. 
 
 the door, but from it, by which means ner ear was brought to the 
 chink) she listened with all her powers ; the listening slave, with the 
 goddess of silence at his back, could not have given a finer thought for 
 an intaglio. 
 
 In this attitude I am determined to let her stand for five minutes, till 
 I bring up the affairs of the kitchen (as Rapin does those of the church) 
 to the same period. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Though in one sense our family was certainly a simple machine, as 
 it consisted of a few wheels, yet there was thus much to be said for it, 
 that these wheels were set in motion by so many different springs, and 
 acted one upon the other from such a variety of strange prmciples and 
 impulses, that though it was a simple machine, it had all the honour and 
 advantages of a complex one, and a number of as odd movements 
 within it as ever were beheld in the inside of a Dutch silk-milL 
 
 Amongst these there was one I am going to speak of, in which, per- 
 haps, it was not altogether so singular as in many others, and it was 
 this, that whatever motion, debate, harangue, dialogue, project, or 
 dissertation was going forwards in the parlour, there was generally 
 another at the same time and upon the same subject running parallel 
 along with it in the kitchen. 
 
 Now, to bring this about, whenever an extraordinary message or 
 letter was delivered in the parlour, or a discourse suspended till a 
 servant went out, or the lines of discontent were observed to hang upon 
 the brows of my father or mother, or, in short, when anything was sup- 
 posed to be upon the tapis worth knowing or listening to, 'twas the rule 
 to leave the door not absolutely shut, but somewhat ajar — as it stands 
 just now — which, under cover of the bad hinge (and that possibly 
 nught be one of the many reasons why it was never mended), it was not 
 difficult to manage ; by which means in all these cases a passage was 
 generally left, not indeed as wide as the Dardanelles, but wide enough 
 for all that to carry on as much of this windward trade as was sufficient 
 to save my father the trouble of governing his house : my mother at this 
 moment stands profiting by it. Obadiah did the same thing as soon as he 
 had left the letter upon the table which brought the news of my 
 brother's death ; so that before my father had well got over his surprise 
 and entered upon his harangue, had Trim got upon his legs to speak his 
 sentiments upon the subject. 
 
 A curious observer of nature, had he been worth the inventory of all 
 Job's stock — though, by-the-by, your curious observers are seldom 
 worth a groat— would have given the half of it to have heard Corporal 
 Trim and my father, two orators so contrasted by nature and education, 
 haranguing over the same bier. 
 
 My father, a man of deep reading, prompt memory, with Cato, and 
 Seneca, and Epictetus at his fingers' ends. 
 
 The Corporal, with nothing to remember, of no deeper reading than 
 his muster-roll, or greater names at his fingers' ends than the contents 
 fit. 
 
VOL. v.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. i8i 
 
 The one proceeding from period to period by metaphor and allusion, 
 and striking the fancy as he went along, as men of wit and fancy do, 
 with the entertainment and pleasantry of his pictures and images. 
 
 The other without wit, or antithesis, or point, or turn this way or 
 that ; but leaving the images on one side and the pictures on the other, 
 going straightforwards as Nature could lead him to the heart. Oli, 
 Trim ! would to heaven thou hadst a bitter hestorian ! would thy historian 
 h^d a better pair of breaches ! Oh, ye critics ! will nothing melt you ? 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 *' My young master in London is dead ! " said Obadiah. 
 
 A green satin night-gown of my mother's, which had been twice 
 scoured, was the first idea which Obadiah's exclamation brought into 
 Susannah's head. Well might Locke write a chapter upon the im- 
 perfections of words. " Then," quoth Susannah, * ' we must all go 
 into mourning." But note a second time, the word mourning, not- 
 withstanding Susannah made use of it herself, failed also of doing its 
 office ; it excited not one single idea tinged either witli gray or black. 
 All was green. The green satin night-gown hung there still. 
 
 *' Oh ! 'twill be the death of my poor mistress," cried Susannah. My 
 mother's whole wardrobe followed. What a procession ! Her red 
 damask, her orange- tawny, her white and yellow lutestrings, her brown 
 taffeta, her bone-laced caps, her bed-gowns, and comfortable under- 
 petticoats. Not a rag was left behind. ** No ; she will never look up 
 again," said Susannah. 
 
 We had a fat foolish scullion— my father, I think, kept her for her 
 simplicity ; she had been all autumn struggling with a dropsy. — '* He 
 is dead ! " said Obadiah. *' He is certainly dead ! '" — " So am not 
 I," said the foolish scullion. 
 
 ** Here is sad news. Trim," cried Susannah, wiping her eyes as Trim 
 stepped into the kitchen ; ** Master Bobby is dead and buried " — the 
 funeral was an interpolation of Susannah's — "we shall have all to go 
 into mourning," said Susannah. 
 
 "I hope not," said Trim. — "You hope not!" cried Susannah 
 earnestly. — [The mourning ran not in Trim's head, whatever it did in 
 Susannah's.] — "I hope," said Trim, explaining himself; " I hope in 
 God the news is not true."—" I heard the letter read with my own ears," 
 answered Obadiah ; "and we shall have a terrible piece of work of it 
 in stubl5ing the Oxmoor." — "Oh! he's dead," said Susannah. — "As 
 sure," said the scullion, "as I am alive." 
 
 " I lament for him from my heart and my soul," said Trim, fetching 
 a sigh. " Poor creature ! poor boy ! poor gentleman ! " 
 
 "He was alive last Whitsuntide," said the coachman. — "Whitsun- 
 tide — alas ! " cried Trim, extending his right arm, and falling instantly 
 into the same attitude in which he read the sermon. " What is Whit- 
 suntide, Jonathan" (for that was the coachman's name), "or Shrove- 
 tide, or any tide or time pa^t, to this ? Are we not here now," con- 
 tinued the Corporal (striking the end of his stick perpendicularly upon 
 the floor so as to give an idea of health and stability), " and are we 
 
l82 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. v. 
 
 not ** (dropping his hat down upon the ground) ** gone in a moment ? " 
 'Twas infinitely striking. Susannah burst into a flood of tears. We are 
 not stacks and stones. Jonathan, Obadiah, the cook-maid, all melted. 
 The foolish fat scullion herself, who was scouring a fish-kettle upon her 
 knees, was roused with it. The whole kitchen crowded about the 
 Corporal. 
 
 Now, as I perceive plainly that the preservation of our constitution 
 in Church and State, and possibly the preservation of the whole world — 
 or, what is the same thing, the distribution and balance of its property 
 and power — may in time to come depend greatly upon the right under- 
 standing of this stroke of the Corporal's eloquence. — I do demand your 
 attention, your worships and reverences, for any ten pages together, 
 take them where you will in any other part of the work, shall sleep for 
 it at your ease. 
 
 I said, *'We are not stocks and stones.'* 'Tis very well. I should 
 have added, * * Nor are we angels " — I wish we were — but men clothed 
 with bodies and governed by our imagination ; and what a junketing 
 piece of work of it there is betwixt these and our seven senses, especially 
 some of them : for my own part I own it, I am ashamed to confess. 
 Let it suffice to affirm that of all the senses, the eye (for I absolutely 
 deny the touch, though most of your Barbati, I know, are for it) has 
 the quickest commerce with the soul ; gives a smarter stroke, and 
 leaves something more inexpressible upon the fancy, than words can 
 either convey or sometimes get rid of. 
 
 I've gone a little about ; no matter, 'tis for health. Let us only 
 carry it back in our mind to the mortality of Trim's hat : ** Are we not 
 here now, and gone in a moment?" There was nothing in the 
 sentence — 'twas one of your self-evident truths we have the advantage of 
 hearing every day ; and if Trim had not trusted more to his hat than 
 his head, he had made nothing at all of it. 
 
 ** Are we not here now," continued the Corporal, " and are we not " 
 (dropping his hat plumb upon the ground, and pausing before he 
 pronounced the word) "gone in a moment?" The descent of the 
 hat was as if a heavy lump of clay had been kneaded into the crown 
 of it. Nothing could have expressed the sentiment of mortality, of 
 which it was the type and forerunner, like it ; his hand seemed to 
 vanish from under it ; it fell dead, the corporal's eye fixed upon it as 
 upon a corpse ; and Susannah burst into a flood of tears. 
 
 Now ten thousand, and ten thousand times ten thousand (for matter 
 and motion are infinite) are the ways by which a hat may be dropped 
 upon the ground without any effect. Had he flung it, or thrown it, 
 or cast it, or skimmed it, or squirted it, or let it slip or fall in any 
 possible direction under heaven, or in the best direction that could be 
 given to it ; had he dropped it like a goose, like a puppy, like an ass, 
 or in doing it, or even after he had done it, had he looked like a fool, 
 like a ninny, like a nincompoop, it had failed, and the effect upon the 
 heart had been lost. 
 
 Ye who govern this mighty world and its mighty concerns with the 
 engines of eloquence, who heat it, and cool it, and melt and mollify it, 
 and then harden it again to your purpose : 
 
 Ye who wind and turn the passions with this great windlass, and, 
 having done it, lead the owners of them whither ye think meet : 
 
VOL. v.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 183 
 
 Ye, lastly, who drive — and why not ? — ye also who are driven, like 
 turkeys to market, with a stick and a red clout : — ^meditate, meditate, 
 I beseech you, upon Trim's hat. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 Stay, I have a small account to settle with the reader before Trim can 
 go on with his harangue. It shall be done in two minutes. 
 
 Amongst many other book-debts, all of which I shall discharge in 
 due time, I own myself a debtor to the world for two items — a chapter 
 upon chambermaids and button-holes, which, in the former part of my 
 work I promised and fully intended to pay off this year ; but some of 
 your worships and reverences telling me that the two subjects, especially 
 so connected together, might endanger the morals of the world, I pray 
 the chapter upon chambermaids and button-holes may be forgiven me, 
 and that they will accept of the last chapter in Heu of it, which is 
 nothing, and please your reverences, but a chapter of chambermaids, 
 gieen gowns, and old hats. 
 
 Trim took his off the ground, put it upon his head, and then went on 
 with his oration upon death in the manner and form following. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 " To us, Jonathan, who knew not what want or care is, who live here in 
 the service of two of the best of masters — bating, in my own case, his 
 Majesty King William the Third, whom I had the honour to serve both 
 in Ireland and Flanders — I own it, that from Whitsuntide to within 
 three weeks of Christmas, 'tis not long, 'tis like nothing ; but to those, 
 Jonathan, who knew what death is, and what havoc and destruction 
 he can make before a man can well wheel about, 'tis like a whole age. 
 O Jonathan ! 'twould make a good-natured man's heart bleed to 
 consider," continued the Corporal, standing perpendicularly, "how low 
 many a brave and upright fellow has been laid since that time ! And 
 trust me, Susy," added the Corporal, turning to Susannah, whose eyes 
 were swimming in water, ** before that time comes round again, many a 
 bright eye will be dim." — [Susannah placed it to the right side of the \ 
 page ; she wept, but she curtsied too.] — " Are we not," continued Trim, I 
 looking at Susannah, ** are we not like a flower of the field ? " — [A tear 
 of pride stole in betwixt every two tears of humiliation, else no tongue 
 could have described Susannah's affliction.] — ** Is not all flesh grass ? 'Tis 
 clay — 'tis dirt." — They all looked directly at the scullion; the scullion had 
 just been scouring a fish-kettle. It was not fair. 
 
 ** What is the finest face that ever man looked at ? " — [** I could bear 
 Trim talk so forever," cried Susannah] — "what is it" — [Susannah laid 
 her hand upon Trim's shoulder]—^* but corruption ? " — [Susannah took 
 it off,] 
 
i84 TRISTRAM SHAND K [vol. v. 
 
 Now I love you for this ; and *tis this delicious mixture within you 
 which makes you dear creatures what you are ; and he who hates you 
 for it, all I can say of the matter is, that he has either a pumpkin for 
 his head or a pippin for his heait, and whenever he is dissected 'twill be 
 found SQ. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 Whether Susannah, by taking her hand too suddenly from off the 
 Corporal's shoulder (by the whisking about of her passions) broke a 
 little ihe chain of his reflections — 
 
 Or whether the Corporal began to be suspicious he Irnd got into the 
 doctor's quarters, and was talking more like the chaplain than him- 
 self— 
 
 Or whether .... 
 
 Or whether — for in all such cases a man of invention and parts may 
 with pleasure fdl a couple of pages with suppositions — wdiich of all these 
 was the cause let the curious physiologist or the curious anybody 
 determine ; 'tis certain at least the Corporal went on thus with his 
 harangue : 
 
 " For my own part I declare it, that out of doors I value not death 
 at all ; not this," added the Corporal, snapping his fingers, but with 
 an air w^hich no one but the Corporal could have given to the sentiment 
 — *' in battle I value death not this. And let him not take me cow- 
 ardly, like poor Joe Gibbons in scouring his gun. What is he ? A 
 pull of a trigger, a push of a bayonet an inch this way or that, makes 
 ihe difference. Look along the line to the riglit : see Jack's down ! 
 Well, 'tis worth a regiment of horse to him. No, 'tis Dick. Then 
 Jack's no worse. Never mind which. We pass on. In hot pursuit 
 the wound itself which brings him is not felt. The best way is to stand 
 up to him. The man who flies is in ten times more danger than the 
 man who marches up into his jaws. I've looked him," added the Cor- 
 poral, "an hundred times in the face, and know what he is. He's 
 nothing, Obadiah, at all in the field." — "But he's very frightful in a 
 house," quoth Obadiah. — " I never mind it myself," said Jonathan, 
 "upon a coach-box." — "It must, in my opinion, be most natural in 
 bed," replied Susannah. — **And could I escape him by creeping into 
 the worst calf's skin that ever was made into a knapsack, I would do it 
 there," said Trim; "but that is nature." — "Nature is nature," said 
 Jonathan. — "And that is the reason," cried Susannah, " I so much 
 pity my mistress." 
 
 " She will never get the better of it. Now, I pity the Captain the 
 most of any one in the family," answered Trim. " Madam will get ease 
 of heart in weeping, and the Squire in talking about it ; but my poor 
 master will keep it all in silence to himself. I shall hear him sigh in his 
 bed for a whole month together, as he did for Lieutenant Le Fevre. 
 * An' please your honour, do not sigh so piteously,' I would say to him 
 as I lay beside him. — * I cannot help it. Trim,' my master would say ; 
 *'tis so melancholy an accident, I cannot get it off my heart.' — ^Your 
 
V6L.V.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, iSj 
 
 honour fears not death yourself.' — * I hope. Trim, I fear nothing/ he 
 would say, * but the doing a wrong thing. Well,' he would add, * what- 
 ever betides, I will take care of Le Fevre's boy/ — And with that, like a 
 quieting draught, his honour would fall asleep." 
 
 ** I like to hear Trim's stories about the Captain," said Susannah. 
 — *' He is a kindly-hearted gentleman," said Obadiah, " as ever lived." 
 — *' Ay, and as brave a one too," said the Corporal, ** as ever stepped 
 before a platoon. There never was a better officer in the King's 
 army, or a better man in God's world ; for he would march up to the 
 mouth of a cannon though he saw the lighted match at the very touch-hole ; 
 and yet, for all that, he has a heart as soft as a child for other people. 
 He would not hurt a chicken." — "I would sooner," quoth Jonatlian, 
 ** drive such a gentleman for seven pound:^ a year than some for eight." — 
 " Thank thee, Jonathan, for thy twenty shillings, as much, Jonathan," 
 said the Corporal, shaking him by the hand, *' as if thou hadst put the 
 money into my own pocket. I would .-erve him to the day of my deatli 
 out of love. He is a friend and a brother to me ; and could I be sure 
 my poor brother Tom was dead," continued the Corporal, taking out his 
 handkerchief, " was I worth ten thousand pounds, I would leave eveiy 
 shilling of it to the Captain." Trim could not refrain from tears at this 
 testamentary proof he gave of his affection to his master. The whole 
 kitchen wa:^ affected. — '* Do tell us this story of the poor lieutenant," 
 said Susannah. — " With all my heart," answered the Corporal. 
 
 Susannah, the cook, Jonathan, Obadiah, and Corporal Trim formed 
 a circle about the fire ; and as soon as the scullion had shut the kitchen 
 door the Corporal began. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 I AM a Turk if I had not as much forgot my mother as if Nature 
 had plastered me up and set me down naked upon the banks of the 
 river Nile without one. Your most obedient servant, madam ; I've 
 cost you a great deal of trouble. I wish it may answer, but you have 
 left a crack in my back ; and here's a great piece fallen off here before ; 
 and what must I do with this foot ? I shall never reach England 
 with it. 
 
 For my own part I never wonder at anyihhig, and so often has my 
 judgment deceived me in my life, that I always suspect it, right or 
 wrong — at least, I am seldom hot upon cold subjects. For all this I 
 reverence truth as much as anybody ; and when it has slipped us, if a man 
 will but take me by the hand, and go quietly and search for it, as for 
 a thing we have both lost, and can neither of us do well without, I'll ^o 
 to the world's end with him. But I hate disputes, and therefore (bating 
 religious points or such as touch society) I would almost subscribe lo 
 anything which does not choke me in the first passage, rather than be 
 drawn into one. But I cannot bear suffocation, and bad smells worst 
 of all ; for whicli reasons I resolved from ti.e beginnii^g, that if ever the 
 army of martyrs was to be augmented or a new one raised, I would 
 have no hand in it, one way or t'other. 
 
i86 TRISTRAM SHAND V. [VOL. V, 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 But to return to my mother. My uncle Toby's opinion, madam, 
 " that there could be no harm in Cornelius Gallus the Roman praetor's 
 lying with his wife " — or rather the last word of that opinion (for it was 
 all my mother heard of it) — caught hold of her by the weak part of the 
 whole sex : you shall not mistake me — I mean her curiosity. She in- 
 stantly concluded herself the subject of the conversation, and with that 
 prepossession upon her fancy, you may readily conceive every word my 
 father said was accommodated either to herself or her family concerns. 
 
 Pray, madam, in what street does the lady live who would not 
 have done the same ? 
 
 From the strange mode of Cornelius's death my father had made 
 a transition to that of Socrates, and was giving my Uncle Toby an 
 abstract of his pleading before his judges ; 'twas irresistible — not the 
 oration of Socrates, but my father's temptation to it. He had wrote the 
 Life of Socrates * himself the year before he left off trade, which, I 
 fear, was the means of hastening him out of it ; so that no one was able 
 to set out with so full a sail, and in no swelling a tide of heroic loftiness 
 npon the occasion, as my father was. Not a period in Socrates* 
 oration which closed with a shorter word than "transmigration" or 
 " annihilation ; " or a worse thought in the middle of it than ** to be or 
 not to be " — the entering upon a new and untried state of things, or 
 upon a long, a profound, and peaceful sleep, without dreams, without 
 disturbance. '* That we and our children were born to die, but neither 
 of us born to be slaves." No, there I mistake ; that was part of 
 Eleazer's oration, as recorded by Josephus {J)e BcL Judaic. ). Eleazer 
 owns he had it from the philosophers in India. In all likelihood, 
 Alexander the Great, in his irruption into India, after he had over- 
 run Persia, amongst the many things he stole, stole that sentiment also ; 
 by which means it was carried, if not all the way by himself (for we all 
 know he died at Babylon), at least by some of his marauders, into 
 Greece, from Greece it got to Rome, from Rome to France, and from 
 France to England. So things come round. 
 
 By land carriage I can conceive no other way. 
 
 By water the sentiment might easily have come down the Ganges 
 into the Sinus Gangeticus, or Bay of Bengal, and so into the Indian 
 Sea ; and following the course of trade (the way from India by the 
 Cape of Good Hope being then unknown), might be carried, with other 
 drugs and spices, up the Red Sea to Joddah, the port of Mecca, or else 
 to Tor or Suez, towns at the bottom of the gulf ; and from thence by 
 carriage to Coptos, but three days' journey distant ; so down the Nile 
 directly to Alexandria, where the sentiment would be landed at the 
 very foot of the great staircase of the Alexandrian Library, and from 
 that storehouse it would be fetched. Bless me ! what a trade was 
 driven by the learned in those days ! 
 
 • This book my father would never consent to publish ; 'tis in manuscript, with 
 some other tracts of his, in the family, all or most of which will be printed in due time. 
 
VOL. v.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 187 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 Now my father had a way a little like that of Job's — in case there ever 
 was such a man ; if not, there's an end of the matter. 
 
 Though, by-the-by, because your learned men find some difficulty in 
 fixing the precise era in which so great a man lived — whether, for in- 
 stance, before or affeer the patriarchs, &c. — to vote, therefore, that he 
 never lived at all is a little cruel. 'Tis not doing as they would be 
 done by. Happen that as it may, my father, I say, had a way, when 
 things went extremely wrong with him, especially upon the first sally 
 of his impatience, of wondering why he was begot, wishing himself 
 dead, sometimes worse. And when the provocation ran high, and 
 grief touched his lips with more than ordinary powers — sir, you scarce 
 eould have distinguished him from Socrates himself. Every word would 
 breathe the sentiments of a soul disdaining life and careless about all its 
 issues. For which reason, though my mother was a woman of no deep 
 reading, yet the abstract of Socrates' oration which my father was giving 
 my Uncle Toby was not altogether new to her. She listened to it with 
 composed intelligence, and would have done so to the end of the chapter, 
 had not my father plunged (which he had no occasion to have done) into 
 that part of the pleading where the great philosopher reckons up his 
 connections, his alliances, and children, but renounces a security to be 
 so won by working upon the passions of his judges. " I have friends, I 
 have relations, I have three desolate children," says Socrates. 
 
 *' Then," cried my mother, opening the door, ** you have one more, 
 Mr. Shandy, than I know of." 
 
 *' By heaven ! I have one less," saki my father, getting up and walk- 
 ing out of the room. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 '* They are Socrates' children,'' said my Uncle Toby. — ** He has been 
 dead a hundred years ago," replied my mother. 
 
 My Uncle Toby was no chronologer ; so not caring to advance a step 
 but upon safe ground, he laid down his pipe deliberately upon the table, 
 and rising up, and taking my mother most kindly by the hand, with- 
 out saying another word, either good or bad, to her, he led her out after 
 my father, that he might finish the ecclaircissement himself. 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 Had this volume been a farce, which, unless every one's life and 
 opinions are to be looked upon as a farce as well as mine, I see no 
 
i88 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. v. 
 
 reason to suppose, the last chapter, sir, had finished j*he first act of it, 
 and then this chapter must have set off thus : 
 
 Ptr-r-r-in^ — twing — twang — prut — trut, *tis a cursed bad fiddle. Do 
 ^ou know whether my fiddle's in tune or no ? — trut-prut. They should 
 /be fifths. 'Tis wickedly strung — tr-a-e-i-o-u — ^twang. The bridge is 
 , a mile too high, and the sound- post absolutely down, else — trut-prut. 
 Hark ! 'tis not so bad a tone. Diddle diddle, diddle diddle, diddle diddle, 
 dum. There is nothing in playing before good judges ; but there's a 
 man there — no, not him with the bundle under his arm ; the grave man 
 in black. 'Sdeath ! not the gentleman with the sword on. Sir, I had 
 rather play a capriccio to Calliope herself than draw my bow across 
 my fiddk before that very man ; and yet I'll stake my Cremona to a 
 Jew's trump, which is the greatest musical odds that ever were laid, 
 that I will this moment stop three hundred and fifty leagues out of tune 
 upon my fiddle, without punishing one single nerve that belongs to 
 him. Twaddle diddle, twedle diddle, twiddle diddle, twoddle diddle, 
 twuddle diddle, prut-trut, crish, CTash, crush ; I've undone you, sir, but 
 you see he is no worse, and was Apollo to take his fiddle after me, he 
 can make him no better. 
 
 Diddle diddle, diddle diddle, diddle diddle — hum — dum — drum. 
 
 Your worships and your reverences love music, and God has made 
 you all with good ears, and some of you play delightfully yourselves—* 
 trut-prut — prut-trut. 
 
 Oh ! there is whom I could sit and hear whole days, whose 
 
 talents lie in making what he fiddles to be felt, who inspires me with 
 his joys and hopes, and puts the most hidden springs of my heart into 
 motion. If you would borrow five guineas of me, sir — which is 
 generally ten guineas more than I have to spare — or you, Messrs, 
 Apothecary and Taylor, want your bills paying, that's your time. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI, 
 
 The first thing which entered my father's head, after affairs were a 
 little settled in the family, and Susannah had got possession of my 
 mother's green satin night-gown, was to sit down coolly, after the 
 example of Xenophon, and write a ** Tristrapsedia,'' or system of education 
 for me, collecting first for that purpose his own scattered thoughts, 
 counsels and notions, and binding them together so as to form an 
 institute for the government of my childhood and adolescence. I was 
 my father's last stake ; he had lost my brother Bobby entirely ; he had 
 lost, by his own computation, full three-fourths of me — that is, he had 
 been unfortunate in his three first great casts for me, my geniture, nose, 
 and name ; there was but this one left, and accordingly my father gave 
 himself up to it with as much devotion as ever my Uncle Toby had 
 done to his doctrine of projectile*?. The difference betvveea them was, 
 that my Uncle Toby drew his whole knowledge of projectiles from 
 Nicholas Tartaglia ; ray fatlier spun his, every thread of it, out of his 
 own brain, or reeled and cross-twisted what all other spinners and 
 
VOL. v.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 189 
 
 spinsters had spun before him, that 'twas pretty near the same torture 
 to him. 
 
 In about three years or something more my father had got advanced 
 almost into the middle of Ins work. L'ke all other writers, he met with 
 disappointments. He imagined he should be able to bring whatever he 
 had to say into so small a compass that, when it was finished and 
 bound, it might be rolled up in my mother's hussive. Mattt-r grows 
 under our hands. Let no man say, '' Come, I'll write a duodecimo." 
 
 My father gave himself up to it, however, with the most painful dili- 
 gence, proceeding step by step in every line with the same kind of 
 caution and circumspection (though I cannot say upon quite so religious 
 a principle) as was used by John de la Casse, the Lord Archbishop of 
 Benevento, in compassing his "Galatea," in which his Grace of liene- 
 "vento spent near forty years of his life, and when the thing came out it was 
 not of above half the size or the thickness of a Rider's Almanack. How 
 the holy man managed the affair, unless he spent the greatest part of his 
 time in combing his whiskers or playing at primero with his chaplain, 
 would pose any mortal not let into the true secret ; and therefore 'tis 
 worth explaining to the world, was it only for the encouragement of 
 those few in it who write not so much to be fed as to be famous. 
 
 I own, had John de la Casse, the Archbishop of Benevento, for whose 
 memory (notwithstanding his " Galattea") I retain the highest veneration, 
 had he been, sir, a slender clerk of dull wit, slow parts, costive head, 
 and so forth, he and his '* Galatea" might have jogged on together to 
 the age of Methuselah for me — the phenomenon had not been worth 
 a parenthesis. 
 
 But the reverse of this was the truth. John de la Casse was a genius 
 of fine parts and fertile fancy ; and yet, with all these great advantages 
 of nature, which should have pricked him forwards with his ** Galatea," 
 he lay under an impuissance at the same time of advancing above a line 
 and a half in the compass of a whole summer's day. This disability in 
 his Grace arose from an opinion he was afflicted with, which opinion 
 was this— viz , that whenever a Christian was writing a book, not for 
 his private amusement, but where his intent and purpose was, bondJiJi\ 
 to print and publish it to the world, his first thoughts were always the 
 temptations of the Evil One. This was the state of ordinary wriiers ; 
 but when a personage of venerable character and high station, either in 
 Church or State, once turned author, he maintained that, from the veiy 
 moment he tof^k pen in hand, all the devils in hell broke out of their 
 holes to cajole him. 'Twas term-time with them ; every thought, first 
 and last, was captious ; how specious and good soever, 'twas all one ; 
 in whatever form or colour it presented itself to the imagination, 'twas 
 still a stroke of one or other of 'em levelled at him, and was to be 
 fenced off; so that the life of a wiiter, whatever he might fancy to the 
 contrary, was not so much a state of composition as a state of warfare, 
 and his probation in it precisely that of any other man militant upon 
 earth, both depending alike not half so much upon the degrees of his 
 wit as his resistance. 
 
 My father was hugely pleased with this theory of John de la Casse, 
 Archbishop of Benevento ; and had it not cramped him a little in his 
 creed, I beheve wouid have given ten of the best acres in the Shandy 
 estate to have been the broncher of it. How far my father actually 
 
tSO TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. V. 
 
 believed in the devil will be seen when I come to speak of my father's 
 religious notions in the progress of this work. *Tis enough to say here, 
 as he could not have the honour of it in the literal sense of the doctrine, 
 he took up with the allegory of it, and would often say, especially when 
 his pen was a little retrograde, there was as much good meaning, truth, 
 and knowledge couched under the veil of John de la Casse's parabolical 
 representation as was to be found in any one poetic fiction or mystic 
 record of antiquity. " Prejudice of education," he would say, *' is the 
 devil ; and the multitudes of them which we suck in with our mother's 
 milk are the devil and all. We are haunted with them, brother Toby, 
 in all our lucubrations and researches ; and was a man fool enough to 
 submit tamely to what they obtruded upon him, what would his book 
 be? Nothing," he would add, throwing his pen away with a ven- 
 geance, ** nothing but a farrago of the clack of nurses and of the non- 
 sense of the old women of both sexes throughout the kingdom." 
 
 This is the best account I am determined to give of the slow progress 
 my father made in his " Tristrapsedia ; " at which (as I said) he was 
 three years and something more indefatigably at work, and at last 
 had scarce completed, by his own reckoning, one half of his under- 
 taking ; the misfortune was, that I was all that time totally neglected 
 and abandoned to my mother ; and, what was almost as bad, by the 
 very delay, the first part of the work, upon which my father had spent 
 the most of his pains, was rendered entirely useless. Every day a page 
 or two became of no consequence. 
 
 Certainly it was ordained, as a scourge upon the pride of human 
 wisdom, that the wisest of us all should thus outwit ourselves, and 
 eternally forego our purposes in the intemperate act of pursuing them. 
 
 In short, my father was so long in all his acts of resistance, or, in 
 other words, he advanced so very slow with his work, and I began to 
 live and get forwards at such a rate, that if an event had not happened — 
 which, when we get to it, if it can be told with decency, shall not be 
 concealed a moment from the reader — I verily believe, I had put by my 
 father, and left him drawing a sun-dial, for no better purpose than to 
 be buried under ground. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 
 ^' Dear Yorick," said my father, smiling (for Yorick had broke his 
 rank with my Uncle Toby in coming through the narrow entry, and so 
 had stept first into the parlour), "this Tristram of ours, I find, comes 
 very hardly by all his religious rites. Never was the son of Jew, 
 Christian, Turk, or infidel initiated into them in so oblique and 
 slovenly a manner." — " But he is no worse, I trust," said Yorick. — 
 '* There has been certainly," continued my father, ** the deuce and all 
 to do in some part or other of the ecliptic when this offspring of mine 
 was formed." — **That you are a better judge of than I," replied 
 Yorick. — " Astrologers," quoth my father, *'know better than us both ; 
 the trine and sextile aspects have jumped awry, or the opposite of their 
 ascendants have not hit it as they should, of something has been wrong 
 above or below with us." 
 
VOL. v.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 19I 
 
 ***Tis possible," answered Yorick. — "But is the child," cried my 
 Uncle Toby, ** the worse ? " — " The Troglodytes say not," replied my 
 
 father. — " And your theologists, Yorick, tell us " — ** Theologically,** 
 
 said Yorick, * * or speaking after the manner of apothecaries, statesmen j 
 or washer-women ? ' 
 
 " I'm not sure," replied my father, "but they tell us, brother Toby, 
 he's the better for it." — "Provided," said Yorick, **you travel him 
 into Egypt." — "Of that," answered my father, "he will have the ad- 
 vantage when he sees the P3^amids." 
 
 ** Now, every word of this," quoth my Uncle Toby, '* is Arabic to 
 me." — " I wish," said Yorick, ** 'twas so to half the world." 
 
 ** Ilus," continued my father, "circumcised his whole army one 
 morning." — ^" Not without a court-martial ?" cried my Uncle Toby. — ^ 
 " Though the learned," continued he, taking no notice of my Uncle 
 Toby's remark, but turning to Yorick, *'are greatly divided still who 
 Ilus was : some say Saturn ; some the Supreme Being ; others, no more 
 than a brigadier-general under Pharaoh Neco." — ** Let him be who he 
 will," said my Uncle Toby, ** I know not by what article of war he could 
 justify it." 
 
 **The controvertists," answered my father, "assign two-and -twenty 
 different reasons for it — others indeed, who have drawn their pens on 
 the opposite side of the question have shown the world the futility of 
 the greatest part of them. But then, again, our best polemic divines " — 
 ['* I wish there was not a polemic divine," said Yorick, ** in the king- 
 dom ; one ounce of practical divinity is worth a painted shipload of all 
 their reverences have imported these fifty years." — " Pray, Mr. Yorick," 
 quoth my Uncle Toby, "do tell me what a polemic divine is?" — "The 
 best description, Captain Shandy, I have ever read is of a couple of 'em," 
 replied Yorick, " in the account of the battle fought single hands betwixt 
 Gymnast and Captain Tripet, which I have in my pocket." — " I beg 
 I may hear it," quoth ray Uncle Toby, earnestly. — "You shall," said 
 Yorick. " And as the Corporal is waiting for me at the door, and I 
 know the description of a battle will do the poor fellow more good than 
 his supper, I beg, brother, you'll give him leave to come in." — " With 
 all my soul," said my father. Trim came in, erect, and happy as an 
 emperor ; and having shut the door, Yorick took a book from his right- 
 hand coat pocket, and read, or pretended to read, as follows. 
 
 { 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 '* Which words being heard by all the soldiers which were there, 
 divers of them being inwardly terrified, did shrink back and make 
 room for tlie assailant ; all this did Gymnast very well remark and 
 consider ; and therefore, making as if he would have alighted from off 
 his horse, as he was poising himself on the mounting side, he most 
 nimbly (with his short sword by his thigh), shifting his feet in the 
 stirrup, and performing the stirrup-leather feat, whereby, after the 
 inclining of his body downwards, he forthwith launched himself 
 aiofi int'> tiie air, and placed both his feet together upon the saddle, 
 
192 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. r. 
 
 standing upright with his back turned towards his horse's head. — ^ 
 'Now,* said he *my case goes forward.* Then suddenly, in the 
 same posture wherein he wa^, he fetched a gamlx)l upon one foot, and 
 turning to the left hand failed not to carry his body perfectly round, 
 just into his former position, without missing one jot. — 'Ha!' said 
 Tripet, ' I will not do that at this time,' and not without cause. — 
 'Well/ said Gymnast, *I have failed, I will undo this leap;' then 
 with a marvellous strength and agility, turning towards the right hand, 
 he fetched another frisking gambol as before ; which done, he set his 
 right-hand thumb upon the bow of the saddle, raised himself up, and 
 sprung into the air, poising and upholding his whole weight upon the 
 muscle and nerve of the said thumb, and so turned and whirled himself 
 about three times ; at the fourth, reversing his body and overturning it 
 upside down, and foreside back, without touching anything, he brought 
 himself betwixt the horse's two ears, and then giving himself a jerking 
 swing he seated himself upon the crupper." 
 
 [*' This can't be fighting," said my Uncle Toby. Tlie Corporal 
 shook his head at it. — "Have patience," said Yorick.] 
 
 **Then Tripet passed his right leg over his saddle, and placed him- 
 self i';^ c7'oup. ' But,' said he, ' 'twere better for me to get into the saddle ; * 
 then putting the thuml)5 of both hands upon the crupper before him^ 
 and thereupon leaning himself as upon the only supporters of his body,, 
 he incontinently turned heels over liead in the air, and straight found 
 himself betwixt the bow of the saddle, in a tolerable seat ; then 
 springing into the air with a somersault, he turned him about like a 
 windmill, and made above a hundred frisks, turns, and deini-pommadas. " 
 — " Good God ! " cried Tim, losing all patience, " one home thrust of 
 a bayonet is worth it all." — " I think so too," replied Yorick. 
 
 *' I am of a contrary opinion," quoth my father. 
 
 CHAPTER XXX. 
 
 "No; I think I have advanced nothing," replied my father, making 
 answer to a question which Yorick had taken the liberty to put to 
 him — " I have advanced nothing in the " Tristra-paedia " but what is as 
 clear as anyone proposition in Euclid. Reach me. Trim, that book 
 from off the escritoire. It has oftimes been in my mind," continued 
 my father, "to have read it over both to you, Yorick, and to my 
 brother Toby, and I think it a little unfriendly in myself in not having 
 done it long ago. Shall we have a short chapter or two now, and a 
 chapter or two hereafter, as occasions serve, and so on, till we get 
 through the whole ? " My Uncle Toby and Yorick made the obeisance 
 which was proper ; and the Corporal, though he was not included in 
 the compliment, laid his hand upon his breast and made his bow at 
 the same time. The company smiled. — "Trim," quoth my father^ 
 " has paid the full price for staying out the entertainment." — " He did 
 not seem to relish the play," replied Yorick. — " 'Twas a tom-fool 
 battle, an' please your reverence, of Captain Tripet's and that other 
 ofhcer, making so many somersaults as they advanced ; the French 
 come on capering nov/ and then in that way, but not quite so much." 
 
VOL. v.] TRISTRAM SHAND Y, 103 
 
 My Uncle Toby never felt the consciousness of 1.1s existciice with 
 more complacency than what the Corporal's and his own reflectinns 
 made him do at that moment. He lighted his pipe, Yorick drew his 
 chair closer to the table, Trim snuffed the candle, my father stirred up 
 the fire, took up the book, coughed twice, and began. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXr. 
 
 ** The first thirty pages," said my father, turning over the leaves, ** are 
 a little dry, and as they are not closely connected with the subject, for 
 the present we'll pass them by. 'Tis a prefatory introduction," con- 
 tinued my father, ** or an introductoiy preface (for I am not determined 
 which name to give it) upon political or civil goveniment.'* 
 
 " I enter upon this speculation," said my father, carelessly, and half 
 shutting the book as he went on, " merely to show the foundation of 
 the natural relation between a father dnd his child." 
 
 **I own," added my father, **thrvt the offspring is not so under the 
 power and jurisdiction of the mother." — "But the reason," replied 
 Yorick, *' equally holds good for her." — "She is under authority her- 
 self," said my father. " Though by all means," added he, not attend- 
 ing to my Uncle Toby, " the son ought to pay her respect, as you may 
 read, Yorick, at large in the first book of the Institutes of Justinian, 
 at the eleventh title and the tenth section." — " I can read it as well," 
 replied Yorick, **in the catechism." 
 
 CHAPTER XXXII. 
 
 ** Trim can repeat every word of it by heart," quoth my Uncle Toby. 
 — "Pooh!" said my father, not caring to be interrupted with Trim's 
 saying his catechism. — " He can, upon my honour," replied my Uncle 
 Toby. * ' Ask him, Mr. Yorick, any question you please." 
 
 *'The Fifth Commandment, Trim," said Yorick, speaking mildly, 
 and with a gentle nod, as to a modest catechumen. The Corporal stood 
 silent. — "You don't ask him right," said my Uncle Toby, raising his 
 voice, and giving it rapidly like the word of command. " The P'ifth ! " 
 cried my Uncle Toby. — "I must begin with the First, an' please your 
 honour," said the Corporal. 
 
 Yorick could not forbear smiling. — "Your reverence does not con- 
 sider," said the Corporal, shouldering his stick lii<e a musket, and 
 marching into the middle of the room to illustrate his position, " that 
 'tis exactly the same thing as doing one's exercise in the field.' 
 
 "Join your right hand to your firelock," cried the Corporal, giving 
 the word of command, and performing the motion. 
 
 " Poise your firelock," cried the Corporal, doing the duty stiU of both 
 adjutant and private man, 
 
194 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. v. 
 
 " Rest yoitr firelock. One motion, an' please your reverence, you see, 
 
 leads into another. If his honour will begin but with the First " 
 
 ** The First ! " cried my Uncle Toby, setting his hand upon his side. 
 ******** 
 
 " The Second ! " cried my Uncle Toby, waving his tobacco-pipe as 
 he would have done his sword at the head of a regiment. The Corporal 
 went through his manual with exactness ; and having honoured his 
 father and mother, made a low bow and fell back to the side of the 
 room. 
 
 " Everything in this world," said my father, " is big with jest, and has 
 wit in it, and instruction too, if we can but find it out. 
 
 *' Here is the scaffold- work of instruction, its true point of folly with- 
 out the building behind it. 
 
 " Here is the glass of pedagogues, perceptors, tutors, governors, 
 gerund-grinders, and bear-leaders to view themselves in, in their true 
 dimensions. 
 
 *' Oh ! there is a husk and shell, Yorick, which grows up with learn- 
 ing, which their unskilfulness knows not how to fling away. 
 
 " Sciences may be learned by rote, but wisdom not." 
 
 Yomck thought my father inspired. ** I will enter into obligations 
 this moment," said my father, " to lay out all my aunt Dinah's legacy 
 in charitable uses [of which, by-the-by, my father had no high opinion] 
 if the Corporal has any one determinate idea annexed to any one word 
 he has repeated. Pr'ythee, Trim," quoth my father, turning round to 
 him, " what dost thou mean by * honouring thy father and mother ? * " 
 
 " Allowing them, an' please your honour, three-halfpence a day 
 out of my pay when they grow old." — ** And didst thou do tliat, Trim ? " 
 said Yorick. — " He did indeed," replied my Uncle Toby. — ** Then, 
 Trim," said Yorick, springing out of his chair, and taking the Corporal 
 by the hand, ** thou art the best commentator upon that part of the 
 Decalc^ue, and I honour thee more for it, Corporal Trim, than if thou 
 hadst had a hand in the Talmud itself." 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII. 
 
 *'0 BLESSED health!" cried my father, making an exclamation as 
 he turned over the leaves to the next chapter : ** thou art above all gold 
 and treasure ; 'tis thou who enlargest the soul, and openest all its 
 powers to receive instruction and to relish virtue. He that has thee 
 has little more to wish for, and he that is so wretched as to want thee, 
 wants everything with thee ! 
 
 " I have concentrated all that can be said upon this important head," 
 said my father, " into a very little room ; therefore we'll read the chapter 
 quite through." 
 
 My father read as follows : 
 
 **The whole secret of health depending upon the due contention for 
 
 mastery betwixt the radical heat and the radical moisture " — " You 
 
 have proved that matter of fact, I suppose, above," said Yorick. — 
 ** Sufficiently," replied my father. 
 
 In saying this my father shut the book — not as if he resolyed to read n© 
 
VOL. v.] TRiST-RAM S HANDY. 195 
 
 more of it, for he kept his foiefinger in the chapter ; not pettishly, for 
 he shut the book slowly, his thumb resting, when he had done it, upon 
 the upper side of the cover, as his three fingers supported the lower 
 side of it, without the least compressive violence. 
 
 "I have demonstrated the truth of that point," quoth my father, 
 nodding to Yorick, " most sufficiently in the preceding chapter." 
 
 Now could the man in the moon be told that a man in the earth had 
 wrote a chapter sufficiently demonstrating that the secret of all health 
 depended upon the due contention for mastery betwixt the ''radical 
 heat and radical moisture;" and that he had managed the point so 
 well that there was not one single word, wet or dry, upon radical beat or 
 radical moisture throughout the whole chapter, or a single syllable in it, 
 pro or con, directly or indirectly, upon the contention betwixt these two 
 powers in any part of the animal economy — 
 
 " O thou Eternal Maker of all beings ! " he would cry, striking his 
 breast with his right hand (in case he had one), " Thou whose power 
 and goodness can enlarge the faculties of Thy creatures to this infinite 
 degree of excellence and perfection, what have we Moonites done ? " 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV. 
 
 With two strokes, the one at Hippocrates, the other at Lord Verulam, 
 did my father achieve it. 
 
 The stroke at the prince of physicians with which he began was no 
 more than a short insult upon his sorrowful complaint of the ars longa 
 and vita brevis. *' Life short," cried ray father, " and the art of heal- 
 ing tedious ! And who are we to thank for both the one and the 
 other but the ignorance of quacks themselves, and the stage-loads of 
 chemical nostrums and peripatetic lumber with which in all ages they 
 have at first flattered the world and at last deceived it ? " 
 
 " O my Lord Verulam ! " cried my father, turning from Hippocrates, 
 and making his second stroke at him, as the principal of nostrum- 
 mongers and the fittest to be made an example of to the rest : " what 
 shall I say to thee, my great Lord Verulam ? What shall I say to 
 thy internal spirit, thy opium, thy saltpetre, thy greasy unction, thy 
 daily purges, thy nightly glisters, and succedaneums ? " 
 
 My father was never at a loss what to say to any man upon any 
 subject, and had the least occasion for the exordium of any man 
 breathing. How he dealt with his lordship's opinion you shall 
 see ; but when, I know not ; we must first see what his lordshii)'s 
 opinion was. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXV. 
 
 **The two (^eat causes which conspire with each other to shorten life," 
 says Lord Verulam, are, first — 
 
 "The internal spirit, which, like a gentle flame, wastes the body 
 down to death ; and secondly, the external air, that parches the 
 body up to ashes : which two enemies, attacking us on both sides of 
 
 G 
 
196 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. v; 
 
 our bodies together, at length destroy our organs, and render them 
 unfit to carry on the functions of life." 
 
 This being the state of the case, the road to longevity was plain ; 
 nothing more being required, says liis lordship, but to repair ihe 
 waste comniilted by the internal spirit, by making tlie substance of 
 it more thick and dense, by a regular course of opiates on one side, 
 and by refrigerating the heat of it on the other, ])y three grains and a 
 half of saltpetre every morning before you get up. 
 
 Still this frame of ours was left exposed to the inimical assaults of the 
 air without ; but this was fenced off" again by a course of greasy 
 unctions, which so fully saturated the pores of the skin that no spicula 
 could enter, nor could any one get out. This put a stop to all per- 
 spiration, sensible and insensible, which bein{T the cause of so many 
 scurvy distem|:>ers, a course of glisters was requisite to carry oiT redundant 
 humours, and render the system complete. 
 
 What ray father had to say to my Lord of Verulaiu's opiates his 
 saltpetre, and greasy unctions and glisters, you shall read, but not to- 
 day or to-morrow : time presses upon me ; my reader is impatient ; I 
 must get forwards. You shall read the chapter at your leisure (if you 
 choose it) as soon as ever the " Tristrapsedia " is published. 
 
 Sufhceth it at present to say, my father levelled the hypothesis with 
 the ground, and in doing that, the learned know, he built up and estab- 
 lished his own. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVL 
 
 *The whole secret of health," said my father, beginning the sentence 
 again, " depending evidently upon the due contention betwixt the radical 
 heat and radical moisture within us, the least imaginable skill had been 
 sufficient to have maintained it, had not the schoolmen confounded the 
 task, merely (as Van Helmont, the famous chemist, has proved) by all 
 along mistaking the radical moisture for the tallow and fat of animal 
 bodies. 
 
 " Now the radical moisture is not the tallow or fat of animals, but an 
 oily and balsamous substance ; for the fat and tallow, as also the phlegm 
 or watery parts, are cold ; v/hereas the oily and balsamous parts are of a 
 lively heat and spirit. 
 
 " Now it is certain that the radical heat lives in the radical moisture, 
 but whether vice versd is a doubt : however, when the one decays, 
 the other decays also ; and then is produced, either an unnatural 
 heat, which causes an unnatural dryness, or an unnatural moisture, 
 which causes dropsies. So that if a child, as he grows up, can be 
 but taught to avoid runnmg into fire or water, as either of them 
 threaten his destruction, 'twill be all that is needful to be done upon 
 th;^t head**' 
 
VOL. v.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 197 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVII. 
 
 The description of the siege of Jericho itself could not have engag;cd 
 the attention of my Uncle Toby more powerfully than the last chapter : 
 his eyes were fixed upon my father throughout it ; he never mentioned 
 radical heat and radical moisture but my Uncle Toby took his pipe out 
 of his mouth and shook Ids head ; and, as soon as the chapter was 
 finished he beckoned to the Corporal to come close to his chair, to ask 
 him the following question aside :******* 
 ****** — **It was at the siege of Limerick, 
 an' please your honour," replied the Corporal, making a bow. 
 
 '* The poor fellow and I," quoth my Uncle Toby, addressing himself 
 to my father, ** were scarce able to crawl out of our tents, at the time 
 the siege of Limerick was raised, upon the very account you mention." 
 — " Now what can have got into that precious noddle of thine, my 
 dear brother Toby?" cried my father, mentally. " By heaven ! '' con- 
 tinued he, communing still with himself, ** it would puzzle an Qidipus 
 to bring it in point." 
 
 " I believe, an' please your honour," quoth the Corporal, ** that if it 
 had not been for the quantity of brandy we .set fire to every night, and 
 the claret and cinnamon with which I plied your honour off" — [" And 
 the geneva, Trim," added my Uncle Toby, " which did us more good 
 than all."}—** I verily believe," continued the Corporal, ** we had both, 
 an' please your honour, left our lives in the trenches, and been buried 
 in them too." — ** The noblest grave, corporal," cried my Uncle Toby, 
 his eyes sparkling as he spoke, " that a soldier could wish to lie down 
 in." — ** But a pitiful death for him, an' please your honour," replied 
 the Corporal. 
 
 All this was as much Arabic to my father as the rites of the Colchi 
 and Troglodytes had been before to my Uncle Toby ; my father could 
 not determine whether he was to frown or smile. 
 
 My Uncle Toby, turning to Yorick, resumed the case at Limerick 
 more intelligibly than he had begun it, and so settled the point for my 
 father at once. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVin. 
 
 **It was undoubtedly," said my Uncle Toby, ** a great liappiness for 
 myself and the Corporal that we liad all along a burning fever, 
 attended with a most raging thirst, during the whole five-and-twenty 
 days the flux was upon us in the camp ; otherwise what my brother 
 calls the i-adical moisture must, as I conceive it, inevitably have got the 
 better." — My father drew in his lungs topful of air, and looking up, 
 blew it forth again as slowly as he possibly could. 
 
 " It was heaven's mercy to us," conlinued my Uncle Toby, ** which 
 put it into the Corporal's head to maintain that due contention between 
 
 3 
 
198 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. v. 
 
 the radical heat and the radical moisture, by reinforcing the fever, as he 
 did all along, with hot wines and spices ; whereby the Corporal kept 
 tip (as it were) a continual firing, so that the radical heat stood its 
 ground from the beginning to the end, and was a fair match for the 
 moisture, terrible as it was. Upon my honour," added my Uncle 
 Toby, " you might have heard the contention within our bodies, brother 
 Shandy, twenty toises."— *' If there was no firing ? " said Yorick. 
 
 "Well," said my father, with a full aspiration, and pausing a while 
 after the word, ** was I a judge, and the laws of the country which 
 made me one permitted it, I would condemn some of the worst male- 
 factors, provided they had had their clergy" Yorick foreseeing 
 
 the sentence was likely to end with no sort of mercy, laid his hand upon 
 my father's breast, and begged he would respite it for a few minuter, 
 till he asked the Corporal a question. ** Pr'ythee, Trim," said Yorick, 
 without staying for my father's leave, " tell us honestly what is thy 
 opinion concerning this self- same radical heat and radical moisture." 
 
 * With humble submission to his honour's better judgment," quoth 
 the Corporal, making a bow to my Uncle Toby.—* * Speak thy opinion 
 freely. Corporal," said my Uncle Toby. "The poor fellow is my ser- 
 vant, not my slave, " added my Uncle Toby, turning to my father. 
 
 The Corporal put his hat under his left arm, and with his stick 
 hanging upon the wrist of it by a black thong split into a tassel about; 
 the knot, he marched up to the ground where he had performed his 
 catechism, then touching his imder-jaw with the thumb and fingers of 
 his right hand before he opened his mguth, he delivered his notion 
 thus. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIX. 
 
 Just as the Corporal was humming to begin, in waddled Dr. Slop. 
 'Tis not twopence matter ; the Corporal shall go on in the next chapter, 
 let who will come in. 
 
 CHAPTER XL. 
 
 ** The city of Limerick, the siege of which was begun under his Majesty 
 King William himself the year after I went into the army, lies, an* 
 please your honours, in the middle of a devilish wet swampy country.'^ 
 •* 'Tis quite surrounded," said my Uncle Toby, ** with the Shannon, 
 and is, by its situation, one of the strongest fortified places in Ireland.'* 
 " I think this is a new fashion," quoth Dr. Slop, " of beginning a 
 medical lecture." — *' 'Tis all true," answered Trim.—** Then I wish the 
 faculty would follow the cut of it," said Yorick.—** 'Tis all cut through, 
 an' please your reverence," said the Corporal, *' with drains and bogs ; 
 and besides, there was such a quantity of rain fell during the siege, the 
 whole country was like a puddle ; 'twas that, and nothing else, which 
 brought on the flux, and which had like to have killed both his honour 
 and myself. Now there was no such thing, after the first ten days," 
 
VOL. v.] TRISTRAM SHAA'jjY. 199 
 
 continued the Corporal, "for a soldier to lie dry in his tent without 
 cutting a ditch round it to draw off the water. Nor was that enouf^h, 
 for those who could afford it, as his honour could, without setting fire 
 every night to a pewter dish full of brandy, which took off the damp of 
 the air, and made the inside of the tent as warm as a stove " 
 
 " And what conclusion dost thou draw, Corporal Trim," cried my 
 father, ** from all these premises ? " 
 
 ** I infer, an' please your worship," replied Trim, "that the radical 
 moisture is nothing in the world but ditch-water, and that the radical 
 heat of those who can go to the expense of it, is burnt brandy ; the 
 radical heat and moisture of a private man, an' please your honour, is 
 nothing but ditch-water and a dram of geneva ; and give us but enough 
 of it, with a pipe of tobacco, to give us spirits and drive away the 
 vapours, we know not what it is to fear death. " 
 
 ** I am at a loss, Captain Shandy," quoih Dr. Slop, ** to determine in 
 which branch of learning your servant shines most, whether in physio- 
 logy or divinity." Slop had not forgot Trim's comment upon the 
 sermon. 
 
 " It is not an hour ago," repHed Yorick, "since the Corporal was ex- 
 amined in the latter, and passed muster with great honour." 
 
 **The radical heat and moisture," quoth Dr. Slop, turning to my 
 father, " you must know, is the basis and foundation of our being, as the 
 root of a tree is the source and principle of its vegetation. It is 
 inherent in the seeds of all animals, and may be preserved sundry 
 ways, but principally, in my opinion, by consubstantials, impriments, 
 and occludents. Now this poor fellow," continued Dr. Slop, pointing 
 to the Corporal, " has had the misfortune to have heard some superficial 
 empiric discourse upon this nice point." — " That he has," said my 
 father. — "Very likely," said my uncle. — "I'm sure of it," quoth 
 Yorick. 
 
 CHAPTER XLI. 
 
 Doctor Slop bemg called out to look at a cataplasm he had ordered, 
 it gave my father an opportunity of going on with another chapter in the 
 ** Tristrapsedia." Come, cheer up my lads! I'll show you land ; for 
 when we ve tugged through that chapter, the book shall not be opened 
 again this twelvemonth. Huzza ! 
 
 CHAPTER XLII. 
 
 Five years with a bib under his chin ; 
 
 Four years in travelling from Christ-cross Row to Malachi ; 
 
 A year and a half in learning to write his own name ; 
 
 Seven long years and more rvxrw-ing it at Greek and Latin ; 
 
 Four years at his probations and his negations — the fine statue Still l)ring 
 in the middle of the marble block, and nothing done but his tools 
 sharpened to hew it out ! 'Tis a piteous delay ! Was not the great Julius 
 
200 TRISTRAM SHANDY [vol. V. 
 
 Scaliger within an ace of never getting his tools sharpened at all? 
 forty-four years old was he before he could manage his Greek. And 
 Peter Damianus, Lord Bishop of Ostia, as all the world knows, could 
 not so much as read when he was of man's estate. And Baldus himself, 
 as eminent as he turned out after, entered upon the law so late in life 
 that everybody imagined he intended to be an advocate in the other 
 world. No wonder when Eudamidas, tlic son of Archidamas, heard 
 Xenocrates at seventy-five disputing about wisdom, that he asked 
 gravely, " If the old man be yet disputing and inquiring concerning 
 wisdom, what time will he have to make use of it ? " 
 
 Yorick listened to my father with great attention ; there was a season- 
 ing of wisdom unaccountably mixed up with his strangest wliim>, and 
 he had sometimes such illuminations in the darkest of his eclipses as 
 almost atoned for them. Be wary, sir, when you imitate him. 
 
 **I am convinced, Yorick," continued my father, half reading and 
 half discoursing, "that there is a north-west passage to the intjUectual 
 world ; and that the soul of man has shorter ways of going to work, in 
 furnishing itself with knowledge and instruction, than we generally take 
 with it. But alack ! all fields have not a river or spring running beside 
 them ; every child, Yorick, has not a parent to point it out. 
 
 " The whole entirely depends," added my father in a low voice, 
 " upon the auxiliaiy verbs, Mr. Yorick." 
 
 Had Yorick tmde upon Virgil's snake, he could not have looked 
 \>iore surprised. — " I am surprised too," cried my father, observing it ; 
 " and I reckon it as one of the greatest calamities which ever befell the 
 republic of letters, that those v/ho have been entrusted with the educa- 
 tion of our children, and whose business it was to open their minds and 
 stock them early with ideas, in order to set the imagination loose upon 
 them, have made so little use of the auxiliary verbs in doing it as they 
 have done. So that, except Raymond LuUius and the elder Pelegrini, 
 the last of which arrived to such perfection in the use of them with his 
 topics, that in a few lessons he could teach a young gentleman to dis- 
 course with plausibility upon any subject pro and con, and to say and 
 write all that could be spoken or written concerning it, without blotting 
 a word, to the admiration of all who beheld him." — *' I should be glad," 
 said Yorick, interrupting my father, *' to be made to comprehend this 
 matter." — ** You shall," said my father. 
 
 " The highest stretch of improvement a single word is capable of is a 
 high metaphor — for which, in my opinion, the idea is generally the 
 worse, and not the better ; but be that as it may, when the mind has 
 done with it, there is an end : the mind and the idea are at rest until a 
 second idea enters, and so on. 
 
 " Now the use of the auxiliaries is, at once to set the soul agoing by 
 herself upon the materials as they are brought her ; and by the versa- 
 tility of this great engine, round which they are twisted, to open new 
 tracts of enquiry, and make every idea engender millions." 
 
 *' You excite my curiosity greatly," said Yorick. 
 
 *' For my own part," quoth my Uncle Toby, *' I have given it up." 
 — '* The Danes, an' please your honour," quoth the Corporal, "who 
 were on the left at the siege of Limerick, were all auxiliaries." — *' And 
 very good ones," said my Uncle Toby." — "And your honour rolled 
 with them, captains with ciptnins, very well," said the Corporal.—' 
 
Vol. v.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 26t 
 
 " But the auxiHaries,Trim, my brother is talking about," ansv/ered my 
 
 Uncle Toby, ** I conceive to be different things " 
 
 " You do ? " said my father, rising up. 
 
 CHAPTER XLIII. 
 
 Mv father took a single turn across the room, then sat down and 
 hiiished the chapter. 
 
 ** The ver])s auxiliary we are concerned in here," continued my 
 father, " are — am ; was ; have ; had ; do ; did make ; made ; suffer ; 
 shall ; stiould ; will ; would ; can ; could ; owe ; ought ; used ; or is 
 wont. And these varied with tenses, present, past, future, and con- 
 jugated with the verb see ; or with these questions added to them — 
 Is it? Was it? Will it be? Would it be? May it be? Might it be? 
 And these again put negatively — Is it not ? Was it not ? Ought it not ? 
 Or affirmatively — It is ; It was ; It ought to be. Or chronologically 
 — Has it been always ? Lately ? How long ago ? Or hypothetically — 
 If it was ? If it was not ? What would follow if the French should 
 beat the English, if the sun go out of the zodiac ? 
 
 '* Now, by the right use and application of these," continued my 
 father, " in which a child's memory should be exercised, there is no 
 one idea can enter his brain, how barren soever, but a magazine of 
 conceptions and conclusions may be drawn forth from it." — ** Didst thou 
 ever see a white bear ? " cried my father, turning his head round to 
 Trim, who stood at the back of his chair. — " No, an' please your 
 honour, " replied the Corporal. — " But thou couldst discourse about one, 
 Trim," said my father, '' in case of need." — *' How is it possible, 
 brother," quoth my Uncle Toby, " if the Corporal never saw one ? " — 
 '"Tis the fact I want," replied my Jather, " and the possibility of it 
 is as follows : — 
 
 " A white bear I Very well. Have I ever seen one ? Might I ever 
 have seen one ? Am I ever to see one ? Ought I ever to have seen one ? 
 Or can I ever see one ? 
 
 ** Would I had seen a white bear? (for how can I imagine it?) 
 
 " If I should see a white bear, what should I sav? If I should never 
 see a white bear, what then ? 
 
 If I never have, can, must^ or shall see a white bear alive, have I 
 ever seen the skin of one? Did I ever see one painted? — described? 
 Have I never dreamed of one ? 
 
 " Did my father, mother, uncle, aunt, brothers or sisters ever see a 
 white bear ? Wliat would they give ? How would they behave ? How 
 would the white bear have behaved ? Is he wild ? tame ? terrible ? 
 rough? smooth? 
 
 ** Is the white bear worth seeing ? 
 
 ** Is there no sin in it ? 
 
 ** Is it better than a black one ? 
 
VOLUME VI. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 We'll not stop two moments, my dear sir; only, as we have got 
 through these five volumes — do, sir, sit down upon a set, they are 
 better than nothing — let us just look back upon the country we have 
 passed through. 
 
 What a wilderness has it been ! and what a mercy that we have not 
 both of us been lost or devoured by wild beasts in it ! 
 
 Did you think the world itself, sir, had contained such a number of 
 jackasses ? How they viewed and re- vie wed us as we passed over the 
 rivulet at the bottom of that little valley ; and when we climbed over 
 that hill, and were just getting out of sight, good God ! what a braying 
 did they all set np together ! 
 
 Pr'ythee, shepherd, who keeps all these jackasses ? 
 
 Heaven be their comforter. What ! are they never curried ? Are 
 they never taken in in winter? Bray, bray, bray. Bray on, the world 
 is deeply your debtor ; louder still, that's nothing ; in good sooth, you 
 are ill used. Was I a jackass, I solemnly declare I would bray in 
 G-fol-re-ut from mornin<T even unto niijht. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 When my father had danced his white bear backwards and forwards 
 through half a dozen pages, he closed the book for good and all, and in 
 a kind of triumph redelivered it into Trim's hand, with a nod to lay it 
 upon the escritoire where he found it. 
 
 "Tristram," said he, " shall be made to conjugate every word in the 
 dictionary backwards and forwards the same way ; every word, Yorick, 
 by this means, you see, is converted into a thesis or an h}T3othesis ; every 
 thesis and hypothesis have an offspring of propositions, and each propo- 
 sition has its own consequences and conclusions ; every one of which 
 leads the mind on again into fresh tracts of inquiries and doubtings. 
 The force of this engine," added my father, "is incredible in opening 
 a child's head." — *"Tis enough, brother Shandy," cried my Uncle 
 Toby, ** to burst it into a thousand splinters." 
 
 /*I presume," said Yorick, smihng, **it must be owing to this (for 
 
VOL. VI.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 203 
 
 let logicians say what they will, it is not to be account6</ for sufficiently 
 from the bare use of the ten predicaments), that the famous Vincent 
 Quirino, amongst the many other astonishing feats of his childhood, of 
 which the Cardinal Bembo has given the world so exact a story, should 
 be able to paste up in the public schools at Rome, so early as in the 
 eighth year of his age, no less than four thousand five hundred and sixty 
 different theses upon the most abstruse points of the most abstruse 
 theology, and to defend and maintain them in such sort as to cramp and 
 dumbfound his opponents." — "What is that," cried my father, "to 
 what is told us of Alphonsus Tostatus, who, almost in his nurse's arms, 
 learned all the sciences and liberal arts without being taught any one of 
 them ?" — " What shall we say of the great Feireskius? " — " Thai's the 
 very man," cried my Uncle Toby, *' I once told you of, brother i^handy, 
 who walked a matter of five hundred miles, reckoning from Paris 
 to Scheveling, and from Scheveling back again, merely to see Stevinus's 
 flying chariot." — " He was a very great man !" added my Uncle Toby 
 (meaning Stevinus). — '* He was so, bf other Toby," said my father 
 (meaning Peireskius), ** and had multiplied his ideas so fast, and in- 
 creased his knowledge to such a prodig*^us stock, that — if we may give 
 credit to an anecdote concerning him, which we cannot withhold here 
 without shaking the authority of all anecdotes whatever — at seven 
 years of age his father committed entirely to his care the education of 
 his younger brother, a boy of five years old, with the sole management 
 of all his concerns." — *' Was the father as wdse as the son? " quoth my 
 Uncle Toby. — *'I should think not," said Yorick. — *' But what are these," 
 continued my father, breaking out in a kind of enthusiasm ; " what are 
 these to those prodigies of childhood in Grotius, Scioppius, Heinsius, 
 Politian, Pascal, Joseph Scaliger, Ferdinand de Cordoue, and others ; 
 some of which left off their substantial forms at nine years old, or soontr, 
 and went on reasoning wi hout them ; others went through their classics 
 at seven ; wrote tragedies at eight. Ferdinand de Cordoue was so wise 
 at nine, 'twas thought the devil was in him ; and at Venice gave such 
 proofs of his knowledge and goodness, that ihe monks imagined he 
 was Antichrist or nothing. Others were masters of fourteen languages 
 at ten ; finished the course of their rhetoric, poetry, logic, and ethics at 
 eleven ; put forth their commentaries upon Servius, and Martianus 
 Capellaat twelve ; and at thirteen received their degrees in philosophy, 
 laws, and divinity." — " But you forget the great Lipsius," quoth Yorick, 
 *• who composed a work the day he was born." — " They should have 
 wiped it up," said my Uncle Toby, '* and said no more about it." 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 " You see 'tis high time," said my father, addressing himself equally 
 to my Uncle Toby and Yorick, ** to take this young creature out of 
 these women's hands, and put him into those of a private governor. 
 Marcus Antoninus provided fourteen governors all at once to superin* 
 tend his son Commodus's education, and in six weeks he cashiered five 
 of them. I am gf opinion that those five whom- Antoninus dismissed. 
 
204 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. vi. 
 
 did Commodus's temper in that short time more hurt than the other 
 nine were able to rectify all their lives long. 
 
 " Now, as I consider the person who is to be about my son as the 
 mirror in which he is to view himself from morning to night, and by 
 which he is to adjust his looks, his carriage, and perhaps the inmost 
 sentiments of his heart, I would have .one, Yorick, if possible, polished 
 at all points, fit for my child to look into." — ** This is very good 
 sense," quoth my Uncle Toby to himself. 
 
 ** There is," continued my father, " a certain mien and motion of 
 the body and all its parts, both in acting and speaking, which argues a 
 man well within ; and I am not at all surprised that Gregory of Nazi- 
 anzum, upon observing the hasty and untoward gestures of Julian, 
 should foretell he would one day become an apostate ; or that St. Am- 
 brose should turn his amanuensis out of doors because of an indecent 
 motion of his head, which went backwards and forwards like a flail ; 
 or that Democritus should conceive Protagoras to be a scholar from 
 seeing him bind up a faggot, and thrusting, as he did it, the small 
 twigs inwards. There are a thousand unnoticed openings," continued 
 my father, " which let a penetrating eye at once into a man's soul ; and 
 I maintain it," added he, *'that a man of sense does not lay down his 
 hat in coming into a room, or take it up in going out of it, but some- 
 thing escapes, which discovers him. 
 
 "It is for tliese reasons," continued my father, *' that the governor I 
 make choice of shall neither lisp, or squint, or wink, or talk loud, or 
 look fierce or foolish, or bile his lips, or grind his teeth, or speak 
 through his nose, or pick it or blow it with his fingers. 
 
 " He shall neither walk fast, or slow, or fold his arms — for that is 
 k-ziness ; or hang them down — for that is folly ; or hide them in his 
 /*;ocket — for that is nonsense. 
 
 " He shall neither strike, or pinch, or tickle, or bite, or cut his nails, 
 or hawk, or spit, or snift, or drum with his feet or fingers in company." 
 — ** Now, this is all nonsense again," ouoth my Uncle Toby to him- 
 self. 
 
 **I will have him," continued my father, "cheerful, facete, jovial ; at 
 the same time, prudent, attentive to business, vigilant, acute, argute, 
 inventive, quick in resolving doubts and speculative questions ; he shall 
 be wise and judicious, and learned." — " And why not humble, and 
 moderate, and gentle-tempered, and good?" said Yorick. — *' And why 
 not," cried my Uncle Toby, *' free, and generous, and bountiful, and 
 brave?" — "He shall, my dear Toby," replied my father, getting up 
 and shaking him by his hand. — " Then, brother Shandy," answered my 
 Uncle Toby, raising himself off the chair, and laying down his pipe to 
 take hold of my father's other hand, " I humbly beg I may recommend 
 poor Le Fevre's son to you." A tear of joy of the first water sparkled 
 in my Uncle Toby's eye, and another, the fellow to it, in the Corporal's 
 as the proposition was made ; you will see why when you read Le 
 Fevre's story. Fool that I \\:\.^, nor can I recollect (nor perhaps you) 
 without turning back to the ])lace, what it was that hmdered me from 
 letting the Corporal tell it in his own vy^ords. But the ocgasion is lost } 
 I must tell it now in my own. 
 
mu VI.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 20$ 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 The Story of Le Fevre. 
 
 It was some time in the summer of that year in which Dendermond 
 was taken by the Allies, which v/as about seven years before my fatlier 
 came into the countrv, and about as many after the time that my Uncle 
 Toby and Trim had privately decamped from my father's house in 
 town, in order to lay some of the finest sieges to some of the finest 
 fortified cities in Europe, when my Uncle Toby was one evening getting 
 his supper, with Trim sitting behind him at a small sideboard ; I say 
 sitting, for in consideration of the Corporal's lame knee (which some- 
 times gave him exquisite pain), when my Uncle Toby dined or supped 
 alone^ he would never suffer the Corporal to stand ; and the poor 
 fellow's veneration for his master was such that, with a proper artillery, 
 my Uncle Toby could have taken Dendermond itself wiih less trouble 
 than lie was able to gain this point over him ; for many a time, when my 
 Uncle Toby supposed the Corporal's leg was at rest, he would look back 
 and detect him standing behind him with the most dutiful respect ; this 
 bred more little squabbles betwixt them than all other causes for five- 
 and-twenty years together. But this is neither here nor there : why d<i 
 I mention it ? Ask my pen ; it governs me — I govern not it. 
 
 He was one evening sitting thus at his supper, when the landlord o"i 
 a little inn in the village came into the parlour with an empty phial in 
 his hand, to beg a glass or two of sack : *"Tis for a poor gentleman, I 
 think, of the army," said the landlord, *' who has been taken ill at my 
 house four days ago, and has never held up his head since, or had 
 a desire to taste anything^ till just now, that he has a fancy for a glass 
 of sack and a thin toast : * I think, ' says he, taking his hand from his 
 forehead, ' it would comfort me.' If I could neither beg, borrow, or buy 
 such a thing," added the landlord, '* I would almost steal it for the poor 
 gentleman, he is so ill. I hope in God he will still mend," continued 
 he ; "we are all of us concerned for him." 
 
 " Thou art a good-natured soul, I will answer for thee," cried my 
 Uncle Toby, " and thou shalt drink the poor gentleman's health in a 
 glass of sack thyself, and take a couple of bottles, with my service, and 
 tell him he is heartily welcome to them, and to a dozen more if they 
 will do him good. 
 
 "Though I am persuaded," said my Uncle Toby as the landlord shut 
 the door, **he is a very compassionate fellow, Trim, yet I cannot help 
 entertaining a high opinion of his guest too ; there must be something 
 more than common in him, that in so short a time should win so much 
 upon the affections of his host. " — " And of his whole family," added 
 the Corporal, *' for they are all concerned for him." — '* Step after him," 
 said my Uncle Toby ; "do, Trim, and ask if he know.^ his nan\e." 
 
 ** I have quite forgot it, truly," said the landlord, coming back into the 
 parlour with the Corporal, " but I can ask his son again." — '■'' Has he 
 a son with him, then?" said my Uncle Toby. — " A boy," replied the 
 landlord, " of about eleven or twelve years of age ; but the poor 
 
scjS Tristram sua Mb v. [vol. vt. 
 
 creature has tasted almost as little as his father ; he does nothing but 
 mourn and lament for him night and day. He has not stirred from the 
 bedside these two days." 
 
 My Uncle Toby laid down his knife and fork, and thrust his plate 
 from before him, as the landlord gave him the account ; and Trim, 
 without being ordered, took it away without saying one word, and in a 
 few minutes after brought him his pipe and tobacco. 
 
 ** Stay in the room a little," said my Uncle Toby. 
 
 "Trim," said my Uncle Toby, after he had lighted his pipe and 
 smoked about a dozen whiflfe. Trim came in front of his master and 
 made his bow ; my Uncle Toby smoked on and said no more. ** Cor- 
 poral," said my Uncle Toby. The Corporal made his bow. My 
 Uncle Toby proceeded no farther, but finished his pipe. 
 
 "Trim," said my Uncle Toby, **I have a project in my head, as it 
 is a bad night, of wrapping myself up warm in my roquelaure, and 
 paying a visit to this poor gentleman." — *' Your honour's roquelaure,'* 
 replied the Corporal, " has not once been had on since the night be- 
 fore your honour received your wound, when we mounted guard in the 
 trenches before the gate of St. Nicolas ; and besides, it is so cold and 
 rainy a night, that, what with the roquelaure and what with the 
 weather, 'twill be enough to give your honour your death, and bring on 
 your honour's torment in your groin." — ** I fear so," replied my Uncle 
 Toby, " but I am not at rest in my mind, Trim, since the account the 
 landlord has given me. I wish I had not known so much of this 
 affair," added my Uncle Toby, " or that I had known more of it. How 
 /hall we manage it?" — *' Leave it, an' please your honour, to me," 
 quoth the Corporal ; I'll take my hat and stick and go to the house 
 and reconnoitre, and act accordingly ; and I will bring your honour a 
 full account in an hour." — " Thou shalt go, Trim," said my Uncle 
 Toby, " and here's a shilling for thee to drink with his servant." — ** I 
 shall get it all out of him," said the Corporal, shutting the door. 
 
 My Uncle Toby filled his second pipe ; and had it not been that he 
 now and then wandered from the point with considering whether it 
 was not full as well to have the curtain of the tenaile a straight line as 
 a crooked one, he might be said to have thought of nothing else but 
 poor Le Fevre and his boy the whole time he smoked it. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 The Story of Le Fevre — continued. 
 
 It was not till my Uncle Toby had knocked the ashes out of his third 
 pipe that Corporal Trim returned from the inn, and gave him the fol- 
 lowing account. 
 
 ** I despaired at first," said the Corporal, "of being able to bring 
 back to your honour any kind of intelligence concerning the poor sick 
 iewtenant." — " Is he in the army then ?" said my Uncle Toby. — " He 
 s,' said the Corporal. — "And in what regiment?" said my Uncle 
 Toby.— •• I'll tell your honour," replied the Corporal, ♦'everything 
 
VOU VI.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 26? 
 
 straightforwards as I learnt it." — " Then, Trim, I'll fill another pipe," 
 said my Uncle Toby, ** and not interrupt thee till thou hast done ; so 
 sit down at thy ease, Trim, in the window-seat, and begin thy story 
 again." — The Corporal made his old bow, which generally spoke as 
 plain as a bow could speak it, "Your honour is good." And having 
 done that, he sat down, as he was ordered, and began the story to my 
 Uncle Toby over again, in pretty near the same words. 
 
 **I despaired at first," said the Corporal, "of being able to bring 
 back any intelligence to your honour about the lieutenant and his son ; 
 for when I asked where his servant was, from whom I made myself 
 sure of knowing everything which was proper to be asked," — ["That's 
 a right distinction, Trim," said my Uncle Toby.]—" I was answered, 
 an' please your honour, that he had no servant with him ; that he had 
 come to the inn with hired horses, which, upon finding himself unable 
 to proceed (to join, I suppose, the regiment), he *had dismissed the 
 morning after he came. ' If I get better, my dear,' said he, as he gave 
 his purse to his son to pay the man, ' we can hire horses from hence.* 
 * But, alas ! the poor gentleman will never get from hence,* said the 
 landlady to me, * for I heard the death-watch all night long ; and when 
 he dies, the youth, his son, will certainly die with him, for he is 
 broken-hearted already.* 
 
 " I was hearing this account," cononued the Corporal, " when the 
 youth came into the kitchen, to order the thin toast the landlord spoke 
 of. * But I will do it for my father myself,' said the youth.* — * Pray let 
 me save you the trouble, young gentleman,' taid I, taking up a fork for 
 that purpose, and offering him my chair to sit down upon by the fire 
 whilst I did it. — *I believe, sir,* said he, very modestly, * I can please 
 him best myself.' — *I am sure,* said I, *his honour will not like the 
 toast the worse for being toasted by an old soldier.* The youth took 
 hold of my hand, and instantly burst into tears." — ["Poor youth!" 
 said my Uncle Toby, " he has been bred up from an infant in the army, 
 and the name of a soldier. Trim, sounded in his ears like the name of a 
 friend. I wish I had him here."] 
 
 ** I never in the longest marcli," said the Corporal, " had so great a 
 mind to my dinner as I had to cry with him for company. What could 
 be the matter with me, an' please your honour ? " — * ' Nothing in tlie 
 world. Trim,'* said my Uncle Toby, blowing his nose, "but that thou 
 art a good-natured fellow.'* 
 
 " When I gave him the toast," continued the Corporal, " I thought it 
 was proper to tell him I was Captain Shandy's servant, and that your 
 honour (though a stranger) was extremely concerned for his father, and 
 that if there was anything in your house or cellar" — ['*And thou 
 mightest have added my purse, too," said my Uncle Toby.] — "he was 
 heartily welcome to it He made a very low bow (which was meant 
 to your honour) but no answer, for his heart was full ; so he went up- 
 stairs with the toast. * I warrant you, my dear,' said I as I opened the 
 kitchen door, * your father will be well again.' Mr. Yorick's curate was 
 smoking a pipe by the kitchen fire, but said not a word, good or bad, 
 to comfort the youth. I thought it wrong," added the Corporal. — "I 
 thing so too," said my Uncle Toby. 
 
 " When the lieutenant had taken his glass of sack and toast, he felt 
 himself a little revived, and sent down into the kitchen to let me know 
 
2o8 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. vl 
 
 that in about ten minutes he should be glad if I would step upstairs. 
 * I believe,' said the landlord, * he is going to say his prayers, for there 
 was a book laid upon the chair by his bedside, and as I shut the door I 
 saw his son take up a cushion.* 
 
 ** ' I thought,' said the curate, * that you gentlemen of the army, Mr. 
 Trim, never said your prayers at all.' — ' I heard the poor gentleman say 
 his prayers last night,' said the landlady, * very devoutly, and v/ith my 
 own ears, or I could not have believed it.' — * Are you sure of it ? ' 
 replied the curate. — 'A soldier, an' please your reverence,' said I, * prays 
 as often (of his own accord) as a parson ; and when he is fighting for 
 his king and for his own life, and for his honour too, he has the most 
 reason to pray to God of any one in the whole world.' " — *" 'Twas well 
 said of thee, Trim," said my Uncle Toby. — " 'But when a soldier,' said 
 I, * an' please your reverence, has been standing for twelve hours to- 
 gether in the trenches up to his knees in cold water, or engaged,' said 
 I, *for months together in long and dangerous marches — harassed, 
 perhaps, in his rear to-day, harassing others to-morrow ; detached here, 
 countermanded there ; resting this night out upon his arms, beat up in 
 his shirt the next, benumbed in his joints, perhaps without straw in his 
 tent to kneel on — must say his prayers how and when he can, I believe,' 
 said I — for I was piqued," quoth the Corporal, ** for the reputation of 
 the army — * I believe, an' please your reverence,' said I, * that when a 
 soldier gets time to pray, he prays as heartily as a parson, though not 
 with all his fuss and hypocrisy.' " — " Thou shouldst not have said that. 
 Trim," said my Uncle Toby, "for God only knows who is a hypocrite 
 and who is not. At the great and general review of us all, Corporal, 
 at the Day of Judgment (and not till then), it will be seen who have 
 done their duties in this w^orid, and who have not ; and we shall be 
 advanced, Trim, accordingly." — ** I hope we shall," said Trim. — *' It 
 is in the Scripture," said my Uncle Toby, **and I will show it thee 
 to-morrow ; ifi the meantime we may depend upon it, Trim, for our 
 comfort," said my Uncle Toby, " that God Almighty is so good and 
 just a governor of the world, that if we have but done our duties in it, 
 it will never be inquired into whether we have done them in a red coat 
 or a black one." — " I hope not," said the Corporal. — " But go on Trim, 
 said my Uncle Toby, *' with thy story." 
 
 "When I went up," continued the Corporal, "into the lieutenant's 
 room, which 1 did not do until the expiration of the ten minutes, he 
 was lying in his bed with his head raised upon his hand, with his elbow 
 upon the pillow, and a clean white cambric handkerchief beside it. 
 The youth was just stooping down to take up the cushion, upon which I 
 supposed he had been kneeling, the book was laid upon the bed, and as 
 he rose, in taking up the cushion with one hand, he reached out his 
 other to take it away at the same time. * Let it remain there, my dear,* 
 said the lieutenant. 
 
 " He did not offer to speak to me till I had walked up close to his 
 bedside. * If you are Captain Shandy's servant,' said he, 'you must 
 present my thanks to your master, with my little boy's thanks along 
 with them, for his courtesy to me: if he was of Leven's,' said the 
 lieutenant. — I told him your honour was. * Then,' said he, ' I served 
 three campaigns with him in Flanders, and remember him ; but 'tis 
 most likely, as I had not the honour of any acquaintance with him, 
 
VOL. VI.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 209 
 
 tliat he knows nothing of me. You will tell him, however, that the 
 person his good nature has laid under obligations to him is one Le 
 Fevre, a lieutenant in Angus's — but he knows me not," said lie a 
 second time, musing. * Possibly he may my story,' added he. * Pray 
 tell the captain I was the ensign at Breda whose wife was most un- 
 fortunately killed with a musket-shot as she lay in my arms in my 
 tent.' — 'I remember the story, an' please your hon«ur,' said I, *very 
 well.' — ' Do you so?' said he, wiping his eyes with his handkerchief; 
 * then well may I.' In saying this he drew a little ring out of his 
 bosom, which seemed tied with a black ribbon about his neck, and 
 kissed it twice. * Here, Billy,' said he. The boy flew across the room 
 to the bedside, and falling down upon his knee, took the ring in his 
 hand and kissed it too, then kissed his father, and sat down upon the 
 bed and wept." 
 
 **I wish," said my Uncle Toby with a deep sigh, ** I wish, Trim, I 
 was asleep." 
 
 **Your honour," replied the Corporal, "is too much concerned. 
 Shall I pour your honour out a glass of sack to your pipe?" — **Do, 
 Trim," said my Uncle Toby. 
 
 **I remember," said my Uncle Toby, sighing again, "the story of 
 the ensign and his wife, with a circumstance his modesty omitted ; and 
 particularly well, that he, as well as she, upon some account or other 
 (I forget what), was universally pitied by the whole regiment. But finish 
 the story thou art upon." — *"Tis finished already, " said the Corporal, 
 for I could stay no longer, so wished his honour a good night ; young 
 Le Fevre rose from off the bed, and saw me to the bottom of the stairs, 
 and as we went down together, told me they had come from Ireland, 
 and were on their route to join the regiment in Flanders. " But alas ! " 
 said the Corporal, '* the lieutenant's last day's march is over." — " Then 
 what is to become of his poor boy ? " cried my Uncle Toby. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 The Story of Le Y^\RK—conHnued. 
 
 It was to my Uncle Toby's eternal honour — though I tell it only for the 
 sake of those who, when cooped in betwixt a natural and a positive 
 law, know not for their souls which way in the world to turn them- 
 selves — that notwithstanding my Uncle Toby was warmly engaged at 
 that time in carrying on the siege of Dendermond parallel with the 
 Allies, who pressed theirs on so vigorously that they scarce allowed liim 
 time to get his dinner, that nevertheless he gave up Dendermond, 
 though he had already made a lodgment upon the counterscarp, and 
 bent his whole thoughts towards the private distresses at the inn ; and, 
 except that he ordered the garden gate to be bolted up, by which he 
 might be said to have turned the siege of Dendermond into a blockade, 
 he left Dendermond to itself, to be relieved or not by the French kin^ 
 as the French king thought good ; and only considered how he himself 
 should relieve the poor lieutenant and his son. 
 
2IO TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. VI. 
 
 That kind Being who is a friend to the friendless shall recompense 
 thee for this. 
 
 ** Thou hast left this matter short," said my Uncle Toby to the 
 Corporal as he was putting him to bed, " and I will tell thee in what, 
 Trim. In the first place, when thou madest an offer of my services to 
 Le Fevre, as sickness and travelling are both expensive, and thou 
 knewest he was but a poor lieutenant, with a son to subsist as well as 
 himself out of his pay, that thou didst not make an offer to him of my 
 purse ; because, had he stood in need, thou knowest, Trim, he had 
 been as welcome to it as myself." — "Your honour knows," said the 
 Corporal, *' I had no orders." — " True," quoth my Uncle Toby ; *' thou 
 didst very right. Trim, as a soldier, but certainly very wrong as a man. 
 
 " In the second place, for which, indeed, thou hast the same excuse," 
 continued my Uncle Toby, " when thou offeredst him whatever was 
 in my h(juse, thou shouldst have offered him my house too. A sick 
 brother officer should have the best quarters. Trim, and if we had him 
 with us, we could tend and look to him. Thou art an excellent nurse 
 thyself Trim, and what with thy care of him, and the old woman's, 
 and his boy's, and mine together, we might recniit him again at once, 
 and set him upon his legs. 
 
 ** In a fortnight or three weeks," added my Uncle Toby, smiling, 
 " he might march." — ** He will never march, an' please your honour, in 
 this world," said the Corporal. — "He will march," said my Uncle 
 Toby, rising up from the side of the bed with one shoe off. — **An* 
 please your honour," said the Corporal, "he will never march but to his 
 grave." — "He shall march," cried my Uncle Toby, marching the foot 
 which had a shoe on, though without advancing an inch, " he shall 
 march to his regiment." — *' He cannot stand it," said the Corporal.— 
 ** He shall be supported," said my Uncle Toby.—** He'll drop at last," 
 said the Corporal, ** and what will become of his boy ? " — ** He shall not 
 drop," said my Uncle Toby firmly. — ** Ah, well-a-day, do what we can 
 for him," said Trim, maintaining his point, * * the poor soul will die."— 
 ** He shall not die, by G ," cried my Uncle Toby. 
 
 The Accusing Spirit which flew up to heaven's chancery with the oath, 
 blushed as he gave it in ; and the Recording Angel, as he wrote it down, 
 dropped a tear upon the word, and blotted it out fpr ever. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 My Uncle Toby went to his bureau, put his purse into his breeches 
 pocket, and having ordered the Corporal to go early in the morning for 
 a physician, he went to bed and fell asleep. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 The Story of Le Y'e.wk'b.— concluded. 
 
 The sun looked bright the morning after to every eye in the village but 
 Jjt Fevre's and his afflicted son's; the h^d of death pressed heaty 
 
VOL. vl] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 2H 
 
 upon his eyelids, and hardly could the wheel at the cistern turn round 
 its circle, when my Uncle Toby, who had rose up an hour before his 
 wonted time, entered the lieutenant's room, and, without preface, or 
 apolog}% sat himself down upon the chair by the bedside, and, 
 independently of all modes and customs, opened the curtain in the 
 manner an old friend and brother officer would have done it, and asked 
 him how he did, how he had rested in the night, what was his com- 
 plaint, where was his pain, and what he could do to help him ? And 
 without giving him time to answer any one of the inquiries, went on 
 and told him of the little plan ^ich he had been concerting with the 
 Corporal the night before for him. 
 
 " But you shall go home directly, Le Fevre," said my Uncle Toby 
 ** to my house, and we'll send for a doctor to see what's the matter, 
 and we'll have an apothecary, and the Corporal shall be your nurse, and 
 I'll be your servant, Le Fevre." 
 
 There was a frankness in my Uncle Toby — not the effect of 
 familiarity, but the cause of it — which let you at once into his soul, and 
 showed you the goodness of his nature. To this there was something 
 in his looks and voice and manner superadded which eternally beckoned 
 to the unfortunate to come and take shelter under him. So that before 
 my Uncle Toby had half finished the kind offers he was making to the 
 father, had tlie son insensibly pressed up close to his knees, and had 
 taken hold of the breast of his coat, and was pulling it towards him. 
 The blood and spirits of Le Fevre, which were waxing cold and slow 
 within him, and were retreating to the last citadel, the heart, rallied 
 back. The film forsook his eyes for a moment. He looked up wist- 
 fully in my Uncle Toby's face, then cast a look upon his boy ; and that 
 ligament, fine as it was, was never broken. 
 
 Nature instantly ebbed again. The film returned to its place ; the 
 pulse fluttered, stopped, went on — throbbed, stopped again — moved, 
 stopped Shall I go on ? No, 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 I AM SO impatient to return to my own story tl^at what remains of 
 young Le Fevre's — that is, from this turn of his fortune to the time my 
 Uncle Toby recommended him for my preceptor — shall be told in a very 
 few words in the next chapter. All that is necessary to be added to 
 this chapter is as follows : 
 
 That my Uncle Toby, with young Le Fevre in his hand, attended the 
 poor lieutenant as chief mourners to his grave. 
 
 That the governor of Dendermond paid his obsequies all military 
 honours ; and that Yorick, not to be behindhand, paid him all eccle- 
 siastic (for he buried him in his chancel), and it appears likewise he 
 preached a funeral sermon over him. I say it appears ; for it was 
 Yorick's custom, which I suppose a general one with those of liis 
 profession, on the first leaf of every sermon which he composed to 
 chronicle down the time, the place, and the occasion of its being 
 preached. To this he was ever wont to add some short comment or 
 stricture upon the sermon itself — seldom, indeed, much to its credit. 
 
212 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. vi. 
 
 For instance : *' This sermon upon the Jewish dispensation I don't 
 like it at all, though I own there is a world of waier-landish knowledge 
 in it; but 'tis all tritical, and most tritically put together." **This is 
 but a flimsy kind of composition. What was in my head when I 
 made it?" 
 
 "N.B. — The excellency of this text is, that it will suit any sermon, 
 and of this sermon that it v/ill suit any text" 
 
 ** For this sennon I shall be hanged, for I have stolen the greatest 
 part of it. Doctor Paidagunes found me out. 
 
 " Set a thief to catch a thief." 
 
 On the back of half-a-dozen I find written, ** So-so," and no more ; 
 and upon a couple, " Moderato," by which, as far as any one may gather 
 from Altieri's Italian Dictionary, but mostly from the authority of a 
 piece of green whipcord, which seemed to have been the unravelling of 
 Yorick's whiplash, with which he has left us the two sermons marked 
 *' Moderato" and the half-dozen of ** So-so " tied fast together in one 
 bundk by themselves, one may safely suppose he meant pretty near the 
 same thing. 
 
 There is but one difficulty in the way of this conjecture, wh'xh is 
 this, that the " Moderatos " are five times better than the " So-sos," 
 show ten times more knowledge of the human heart, have seventy times 
 more wit and spirit in them, and (to rise properly in my climajc) dis- 
 cover a thousand times more genius ; and, to crown all, are infinitely 
 more entertaining than those tied up with them, for which reason, 
 whenever Yorick's dramatic sermons are offered to the world (though I 
 shall admit but one out of the whole number of the " So-sos"), I shall 
 nevertheless adventure to print the two " Moderatos " without any sort 
 of scruple. 
 
 What Yorick could mean by the words Uniamente^ tenjdi^ gravt\ and 
 sometimes adagio, as applied to'theological compositions, and with which 
 he has characterized some of these sermons, I dare not venture lo guess. 
 I am more puzzled still upon finding A Poctava alia! upon one ; Con- 
 strepito upon the back of another ; Scicillui7zCi- upon a third ; Alia capelLi 
 upon a fourth ; Con Va7'co upon this ; Senza Carco upon that. All I 
 know is, tliat they are musical terms and have a meaning ; and as he 
 was a musical man, I will make no doubt but that by some quaint appli- 
 cation of such metaphors to tlie compositions in hand, they impressed 
 very distinct ideas of their several characters upon his fancy, whatever 
 they may do upon that of others. 
 
 Among these there is that particular sermon which has unaccountably 
 led me into this digression — the funeral sermon upon poor Le Fcvre, 
 wrote out very fairly, as if from a hasty copy. I take notice of it the 
 more, because it seems to have been his favourite composition. It is 
 upon mortality, and is tied lengthways and cross ways with a yarn 
 thrum, and then rolled up and twisted round with a half-sheet of dirty 
 blue paper, \^'hich seems to have been once the cast cover of a general 
 review, which to this day smells horribly of horse-drugs. Wheiher 
 these marks of humiliation were designed I something doubt, because at 
 the end of the sermon, and not at the beginning ot it — very different 
 from his way of treating the rest — he had wrote 
 
 *' Bravo ! " 
 
VOL. VI.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 213 
 
 Though not very offensively, for it is at two inches, at least, and a 
 'halfs distance from and below the concluding line of tke sermon, at the 
 very extemity of the page, and in the right hand corner of it, which you 
 know is generally covered with your thumb ; and, to do it justice, it is 
 wrote besides with a crow's quill, so faintly, in a small Italian hand, as 
 scarce to solicit the eye towards the place, whether your thumb is there 
 or not ; so that from the manner of it, it stands half excused, and being 
 wrote, moreover, with very pale ink, diluted almost to nothing, 'tis more 
 like a ritratto of the shadow of vanity than of vanity herself ; of the 
 two, resembling rather a faint thought of transient applause, secretly 
 stirring up in the heart of the composer, than a gross mark of it, coarsely 
 obtruded upon the world. 
 
 Wiih all these extenuations, I am aware that in publishing this I do 
 no service to Yorick's character as a modest man ; but all men have 
 their failings ; and what lessens this still further, and almost wipes it 
 away, is this, that the word was struck through some time afterwards 
 (as appears from a different tint of the ink) with a line quite across it, 
 as if he had retracted or was ashamed of the opinion he had once enter- 
 tained of it. 
 
 These short characters of his sermons were always written, excepting 
 in this one instance, upon the first lenf of his sermon, which served as a 
 cover to it, and usually upon the inside of it, which was turned towards 
 the text ; but at the end of his discourse, where, perhaps he had five or 
 six pages, and sometimes perhaps a whole score, to turn himself in, 
 he took a larger circuit, and indeed a much more mettlesome one ; as 
 if he had snatched the occasion of unlacing himself with a few more 
 frolicsome strokes at vice than the straitness of the pulpit allowed. 
 These, though, hussar-like, they skirmish lightly and out of all order, 
 are still auxiliaries on the side of virtue : tell me then, Mynheer Vander 
 Blonederdondergewdenstronke, why they should not be printed to- 
 gether ? 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 When my Uncle Toby had turned everything into money, and settled 
 all accounts betwixt the agent of the regiment and Le Fevre, and be- 
 twixt Le Fevre and all mankind, there remained nothing more in my 
 Uncle Toby's hands than an old regimental coat and a sword ; so that 
 my Uncle Toby found little or no opposition from the world in taking 
 administration. The coat my Uncle Toby gave the Corporal : " Wear 
 it. Trim," said my Uncle Toby, *' as long as it will hold together, for the 
 sake of the poor lieutenant. And this," said my Uncle Toby, taking 
 up the sword in his hand, and drawing it out of the scabbard as he 
 spoke, **and this, Le Fevre, TU save for thee: 'tis all the fortune," 
 continued my Uncle Toby, hanging it upon a crook and pointing to it, 
 "'tis all the fortune, my dear Le Fevre, which God has left thee; but 
 if he has given thee a heart to fight thy way with it in the world, and 
 thou dost it like a man of honour, 'tis enough for us." 
 
 As soon as my Uncle Toby had laid a foundation, and taught him to 
 
214 TRISTRAM SHAND K [Vol. VL 
 
 inscribe a regular polygon in a circle, he sent him to a public school, 
 where, excepting Whitsuntide and Christmas, at which times the Cor- 
 poral was punctually dispatched for him, he remained to the spring of 
 the year '17 ; when the stories of the emperor's sending his army mto 
 Hungary against the Turks, kindling a spark of fire in his bosom, he 
 left his Greek and Latin without leave, and throwing himself upon 
 his knees before my Uncle I'oby, begged his father's sword, and my 
 Uncle Toby's leave along with it, to go and try his fortune under 
 Eugene. Twice did my Uncle Toby forget his wound, and cry out, **Le 
 Fevre, I will go with ihee, and thou shall fight beside me." And twice 
 he laid his hand upon his groin, and hung down his head in sorrow and 
 disconsolation. 
 
 My Uncle Toby took down the sword from the crook, where it had 
 hung untouched ever since the lieutenant's death, and delivered it to the 
 Cor})oral to brighten up ; and having detained Le Fe\Te a single fort- 
 night to equip him and contract for his passage to Leghorn, he put the 
 sword into his hand. *' If thou art brave, Le Fevre," said my Uncle 
 Toby, " this will not fail thee ; but Fortune," said he, musing a little 
 ** Fortune may. And if she does," added my Uncle Toby, embracing 
 him, " come back again to me, Le Fevre and we will shape thee another 
 course.'* 
 
 The greatest injury could not have oppressed the heart of Le Fevre 
 more than my Uncle Toby's paternal kindness. He parted from my 
 Uncle Toby as the best of sons from the best of fathers. Both dropped 
 tears, and as my Uncle Toby gave him his last kiss, he slipped sixty 
 guineas, tied up in an old purse of his father's in which was his mother's 
 ring, into his hand, and bid God bless him. 
 
 CHAPTER Xin. 
 
 Le Fevre got up to the imperial army just time enough to try what 
 metal his sword was made of at the defeat of the Turks before Belgrade ; 
 but a series of unmerited mischances had pursued him from that moment, 
 and trod close upon his heels for four years together after. He had 
 withstood these buffetings to the last, till sickness overtook him at 
 Marseilles, from whence he wrote my Uncle Toby word he had lost 
 his time, his services, his health, and, in short, everything but his 
 sword, and was waiting for the first ship to return back to him. 
 
 As this letter came to hand about six weeks before Susannah's acci- 
 dent, Le Fevre was hourly expected, and was uppermost in my Uncle 
 Toby's mind all the time my father was giving him and Yorick a 
 description of what kind of a person he would choose for a preceptor to 
 me ; but as my Uncle Toby thought my father at first somewhat fanciful 
 in the accomplishments he required, he forbore mentioning Le Fevre's 
 name, till the character, by Yorick's interposition, ending unexpectedly 
 in one who should be gentle-tempered and generous and good, it 
 impressed the image of Le Fevre and his interest upon my Uncle Toby 
 so forcibly, he rose instantly off his chair, and laying down his pipe in 
 order to take hold of both my father's hands : ** I beg, brother Shandy," 
 
VOL. vl] TRISTRAM SHAND K 215 
 
 said my Uncle Toby, ** I may recommend poor Le Fevie's son to you.'* 
 — ** I beseech you do," added Yorick. — "He has a good heart," said 
 my Uncle Toby. — ** And a brave one, too, an' please your honour," 
 said the Corporal. 
 
 •* The best hearts, Trim, are ever the bravest," replied my Uncle 
 Toby. — "And the greatest cowards, an' please your honour, in our 
 regiment were the greatest rascals in it. There was Sergeant Kumber 
 and Ensign * 
 
 ** We'll talk of them," said my father, "another time." 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 There are a thousand resolutions, sir, both in Church and State, as 
 well as in matters, madam, of a more private concern, which, though 
 they have carried all the appearance in the world of being taken and 
 entered upon in a hasty, hair- brained, and unadvised manner, were, not- 
 withstanding this — and could you or I have got into the cabinet, or 
 stood behind the curtain, we should have found it was so — weighed, 
 poised, and perpended, argued upon, canvassed through, entered into, 
 and examined on all sides with so much coolness that the goddess of 
 coolness herself — I do not take upon me to prove her existence — could 
 neither have wished it or done it better. 
 
 Of the number of these was my father's resolution of putting me into 
 breeches; which, though determined at once in a kind of huff and 
 a defiance of all mankind had nevertheless, been pro\i and cond^ and 
 judicially talked over betwixt him and my mother about a month be- 
 fore, in two several beds of justice which my father had held for that 
 purpose. I shall explain the nature of these beds of justice in my 
 next chapter ; and in the chapter following you shall step with me, 
 madam, behind the curtain, only to hear in what kind of manner my 
 father and my mother debated between themselves this affair of the 
 breeches, from which you may form an idea how they debated all lesser 
 matters. 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 The ancient Goths of Germany, vi'ho, the learned Cluverius is positive, 
 were first seated in the country between the Vistula and the Oder, and 
 who afterwards incorporated the Herculi, the Bugians, and some other 
 Vandallic clans to them, had all of them a wise custom of debating 
 everything of importance to their State, twice — that is, once drunk and 
 once sober : drunk, that their counsels might not want vigour ; and 
 £ol)er, that they might not want discretion. 
 
 Now, my father, being entirely a water-drinker, was a long time 
 gravelled almost to death in turning this as much to his advantage as 
 he did every other thing which the ancients did or said, and it was not 
 till the seventh year of his marriage, after a thousand fruitless experi* 
 
2i6 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. vi. 
 
 rnents and device?, iliat he hit upon an expedient which answered the 
 purpose ; and that was, when any difficult and momentous point was to 
 be settled in the family, which required great sobriety, and great spirit 
 too, in its determination, he fixed and set apart the first Sunday night 
 in the month, and the Saturday night which immediaely preceded it, 
 to argue it over in bed with my mother. 
 
 These my fatlier humorously enough called his ** beds of justice " ; 
 for from the two different counsels taken in these twc; different humours, 
 a middle one was generally found out which touched the point of wisdom 
 as well as if he had got dmnk and sober a hundred times. 
 
 It must not be made a secret of to the world that this answers full as 
 well in literary discussions as either in military or conjugal ; but it is not 
 every author that can try the experiment as the Goths and Vandals did 
 it ; or if he can, may it be always for his body's health ? and to do it as 
 my father did it, am I sure it would be always for his soul's ? 
 
 My way is this : 
 
 In all nice and ticklish discussions — of which, heaven knows, there 
 are but too many in my book — where I find I cannot take a step without 
 the danger of having either their worships or their reverences upon my 
 back, I write one \\:Ci.i full and t'other fasting; or write it all full, and 
 correct it fasting ; or write it fasting and correct it full ; for they all 
 come to the same thing. So that with a less variation from my father's 
 plan than my father's from the Gothic, I feel myself upon a par witli 
 him in his first bed of justice, and no way inferior to him in the second. 
 These different and almost irreconcilable effects flow uniformly from 
 the wise and wonderful mechanism of Nature — of which be hers the 
 honour. All that we can do is to turn and work the machine to the 
 improvement and better manufactory of the arts and sciences. 
 
 Now, when I write full, I write as if I was never to write fasting 
 again as long as I live ; that is, I write free from the cares as well as 
 the terrors of the world. I count not the number of my scars, nor 
 does my fancy go forth into dark entries and by-corners to antedate my 
 stabs. In a word, my pen takes its course, and I write on as much 
 from the fulness of my heart as my stomach. 
 
 But when, an' please your honours, I indite fasting, 'tis a different 
 history. I pay the world all possible attention and respect, and have as 
 great a share (whilst it lasts) of that understrapping virtue of discretion 
 as the best of you. So that, betwixt both, I write a careless kind of a 
 civil, nonsensical, good-humoured Shandean book, which will do all 
 your hearts good — and all your heads too, provided you understand it. 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 ** We should begin," said my father, turning himself half round in bed, 
 and shifting his pillow a little towards my mother's as he opened the 
 debate, *' we should begin to think, Mrs Shandy, of putting this boy into 
 breeches." 
 
 " We should so," said my mother." — ** We defer it, my dear," quoth 
 my father, ** shamefully." 
 
VOL. VI. TRISTRAM SHANDY. 217 
 
 " I think we do, Mr. Shandy," said my mother. 
 
 **Not but the child looks extremely well," said my father, "in his 
 vests and tunics." 
 
 ** He does look very well in them," replied my mother. 
 
 " And for that reason it would be almost a sin," added my father, *' to 
 take him out of 'em." 
 
 '* It would so," said my mother. — " But indeed he is growing a very 
 tall lad," rejoined my father. 
 
 *' He is very tall for his age, indeed," said my mother. 
 
 ** I can not (making two syllables of it) imagine," quoth my father, 
 *' who the deuce he takes after." 
 
 ** I cannot conceive for my life," said my mother. 
 
 " Humph ! " said my father. 
 
 (The dialogue ceased for a mom.ent.) 
 
 ** I am very short myself," continued ray father, gravely. 
 
 " You are very short, Mr. Shandy," said my mother. 
 
 *' Humph ! " quoth my father to himself a second time : in muttering 
 which, he plucked his pillow a little further from my mother's, and 
 turning about again, there was an end of the debate for three minutes 
 and a half. 
 
 "When he gets these breeches maae," cried my father in a higner 
 tone, ** he'll look like a beast in 'em." 
 
 ** He will be very awkward in them at first," replied my mother. 
 
 " And 'twill be lucky if that's the worst on't," added my father. 
 
 ' * It will be very lucky," answered my mother. 
 
 ** I suppose," replied my father, making some pause first, *' he'll be 
 exactly like other people's children." 
 
 *' Exactly," said my mother. 
 
 " Though I should be sorry for that," added my father ; and so the 
 debate stopped again. 
 
 " They should be of leather," said my father, turning him about 
 again. 
 
 '* Tliey will last him," said my mother, " the longest." 
 
 *' But he can have no linings to 'em," replied my father. 
 
 *' He cannot," said my mother. 
 
 " 'Twere better to have them of fustian," quoth my father. 
 
 " Nothing can be better," quoth my mother. 
 
 "Except dimity," replied my father. — " 'Tis best of all," replied my 
 mother. 
 
 *'One must not give him his death, however," interrupted my father. 
 
 "By no means," said my mother; and so the dialogue stood still 
 again. 
 
 "I am resolved, however," quoth my father, breaking sileace the 
 fourth time, "he shall have no pockets in them." 
 
 " There is no occasion for any," said my mother. 
 
 ** I mean in his coat and waistcoat," cried my farther. 
 
 " I mean so too," replied my mother. 
 
 *' Though, if he gets a gig or a top — poor fools ! it is a crown and a 
 sceptre to them — they should have where to secure it." 
 
 " Order it as you please, Mr. Shandy," replied my mother. 
 
 " But don't you think it right ? " added my father, pressing the point 
 home to her. 
 
2X8 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [VOLVL 
 
 "Perfectly,** said my mother, "if it pleases you, Mr. Shandy.'* 
 *' There's for you ! " cried my father, losing temper ; " pleases me ! 
 You never will distinguish, Mrs. Shandy, nor shall I ever teach you to 
 do it, betwixt a point of pleasure and a point of convenience," This 
 was on the Sunday night ; and further this chapter sayeth not. 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 After my father had debated the affair of the breeches with my 
 mother, he consulted Albertus Rubenius upon it ; and Albertus Rubenius 
 used my father ten times worse ia the consultation (if possible) than 
 even my father had used my mother : for as Rubenius had wrote a 
 quarto express, *' De re Vestiaria Veterum," it was Rubenius's business 
 to have given my father some lights. On the contrary, my father might 
 as well have thought of extracting the seven cardinal virtues out of a 
 long beard, as of extracting a single word out of Rubenius upon the 
 subject. 
 
 Upon every other article of ancient dress Rubenius was very cora- 
 jfnunicative to my father : gave him a full and satisfactory account of 
 
 The Toga, or loose gown ; the Chlamys ; the Ephod ; the Tunica, 
 or jacket ; the Synthesis ; the Psenula ; the Lacerna, with its CucuUiis ; 
 the Paludamentum ; the Praetexta ; the Sagum, or soldier's jerkin. 
 
 The Trabea, of which, according to Suetonius, there were three 
 kinds. 
 
 **But what are all these to the breeches?" said my father. 
 
 Rubenius threw him down upon the counter all kinds of shoes which 
 had been in fashion with the Romans. There was — 
 
 The open shoe ; the close shoe ; the slip shoe ; the wooden shoe ; 
 the sock ; the buskin. 
 
 And the military shoe with hobnails in it, which Juvenal takes 
 notice of. 
 
 There were the clogs ; the pattens ; the pantoufles ; the brogues ; the 
 sandals, with latchets to them. 
 
 There was the felt shoe ; the linen shoe ; the laced shoe ; the 
 braided shoe ; the calceus incisus, and the calceus rostratus. 
 
 Rubenius showed my father how well they all fitted, in what manner 
 they laced on, with what points, straps, thongs, latchets, ribands, jaggs, 
 and ends. 
 
 " But I want to be informed about the breeches, " said my father. 
 
 Albertus Rubenius informed my father that the Romans manufactured 
 stuffs of various fabrics, some plain, some striped, others diapered 
 throughout the whole contexture of the wool with silk and gold ; that 
 linen did not begin to be in common use till towards the declension of 
 the empire, when the Egyptians coming to settle amongst them, brought 
 it into vogae. 
 
 That persons of quality and fortune distinguished themselves by the 
 fineness and whiteness of their clothes ; which colour (next to purple, 
 which was appropriated to the great offices) they most affected and 
 wore on their birthdays and public rejoicings. That it appeared from 
 
VOL. VI.] TRIStkAM StlANDY. ^i# 
 
 the best historians of those times, that they frequently sent their clothes 
 to the fuller to be cleaned and whitened ; but that the inferior people, 
 to avoid that expense, generally wore brown clothes, and of a some- 
 what coarser texture, till towards the beginning of Augustus's reign, 
 when the slave dressed like his master, and almost every distinction of 
 habiliment was lost, but the latus clavus, 
 
 ** And what was the latus ciavus ? " said my father. 
 
 Rubenius told him that the point was still litigating amongst the 
 learned : that Egnatius, Sigonius, Bossius, Ticinensis, Baysius, 
 Budaeus, Salmasius, Lipsius, Lazius, Isaac Causabon, and Joseph 
 Scaliger, all differed from each other, and he from them. That some 
 took it to be the button, some the coat itself, others only the colour of 
 it. That the great Baysius, in his Wardrobe of the Ancients, chap. 12, 
 honestly said he knew not what it was, whether a tibula, a stud, a 
 button, a loop, a buckle, or clasps and keepers. 
 
 My father lost the hcrse but not the saddle. " They are hooks and 
 eyes," said my father, and with hooks and eyes he ordered my breeches 
 to be made. 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 We are now going to enter upon a new scene of events. 
 
 Leave we then the breeches in the tailor's hands, with my father 
 standing over him with his cane, reading him as he sat at work a lecture 
 upon the latus ciavus, and pointing to the precise part of the waistband 
 where he was determined to have it sewed on. 
 
 Leave we my mother (truest of all the Poco-curantes of her sex !) 
 careless about it, as about everything else in the world which concerned 
 her ; that is, indifferent whether it was done this way or that, provided 
 it was but done at all. 
 • Leave we Slop likewise to the full profits of all my dishonours. 
 
 Leave we poor Le Fevre to recover, and ^tX. home fiom Marseilles 
 as he can. And last of all, because the hardest of all, 
 
 Let us leave, if possible, myself. But 'tis impossible, I must go 
 alo ig with you to the end of the work. 
 
 CHAPTER XXL 
 
 If the reader has not a clear conception of the rood and the half of 
 ground which lay at the bottom of my Uncle Toby's kitchen garden, 
 and which was the scene of so many of his delicious hours, the fault is 
 not in me, but in his imagination ; for I am sure I gave him so minute 
 a description, I was almost ashamed of it. 
 
 When Fate was looking forwards one afternoon into the great trans- 
 actions of future times, and recollected for what purposes this little 
 plot, by a degree fast bound down in iron, had been destined, she gave 
 a nod to Nature. 'Twas enough. Nature threw half a spadeful of the 
 
220 TRISTRAM SHAND V. [vol. vI. 
 
 kindliest compost ttpon it, and just so much clay in it, as to retain the 
 forms of angles and mdentings, and so little of it too, as not to cling to 
 the spade, and render works of so much glory, nasty in f()ul weather. 
 
 My Uncle Toby came down, as the reader has been informed, with 
 plans along with him, of almost every fortified town in Italy and 
 Fla;i(ier.^ ; so let the Duke of Marlborough, or the Allies, have sat down 
 before v/hat town they pleased, my Uncle Toby was prepared for them. 
 
 His way, which was the simplest one in the world, was this : as soon 
 as ever a town was invested (but sooner when the design was known) 
 to take the plan of it (let it be what town it would), and enlarge it upon 
 a scale to the exact size of his bowling-green ; upon the surface of 
 which, by means of a large roll of packthread, and a number of small 
 piquets driven into the ground, at the several angles and redans, he 
 transferred the lines from his paper ; then taking the profile of the 
 place, with its works, to determine the depths and slopes of the ditches, 
 the talus of the glacis, and the precise height of the several banquets, 
 parapets, &c. , he set the Corporal to work, and sweetly went it on. 
 The nature of the soil, the nature of the work itself, and, above all, the 
 good-nature of my Uncle Toby, sitting by from morning to night, and 
 chatting kindly with the Corpoi-al upon past-done deeds, left labour little 
 else but the ceremony of the name. 
 
 When the place was finished in this manner, and put into a proper 
 posture of defence, it was invested, and my Uncle Toby and the Corporal 
 began to run their first parallel. I beg I may not be interrupted in 
 my story, by being told that the first parallel should be at the least three 
 hundred toises distant from the main body of the place, and that I have 
 not left a single inch for it ; for my Uncle Toby took the liberty of 
 encroaching upon his kitchen garden for the sake of enlarging his 
 works on the bowhng-green, and for that reason generally ran his 
 first and second parallels betwixt two rows of his cabbages and his 
 cauliflowers ; the conveniences and inconveniences of which will be con- 
 sidered at large in the history of my Uncle Toby's and the Corporal's 
 campaigns, of which this I'm now writing is but a sketch, and will be 
 finished, if I conjecture right, in three pages (but there is no guessing). 
 The campaigns themselves will take up as many books, and therefore I 
 apprehend it would be hanging too great a weight of one kind of matter 
 in so flimsy a performance as this to rhapsodize them, as I once intended, 
 into the body of the work — surely they had better be printed apart, 
 we'll consider the affair — so take the following sketdi of them in the 
 meantime. 
 
 CHAPTER 5CXII. 
 
 When the town with its works was finished, my Uncle Toby and the 
 Corporal began to run their first parallel, not at random or anyhow, but 
 from the same points and distances the Allies had begun to run theirs ; 
 and regulating their approaches and attacks by the accounts my Uncle 
 Toby received from the daily papers, they went on during the whole 
 siege step by step with the Allies, 
 
VOL. vi.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 221 
 
 When the Duke of Marlborough made a lodgment, my Uncle Toby 
 made a lodgment too. And when the face of a bastion was battered 
 down, or a defence mined, the Corporal took his mattock and did as 
 much, and so on, gaining ground and making themselves masters of the 
 works one after another till the town fell into their hands. 
 
 To one who took pleasure in the happy state of others there could 
 not have been a greater sight in the world, than, on a post morning, in 
 which a practicable breach had been made by the Duke of Marlborough 
 in the main body of the place, to have stood behind the horn-beam 
 hedge, and observed the spirit with which my Uncle Toby, with Trim 
 behind him, sallied forth — the one with the Gazette in his hand, the 
 other with a spade on his shoulder to execute the contents. What an 
 honest triumph in my Uncle Toby's loolcs as he marched up to the 
 ramparts ! What intense pleasure swimming in his eye as he stood 
 over the Corporal reading the paragraph ten times over to him as be was 
 at work, lest, perad venture, he should make the breach an inch too 
 wide or leave it an inch too narrow. But when the chaniade was beat, 
 and the Corporal helped my uncle up it, and followed with the colours 
 in his hand to fix them upon the ramparts — heaven ! earth ! sea ! — but 
 what avail apostrophes? with all your elements, wet or dry, you never 
 compounded so intoxicating a draught. 
 
 In this tract of happiness for many years, without one interruption to 
 it, except now and then when the wind continued to blow due west for 
 a week or ten days together, which detained the Flanders mail, and 
 kept them so long in torture — but still 'twas the torture of the happy — 
 in this tract, I say, did my Uncle Toby and Trim move for many years, 
 every year of which, and sometimes every month, from the invention of 
 either the one or the other of them, adding some new conceit or quirk 
 of improvement to their operations, which always opened fresh springs 
 of delight in carrying them on. 
 
 The first year's campaign was carried on from beginning to end, in 
 the plain and simple method I've related. 
 
 In the second year, in which my Uncle Toby took Liege and Rure- 
 mond, he thought he might afford the expense of four handsome draw- 
 bridges, two of which I have given an exact description of in the former 
 part of my work. 
 
 At tlie latter end of the same year he added a couple of gates with 
 portcullises. These last were converted afterwards into orgues as the 
 better thing, and during the winter of the same year, my Uncle Toby, 
 instead of a new suit of clothes which he always had at Christmas, 
 treated himself with a handsome sentry-box to stand at the corner of the 
 bowling-green, betwixt which point and the foot of the glacis there was 
 left a little kind of an esplanade for him and the Corporal to confer and 
 hold councils of war upon. 
 
 The sentry-box was in case of rain. 
 
 All these were painted white three times over the ensuing spring, 
 which enabled my Uncle Toby to take tlie field with great splendour. 
 
 My father would often say to Yorick, that if any mortal in tl^e whole 
 universe had done such a thing, except his i^rother Toby, it would 
 have been looked upon by the world as one of the most refined satires 
 upon the parade and prancing manner in which Louis XIV., from the 
 beginning of the war^ but particuJarly that ver3; year, had taken the 
 
322 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. VI. 
 
 field. " But 'tis not my brother Toby's nature, kind soul ! " my father 
 would add, "to insult any one." 
 But let us go on. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 I MUST observe that although in the first year's campaign the word 
 town is often mentioned, yet there was no town at that time within 
 the polygon ; that addition was not made till the summor following the 
 spring in which the bridges and sentry-box were painted, which was 
 the third year of my Uncle Toby's campaigns ; when upon his taking 
 Amberg, Bonn, and Reinberg, and Huy, and Limbourg, one after 
 another, a thought came into the Corporal's head, that to talk of taking 
 so many towns, without one town to show for it, was a very nonsensical 
 way of going to work, and so proposed to my Uncle Toby that they 
 should have a little model of a town built for them, to be run up 
 together of slit deals, and then painted and clapped within the interior 
 polygon to serve for all. 
 
 My Uncle Toby felt the good of the project instantly, and instantly 
 agreed to it ; but with the addition of two singular improvements, of 
 which he was almost as proud as if he had been the original inventor 
 of the project himself. 
 
 The one was to have the town built exactly in the style of those of 
 which it was most likely to be the representative ; with grated windows, 
 and the gable ends of the houses facing the streets, &c. &c., as those in 
 Ghent and Bruges, and the rest of the towns in Brabant and Flanders. 
 
 The other was not to have the houses run up together as the Corporal 
 proposed, but to have every house independent, to hook on or off, so 
 as to form into the plan of whatever town they pleased. This was put 
 dieectly into hand, and many and many a look of mutual congratulation 
 was exchanged between my Uncle Toby and the Corporal, as the 
 carpenter did the work. 
 
 It answered prodigiously the next summer ; the town was a perfect 
 Proteus. It was Landen, and Trerebach, and Santvliet, and Drusen, 
 and Hagenau, and then it was Ostend and Menin, and Aeth and Den- 
 dermond. 
 
 Surely never did any town act so many parts since Sodom and 
 Gomorrah, as my Uncle Toby's town did. 
 
 In the ifourth year, my Uncle Toby thinking a town looked foolishly ■* 
 without a church, added a very fine one with a steeple. Trim was for 
 having bells in it. My Uncle Toby said the metal had better be cast 
 into cannon. 
 
 This led the way the next campaign for half a dozen brass field- 
 pieces, to be planted three and three on each side of my Uncle Toby's 
 sentry-box ; and in a short time these led the way for a train of some- 
 what larger, and so on — as must always be the case in hobby-horsical 
 affairs — from pieces of half an inch bore, till it came at last to my 
 father's jack-bo»ts. 
 
 The next year, which was that in which Lisle was besieged, and at 
 the close of which both Ghent and Bruges fell into our hands, my 
 
VOL. 7t.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 223 
 
 Uncle Toby was sadly put to it for proper ammunition. I say, proper 
 ammunition, because his great artillery would not bear powder, and 
 'twas well for the Shandy family they would not ; for so full were the 
 papers from the beginning to the end of the siege of the incessant firings 
 kept up by the besiegers, and so heated was my (Jncle Toby's imagina- 
 tion with the accounts of them, that he had infallibly shot away all his 
 estate. 
 
 Something therefore was wanting as a succedanettm, especially in one 
 or two of the more violent paroxysms of the siege, to keep up some- 
 thing like a continual firing in the imagination, and this something the 
 Corporal, whose principal strength lay in invention, supplied by an 
 entire new system of battering of his own, without which this had 
 been objected to by military critics to the end of the world, as one of 
 the great desiderata of my Uncle Toby's apparatus. 
 
 This will not be explained the worse for setting off, as I generally do, 
 at a little distance from the subject. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 With two or three other trinkets, small in themselves, but of great 
 regard, which poor Tom, the Corporal's unfortunate brother, had sent 
 him over, with the account of his marriage with the Jew's widow, there 
 was — 
 
 A Montero cap and two Turkish tobacco-pipes. 
 
 The Montero cap I shall describe by-and-by. The Turkish tobacco- 
 pipes had nothing particular in them. They were fitted up and orna- 
 mented as usual with flexible tubes of Morocco leather and gold wire, 
 and mounted at their ends, the one of them with ivory, the other with 
 black ebony, tipped with silver. 
 
 My father, who saw all things in lights different from the rest of tne 
 world, would say to the Corporal that he ought to look upon these two 
 presents more as tokens of his brother's nicety than his affection. — "Tom 
 did not care, Trim," he would say, " to put on the cap or to smoke in 
 the tobacco-pipe of a Jew. " — " God bless your honour," the Corporal 
 would say, giving a strong reason to the contrary, "how can that 
 be?" 
 
 The Montero cap was scarlet, of a superfine Spanish cloth, dyed in 
 grain, and mounted all round with fur, except about four inches in the 
 front-, which was faced with a light blue, slightly embroidered, and 
 seemed to have been the property of a Portuguese quarter-master, not 
 of foot, but of horse, as the word denotes. 
 
 The Corporal was not a little proud of it, as well for its own sahe 
 as the sake of the giver, so seldom or never put it on but upon gala- 
 days. And yet never was a Montero cap put to so many uses ; for in 
 all controverted points, whether military or culinary, provided the Cor- 
 poral was sure he was in the right, it was either his oath, his wager, or 
 his gift. 
 
 'Twas his gift in the present case. 
 
 **I'U be bound," said the Corporal, speaking to himself, "to gnrc 
 
224 TRISTRAM SHAND K [VOI^ m. 
 
 away my Montero cap to the first beggar who comes to the door if 1 do 
 not manage this matter to his honour's satisfaction." 
 
 The completion was no further off than the very next morning, which 
 was that of the storm of tlie counterscarp betwixt the Lower Deule to 
 the right and the gate of St. Andrew, and on the left between St, Mag- 
 dalen's and the river. 
 
 As this was the most memorable attack in the whole war — ^the mo^t 
 gallant and obstinate on both sides, and, I must add, the most bloody 
 too, for it cost the Allies themselves that morning above eleven hundred 
 men — my Uncle Toby prepared himself for it with a more than ordinary 
 solemnity. 
 
 The eve which preceded, as my Uncle Toby went to bed, he ordered 
 his Ramillie wig, which had lain inside-out for many years in the comer 
 of an old campaigning trunk which stood by his bedside, to be taken 
 out and laid upon the lid of it, ready for the morning ; and the very 
 first thing he did in his shirt, when he had stepped out of bed, my Uncle 
 Toby, after he had turned the rough side outwards, put it on. This 
 done, he proceeded next to his breeches, and, having buttoned the 
 waistband, he forthwith buckled on his swordbelt, and had got his 
 sword half way in, when he considered he should want shaving, and 
 tliat it would be very inconvenient doing it with his sword on, so took 
 it off. In essaying to put on his regimental coat and waistcoat, my 
 Uncle Toby found the same objection as in his wig, so that went off 
 too ; so that, what with one thing and what with another, as always 
 falls out when a man is in the most haste, 'twas ten o'clock, which 
 was half an hour later than liis usual time, before my Uncle Toby 
 sallied out 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 My Uncle Toby had scarce turned the corner of his yew-hedge, which 
 separated his kitchen garden from his bowling-green, when he perceived 
 the Corporal had begun the attack without him. Let me stop and give 
 you a picture of the Corporal's apparatus, and of the Corporal himself 
 in the height of this attaclc, just as it struck my Uncle Toby as he 
 turned towards the sentry-box where the Coi^poral was at work ; for in 
 Nature there is not such another, nor can any combination of all that 
 is grotesque and whimsical in her works produce its equaL 
 
 The Corporal — Tread lightly on his ashes, ye men of genius, for he 
 was your kinsman. 
 
 Weed his grave clean, ye men of goodness, for he was your brother. 
 O Corporal ! had I thee but now — now that I am able to give thee a 
 dinner and protection — how would I cherish thee ! thou shouldst wear 
 thy Montero cap every hour of the da)', and every day of the week, aiic? 
 when it was worn out I would purchase thee a couple like it. But, 
 alas ! alas ! alas ! now that I can do this in spite of their reverences — 
 the occasion is lost, for thou art gone ; thy genius fied up to the star.v 
 from whence it came; and that warm heart of thine, with all its 
 generous and open vessels, compressed in'o a dod of the valley ! 
 
 But what, what is tliis, to that future and dreaded pa.ge, v/here \ 
 
VOL. VI.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 22$ 
 
 look towards the velvet pall, decorated with the military ensigns of 
 thy master, the first, the foremost of created beings ; where I shall see 
 thee, faithful servant, laying his sword and scal)bard with a trembling 
 hand across his cofiin, and then returning pale as ashes to the door, 
 to take his mourning horse by the bridle to follow his hearse, as he 
 directed thee ; where all my father's systems shall be baffled by his 
 sorrows ; and, in spite of his philosophy, I shall behold hirii, as he 
 inspects the lacquered plate, twice taking his spectacles from off his 
 nose, to wipe away the dew which Nature has shed upon them. When 
 1 see him cast in the rosemary with an air of disconsolation, which 
 cries through my ears, " O Toby ! " in what corner of the world shall I 
 seek thy fellow ? 
 
 Gracious powers ! which erst have opened the lips of the dumb in 
 his distress, and made the tongue of the stammerer speak plain — when 
 I shall arrive at this dreaded page, deal not with me then with a stinted 
 hand. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 The Corporal, who the night before had resolved in his mind to supply 
 the grand desideratum of keeping up something like an incessant firing 
 upon the enemy during the heat of the attack, had no further idea in 
 his fancy at that time than a contrivance of smoking tobacco against 
 the tov/n, out of one of my Uncle Toby's six field-pieces, which were 
 planted on each side of his sentry-box, the means of effecting which 
 occurring to his fancy at the same time, though he l>ad pledged his cap, 
 he thought it in no danger from the miscarriage of his projects. 
 
 Upon turning it this way and that a little in his mind, he soon began 
 to find out that by means of his two Turkish tobacco-pipes, with the 
 supplement of three smaller tubes of wash-leather at each of their lower 
 end.«, to be tagged by the same number of tin pipes fitted to the touch- 
 holes and sealed with clay next the cannon, and then tied hermetically 
 with waxed silk at their several insertions into the Morocco tube, he 
 should be able to fire the six field-pieces all together, and with the same 
 ease as to fire one. 
 
 Let no man say from what tags and jags hints may not be cut out 
 for the advancement of human knowledge. Let no man, who has 
 read my father's first and second Beds of Justice, ever rise up and say 
 again, from collision of what kinds of bodies light may or may not be 
 struck out, to carry the arts and sciences up to perfection. Heaven ! 
 thou knowest how I love them ; thou knowest the secrets of my heart, 
 
 and that I would this moment give my shirt **Thou art a fool. 
 
 Shandy," says Eugenius, " for thou hast but a dozen in the world, and 
 'twill break thy set." 
 
 *' No matter for that, Eugenius ; I would give the shirt off my back 
 to be burnt into tinder, were it only to satisfy one feverish inquirer, 
 how many sparks at one good stroke a good flint and steel could strike 
 into the tail of it. Think ye not that in striking these in, he might, 
 perad venture, strike something out ? as sure as a gun, " 
 
 But this project, by the-by. 
 
256 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [VOL. vt 
 
 The Corporal sat up the best part of the night in bringing his 
 to perfection ; and having made a sufficient proof of his cannon, with 
 charging them to the top with tobacco, he went with contentment to 
 bed. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVII. 
 
 The Corporal had slipped out about ten minutes before my Uncle 
 Toby, in order to fix his apparatus, and just give the enemy a shot or 
 two before my Uncle Toby came. 
 
 He had drawn the six field-pieces for this end all close up together 
 in front of my uncle's sentry-box, leaving only an interval of about a yard 
 and a half betwixt the three — on the right and left, for the convenience of 
 charging, &c., and the sake, possibly, of two batteries, which he might 
 think double the honour of one. 
 
 In the rear, and facing this opening, with his back to the door of the 
 sentry-box, for fear of being flanked, had the Corporal wisely taken 
 his post. He held the ivory pipe, appertaining to the battery on the 
 right, betwixt the finger and thumb of his right hand ; and the ebony 
 pipe tipped with silver, which appertained to the battery on the left, 
 betwixt the finger and thumb of the other ; and with his right knee 
 fixed firm upon the ground, as if in the front rank of his platoon, was 
 the Corporal, with his Montero cap upon his head, furiously playing 
 off his two cross-batteries at the same time against the counterguard, 
 which faced the counterscarp, where the attack was to be made that 
 morning. His first intention, as I said, was no more than giving the 
 enemy a single puff or two ; but the pleasure of the puffs, as v;eU 
 as the puffing, had insensibly got hold of the Corporal, and drawn hira 
 on from puff to puff, into the very height of the attack, by the time my 
 Uncle Toby joined him. 
 
 *Twas well for my father that my Uncle Toby had not his will to 
 make that day. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 
 My Uncle Toby took the ivory pipe out of the Corporal's hand, looked 
 at it for half a minute, and returned it. 
 
 In less than two minutes my Uncle Toby took the pipe from the 
 Corporal again, and raised it half-way to his mouth, then hastily gave 
 it back a second time. 
 
 The Corporal redoubled the attack ; my Uncle Toby smiled, then 
 looked grave, then smiled for a moment, then looked serious for a long 
 time. ** Give me hold of the ivory pipe, Trim," said my Uncle Toby. 
 My Uncle Toby put it to his lips, drew it back directly, gave a peep 
 over the ham-beam hedge ; never did my Uncle Toby's mouth water 
 so much for a pipe in his life. My Uncle Toby retired into the sentry- 
 box with the pipe in his hand. 
 
 ' Dear Uncle Toby ! don't go into the sentry-box with the pipe ; there's 
 no trusting a man's self with such a thing in such a corner. 
 
VOL. VI.] TRISTRAM SHAND Y. 227 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 I BEG the reader will assist me here to wheel off my Uncle Toby's 
 ordnance behind the scenes, to remove his sentry-box, and clear the 
 theatre, if possible, of horn- works and half- moons, and get the rest of 
 his military apparatus out of the way. That done, my dear friend 
 Garrick, we'll snuff the candles bright, sweep the stage with a new 
 broom, draw up the curtain, and exhibit my Uncle Toby dressed in a 
 new character, throughout which the world can have no idea how he 
 will act ; and yet, if pity be akin to love, and bravery no alien to it, 
 you have seen enough of my Uncle Toby in these, to trace these family 
 likenesses betwixt the tw^o passions (in case there is one) to your heart's 
 content. 
 
 Vain science 1 thou assistest us in no case of this kind, and thou 
 puzzlest us in every one. 
 
 There was, madam, in my Uncle Toby, a singleness of heart which 
 misled him so far out of the little serpentine tracts in which things of 
 this nature usually go on ; you can, you can have no conception of it ; 
 with this, there was a plainness and simplicity of thinking with such 
 an unmistrusting ignorance of the plies and foldings of the heart of 
 woman, and so naked and defenceless did he stand before you (when a 
 siege was out of his head), that you might have stood behind any one 
 of your serpentine walks and shot my Uncle Toby, ten times in a day, 
 through his liver, if nine times in a day, madam, had not served your 
 purpose. 
 
 With all this, madam, and what confounded everything as much on 
 the other hand, my Uncle Toby had that unparalleled modesty of 
 nature I once told you of, and which, by- the- by, stood eternal sentry 
 upon his feelings, that you might as soon — But where am I going ? 
 these reflections crowd in upon me ten pages at least too soon, and take 
 up that time which I ought to bestow upon facts. 
 
 CHAPTER XXX. 
 
 Of the few legitimate sons of Adam, whose breasts never felt what the 
 sting of love was (maintaining, first, all misogynists to be bastards) — the 
 greatest heroes of ancient and modem stcry have carried off amongst 
 them, nine parts in ten of the honour ; and I wish, for their sakes, 
 I had the key of my study out of my draw-well, only for five minutes, 
 to tell you their names — recollect them I cannot — so be content to 
 accept of these, for the present, in their stead. 
 
 There was the great King Aldrovandus, and Bosphoru?, and Cappa- 
 docius, and Dardanus, and Pontus, and Asius — to say nothing of the 
 
 iron-hearted Charles the Twelfth, whom the Countess of K herself 
 
 could make nothing of. There was Babylonicus and Mediterraneus, 
 and Polixenc?, and Pcrsicus, and Pru'?''^<,s, not one of whom (except 
 
 H 
 
228 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. vi. 
 
 Cappadocius and Pontus, who were both a little suspected) ever once 
 bowed down his breast to the goddess. The tiuth is, they had all of 
 them something else to do — and so had my Uncle Toby — till Fate — 
 till Fate, I say, envying his name the glory of being handed down to 
 posterity with Aldrovandus's and the rest, she basely patched up the 
 peace of Utrecht. 
 
 Believe me, Sirs, 'twas the worse deed she did that year. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXI. 
 
 Amongst the many ill consequences of the treaty of Utrecht, it was 
 within a point of giving my Uncle Toby a surfeit of sieges ; and though 
 he recovered his appetite afterwards, yet Calais itself left not a deeper 
 scar in Mary's heart than Utrecht upon my Uncle Toby's. To the end 
 of his life he never could hear Utrecht mentioned upon any account 
 whatever, or so much as read an article of news extracted out of the 
 Utrecht Gazette, without fetching a sigh, as if his heart would break in 
 twain. 
 
 My father, who was a great motive-monger, and consequently a 
 very dangerous person for a man to sit by, either laughing or crying, 
 for he generally knew your motive for doing both, much better than 
 you knew it yourself, would always console my Uncle Toby upon these 
 occasions, in a way, which showed plainly he imagined my Uncle 
 Toby grieved for nothing in the whole affair, so much as the loss of his 
 hobby-horse. " Never mind, brother Toby," he would say, " by God's 
 blessing we shall have another war break out again some of these days, 
 and when it does, the belligerent powers, if they would hang themselves, 
 cannot keep us out of play. I defy 'em, my dear Toby," he would addj 
 "to take countries without taking towns, or towns without sieges." 
 
 My Uncle Toby never took this back-stroke of my father's at his 
 hobby-horse kindly. He thought the stroke ungenerous ; and the 
 more so, because, in striking the horse, he hit the rider too, and in the 
 most dishonourable part a blow could fall ; so that upon these occasions 
 he always laid down his pipe upon the table, with more fire to defend 
 himself than common. 
 
 I told the reader, this time two years, that my Uncle Toby was not 
 eloquent ; and in the very same page gave an instance to the contrary. 
 I repeat the observation, and a fact which contradicts it again. He 
 was not eloquent ; it was not easy to my Uncle Toby to make long 
 harangues, and he hated florid ones ; but there were occasions where 
 the stream overflowed the man, and ran so counter to its usual course, 
 that in some parts my Uncle Toby, for a time, was at least equal to 
 Tertullus, but in others, in my own opinion, infinitely above him. 
 
 My father was so highly pleased with one of tliese apologetical 
 orations of my Uncle Toby's, which he had delivered one evening 
 before him and Vorick, that he wrote it down before he went to bed. 
 
 I have had the good fortune to meet with it amongst my father's 
 papers, with here and there an insertion of his own betwixt two crooks, 
 thus [ ], and is endorsed ; — *' My brother Toby's justification of his 
 
tOUVi.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 229 
 
 own principles and conduct in wishing to continue the war.** I may 
 safely say, I have read over this apologetical oration of my Uncle 
 Toby's a hundred times, and think it so fine a model of defence, and 
 shows so sweet a temperament of gallantry and good principles in him, 
 that I give it the world, word for word (interlineations and all), as I 
 find it. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXII. 
 
 My Uncle Toby's Apologetical Oration. 
 
 1 AM not insensible, brother Shandy, that when a man, whose pro- 
 fession is arms, wishes, as I have done, for war, it has an ill aspect to the 
 world ; and that, how just and right soever his motives and intentions 
 may be, he stands in an uneasy posture in vindicating himself from 
 private views in doing it. 
 
 For this cause, if a soldier is a prudent man — which he may be 
 without being a jot the less brave — he will be sure not to utter his wish 
 in the hearing of an enemy ; for, say what he will, an enemy will not 
 believe him. He will be cautious of doing it even to a friend, lest he 
 may suffer in his esteem. But if his heart is overcharged, and a secret 
 sigh for arms must have its vent, he will reserve it for the ear of a 
 brother, who knows his character to the bottom, and what his true 
 notions, dispositions, and principles of honour are. What, I hope, I 
 have been in all these, brother Shandy, would be unbecoming in me 
 to say ; much worse, I know, have I been than I ought, and some- 
 thing worse, perhaps, than I think. But such as I am, you, my dear 
 brother Shandy, who have sucked the same breasts with me, and with 
 whom I have been brought up from my cradle, and from whose know- 
 ledge, from the first hours of our boyish pastimes down to this, I have 
 concealed no one action of my life, and scarce a thought in it. Such 
 as I am, brother, you must by this time know me, with all my vices, 
 and with all my weaknesses too, whether of my age, my temper, my 
 passions, or my understanding. 
 
 Tell me then, my dear brother Shandy, upon which of them it is, 
 that when I condemned the peace of Utrecht, and grieved the war was 
 not carried on with vigour a little longer, you should think your brothei" 
 did it upon unworthy views; or that, in- wishing for war he should be 
 bad enough to wish more of his fellow-creatures slain, more slaves 
 made, and more families driven from their peaceful habitations, merely 
 for his own pleasure. Tell me, brother Shandy, upon what one deed 
 of mine do you ground it? ["The devil a deed do I know of, dear 
 Toby, but one for a hundred pounds which I lent thee to carry on these 
 cursed seiges."] 
 
 If, when I was a school-boy, I could not hear a drum beat, but my 
 heart beat with it ; was it my fault ? Did I plant the propensity there? 
 Did I sound the alarm within, or Nature ? 
 
 When Guy, Earl of Warwick, and Parismus and Parismenus, and 
 Valentine and Orson, and the Seven Champions of England were 
 handed around the school, were they not all purchased with my own 
 
 H 2 
 
^30 TRISTRAM SHAND K [vol. Vt 
 
 pocket-money ? Was that selfish, brother Shandy ? When we read 
 over the siege of Troy, which lasted ten years and eight months — 
 though with such a train of artillery as we had at Namur, the town 
 might have been carried in a week — was I not as much concerned for 
 the destruction of the Greeks and Trojans as any boy of the whole 
 school? Had I not three strokes of a ferula given me, two on my 
 right hand and one on my left, for calling Helena a bitch for it ? 
 Did any one of you shed more tears for Hector ? And when king Priam 
 came to the camp to beg his body, and returned weeping back to Troy 
 without it, you know, brother, I could not eat my dinnei. 
 
 Did that bespeak me cruel ? Or because, brother Shandy, my blood 
 flew out into the camp, and my heart panted for war, was it a proof it 
 could not ache for the distresses of war too ? 
 
 O brother I *tis one thing for a soldier to gather laurels, and 'tis 
 another to scatter cypress — [**Who told thee, my dear Toby, that 
 cypress was used by the ancients on mournful occasions ? "] 
 
 'Tis one thing, brother Shandy, for a soldier to hazard his own life, 
 to leap first down into the trench, where he is sure to be cut in pieces. 
 'Tis one thing, from public spirit and a thirst of glory, to enter the 
 breach the first man, to stand in the foremost rank, and march bravely 
 on with drums and trumpets, and colours flying about his ears. 'Tis 
 one thing, I say, brother Shandy, to do this, and 'tis another thing to 
 reflect on the miseries of war ; to view the desolations of whole 
 countries, and consider the intolerable fatigues and hardships which the 
 soldier himself, the instrument who works them, is forced (for sixpence 
 a day, if he can get it) to undergo. 
 
 Need I be told, dear Yorick, as I was by you, in Le Fevre's funeral 
 sermon, that so soft and gentle a creature, bom to love, to mercy, and 
 kindness, as man is, was not shaped for this ? But why did you not add, 
 Yorick, '* if not by nature, that he is so by necessity ?" For what is war ? 
 What is it, Yorick, when fougfit, as ours has been, upon principles of 
 liberty, and upwn principles of honour ; what is it, but the getting 
 together of quiet and harmless people, with their swords in their hands, 
 to keep the ambitious and the turbulent within bounds ? And Heaven is 
 my witness, brother Shandy, that the pleasure I have taken in these 
 things, and that infinite delight, in particular, which has attended my 
 sieges in my bowling-green, has arisen within me, and I hope in 
 the Corporal too, from the consciousness we both had, that in carrying 
 them on, we were answering the great ends of our creation. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII. 
 
 I TOLD the Christian reader — 1 say Christian, hoping he is one — and if 
 he is not, I am sorry for it, and only beg he will consider the matter 
 with himself, and not lay the blame entirely upon this book. 
 
 I told him. Sir — for, in good truth, when a man is telling a story in the 
 strange way I do mine, he is obliged continually to be going backwards 
 and forwards to keep all tight together in the reader's lancy, which, for 
 my own part, if I did not take heed to do more than at first, there is so 
 
VOL. vi.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 23I 
 
 much unfixed and equivocal matter starting up, with so many breaks and 
 gaps in it, and so little service do the stars afford, which, nevertheless, I 
 hang up in some of the darkest passages, knowing that the world is apt 
 to lose its way, with all the lights the sun itself at noonday can give it. 
 And now, you see, I am lost myself ! 
 
 But 'tis my father's fault ; and whenever my brains come to be 
 dissected, you will perceive, without spectacles, that he has left a large 
 uneven thread, as you sometimes see in an unsaleable piece of cambric, 
 running along the whole length of the web, and so untowardly, you 
 
 cannot so much as to cut out a (here I hang up a couple of lights 
 
 again), or a fillet, or a thumb-stall, but it is seen or felt. 
 
 All which being considered, and that you see 'tis morally impracticable 
 for me to wind this round to where I set out — 
 
 I begin the chapter over again. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV. 
 
 t TOLD the Christian reader in the beginning of the chapter which pre- 
 ceded my Uncle Toby's apologetical oration, though in a different 
 trope from what I shall make use of now, that the peace of Utrecht 
 was within an ace of creating the same shjmess betwixt my Uncle Toby 
 and his hobby-horse as it did betwixt the queen and the rest of the 
 confederating powers. 
 
 There is an indignant way in which a man sometimes dismounts 
 his horse which as good as says to hyn, " I'll go a-foot, sir, all the 
 days of my hfe before I will ride a single mile upon your back again." 
 Now my Uncle Toby could not be said to dismount his horse in this 
 manner, for in strictness of language he could not be said to dismount 
 his horse at all. His horse rather flung him, and somewhat viciously, 
 which made my Uncle Toby take it ten times more unkindly. Let this 
 matter be settled by State jockeys as they like, it created, I say, a sort 
 of sh)mess betwixt my Uncle Toby and his hobby-horse. He had no 
 occasion for him from the month of March to November, which was 
 the summer after the articles were signed, except it was now and then 
 to take a short ride out, just to see that the fortifications and harbour of 
 Dunkirk were demolished according to stipulation. . 
 
 The French were so backward all that summer in setting about that 
 affair, and Monsieur Tugghe, the deputy from the magistrates at Dun- 
 kirk, presented so many affecting petitions to the queen, beseeching her 
 majesty to cause only her thunderbolts to fall upon the martial works 
 which might have incurred her displeasure — but to spare, to spare 
 the mole for the mole's sake, which in its naked situation could be no 
 more than an object of pity. And the queen, who was but a woman, 
 being of a pitiful disposition, and her ministers also, they not wishing 
 in their hearts to have the town dismantled, for these private reasons *, 
 
 ************ 
 
 so that the whole went heavily on with my Uncle Toby, insomuch 
 that it was not within three full months after he and the Corporal had 
 constructed the town, and put it in a condition to be destroyed, that 
 
232 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. Vr. 
 
 the several commandants, commissaries, deputies, negotiators, and 
 intendants would permit him to set about it. Fatal interval of in- 
 activity ! 
 
 The Corporal was for beginning the demolition by making a breach 
 in the ramparts or main fortifications of the town. " No, that will 
 never do, Corporal," said my Uncle Toby, '*for in going that way to 
 work with the town the English garrison will not be safe in it an hour ; 
 
 because, if the French are treacherous " — " They are as treacherous 
 
 as devils, an' please your honour," said the Corporal. — " It gives me 
 concern always when I hear it. Trim," said my Uncle Toby, " for they 
 don't want personal bravery ; and if a breach is made in the ram- 
 parts they may enter it, and make themselves masters of the place 
 w^hen they please." — " Let them enter it," said the Corporal, lifting up 
 his .pioneer's spade in both his hands, as if he was going to lay about 
 him with it. *' Let them enter, an' please your honour, if they dare." 
 — "In cases like this, Corporal," said my Uncle Toby, slipping his 
 right hand down to the middle of his cane, and holding it afterwards 
 truncheon- wise, with his forefinger extended, ** 'tis no part of the con- 
 sideration of a commandant what the enemy dare or what they dare not 
 do. He must act with prudence. We will begin with the outworks, 
 both towards the sea and the land, and particnlarly with Fort Louis, 
 the most distant of them all, and demolish it first ; and the rest, one 
 by one, both on our right and left, as we retreat towards the town. 
 Then we'll demolish the mole, next fill up the harbour, then retire into 
 the citadel and blow it up into the air ; and having done that. Corporal, 
 we'll embark for England." — " We are there," quoth the Corporal, 
 recollecting himself. — " Very true," said my Uncle Toby, looking at 
 the church. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXV. 
 
 A DELtrsiVE, delicious consultation or two of this kind, betwixt my 
 Uncle Toby and Trim, upon the demolition of Dunkirk, for a moment 
 rallied back the ideas of those pleasures which were slipping from 
 under him : still — still all went on heavily, tlie magic left the mind the 
 weaker. Stillness, with Silence at her back, entered the soUtary parlour, 
 and drew their gauzy mantle over my Uncle Toby's head ; and Listless- 
 ness, with her lax fibre and undirected eye, sat quietly down beside him 
 in his arm-chair. No longer Amberg, and Rhinberg, and Limbourg, and 
 Huy, and Bonn, in one year, and the prospect of Landen and Trerebach, 
 and Drusen and Dendermond, the next, hurried on the blood: no 
 longer did saps, and mines, and blinds, and gabions, and palisadoes, 
 keep out this fair enemy of man's repose : no more could my Uncle 
 Toby, after passing the French lines, as he eat his ^g^ at supper, from 
 thence break into the heart of France, cross over the Oyes, and with 
 all Picardie open behind him, march up to the gates of Paris, and 
 fall asleep with nothing but ideas of glory : no more was he to dream, 
 he had fixed the royal standard upon the tower of the Bastile, and 
 awake with it streaming in his head. 
 
 Sofcer visions, gentler vibrations, stole sweetly in upon his slumbers; 
 
VOL. VI.3 TRISTRAM SHANDY. 233 
 
 the trumpet of war fell out of his hands, he took up the lute — sweet in- 
 stniment ! of all others the most dehcate ! the most difficult — how wilt 
 thou touch it, my dear Uncle Toby ? 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVI. * 
 
 Now, because I have once or twice said, m my inconsiderate way of 
 talking, that I was confident the following memoirs of my Uncle Toby's 
 courtship of Widow Wadman, whenever I got time to write them, 
 would turn out one of the most complete systems, both of the elemen- 
 tary and practical part of love and love-making, that ever was addressed 
 to the world, are you to imagine from thence that I shall set out with 
 a description of what love is ? whether part god and part devil, as 
 Plotinus will have it. 
 
 Or by a more critical equation, and supposing the whole of love to be 
 as ten, to determine, with Ficinus, **How many parts of it, the one — 
 and how many the other ; " or whether it is all of it one great devil, 
 from head to tail, as Plato has taken upon him to pronounce ; concern- 
 ing which conceit of his, I shall not offer my opinion : but my opinion 
 of Plato is this ; that he appears, from this instance, to have been a 
 man of much the same temper and way of reasoning with Doctor Bay- 
 nard, who being a great enemy to blisters, as imagining that half a 
 dozen of 'em on at once, would draw a man as surely to his grave as a 
 hearse and six, ra..hly concluded that the devil himself was nothing in 
 the world but one great bouncing cantharidis. 
 
 I have nothing to say to people who allow themselves this monstrous 
 liberty in arguing, but what Nazianzen cried out (that is, polemically) to 
 Philagrius 
 
 " *Eu7s ! " — O rare ! 'tis fine reasoning. Sir, indeed ! ** 6'rt 0iXoo-o0eis 
 iv Uddeffi, " — and most nobly do you aim at tmth, when you philoso- 
 phize about it in your modes and passions. 
 
 Nor is it to be imagined, for the same reason, I should stop to in- 
 quire, whether love is a disease, or embroil myself with Rhasis and 
 Dioscorides, whether the seat of it is in the brain or liver, because 
 this would lead me on to an examination of the two very opposite 
 manners, in which patients have been treated, the one, of Asetius, 
 who always began with a cooling glister of hemp-seed and bmised 
 cucumbers ; and followed on with thin potations of water-lilies and 
 purslane, to which he added a pinch of snuff, of the herb hanea ; and 
 where Aeetius durst venture it, his topaz ring. 
 
 The other, that of Gordonius, who (in his cap. 15 De Amore) 
 directs they should be thrashed, ad putorem usque, till they stink 
 again. 
 
 These are disquisitions, which my father, who had laid in a great 
 stock of knowledge of this kind, will be very busy with, in the progress 
 of* Uncle Toby's affairs : I must anticipate thus much, that from his 
 theories of love (with which, by the way, he contrived to crucify my 
 Uncle Toby's mind, almost as much as his amours thems elves), he 
 took a single step into practice; and, by means of a camphorated 
 
234 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vOL. VI. 
 
 cere-cloth, which he found means to impose upon the tailor for 
 buckram, whilst he was making my Uncle Toby a new pair of 
 breeches, he produced Gk)rdonius's effect upon my Uncle Toby without 
 the disgrace. 
 
 What changes this produced will be read in its proper place ; all that 
 is needful to be added to the anecdote is this : that whatever effect it 
 had upon my Uncle Toby, it had a vile effect upon the house ; and if 
 my Uncle Toby had not smoked it down as he did, it might have had a 
 vile effect upon my father too. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVII. 
 
 TwiLi. come out of itself by-and-by. All I contend for is that I am 
 not obliged to set out with a definition of what love is ; and so long as I 
 can go on with my story intelligibly, with the help of the word itself, 
 without any other idea to it than what I have in common with the rest of 
 the world, why should I differ from it a moment before the time ? When 
 I can get on no further, and find myself entangled on all sides of this 
 mystic labyrinth, my opinion will then come in, in course, and lead me 
 out. 
 
 At present, I hope I shall be sufHciently understood in telling the 
 reader my Uncle Toby fell in love. 
 
 Not that the phrase is at all to my liking ; for to say a man is fallen 
 in love, or that he is deeply in love, or up to the ears in love, and 
 ^metimes even over head and ears in it, carries an idiomatical kind of 
 implication, that love is a thing below a man ; this is recurring again to 
 Plato's opinion, which, with all his divinityship, I hold to be damnable 
 and heretical ; and so much for that. 
 
 Let love therefore be what it will, my Uncle Toby fell into it. 
 
 And possibly, gentle reader, with such a temptation, so wouldst 
 thou. For never did thy eyes behold, or thy concupiscence covet any- 
 thing in this world more concupiscible than Widow Wadman. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVIII. 
 
 To conceive this right, call for pen and ink, here's paper ready to your 
 hand. Sit down, Sir, paint her to your own mind, as like your mistress 
 as you can, as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you ; 'tis all 
 one to me ; please but your own fancy in it. 
 
Vol. Vt] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 535 
 
 Was ever anything in Nature so sweet — so exquisite I 
 
 Then, dear sir, how could my Uncle Toby resist it ? 
 
 Thrice happy book ! Thou wilt have one page, at least, within thy 
 
 covers whicli Malice will not blacken and which Ignorance cannot 
 
 misrepresent. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIX. 
 
 As Susannah w^as informed by an express from Mrs. Bridget of my 
 Uncle Toby's falling in love with her mistress fifteen days before it 
 happened — the contents of which express Susannah communicated to 
 my mother the next day — it has just given me an opportunity of enter- 
 ing upon my Uncle Toby's amours a fortnight before their existence. 
 
 "I have an article of news to tell you, Mr Shandy," quoth my 
 mother, '* which will surprise you greatly." 
 
 Now my father was then holding one of his second beds of justice, 
 and was musing within himself about the hardships of matrimony as 
 my mother broke silence. 
 
 " My brother Toby," quoth she, " is going to be married to Mrs. 
 Wadman," 
 
 **Then he will never," quoth my father, "be able to lie diagonally 
 in his bed again as long as he lives." 
 
 It was a consuming vexation to my father that my mother never 
 asked the meaning of a thing she did not understand. 
 
 **That she is not a woman of science," my father would say, ** is her 
 misfortune ; but she might ask a question." 
 
 My mother never did. In short, she went out of the world at last 
 without knowing whether it turned round or stood still. My father had 
 officiously told her about a thotisand times which way it was, but she 
 always forgot. 
 
 For these reasons a discourse seldom went on much further betwixt 
 them than a proposition, a reply, and a rejoinder ; at the end of which 
 it generally took breath for a few minutes— as in the affair of the 
 breeches — and then went on again. 
 
 ** If he marries, 'twill be the worse for us," quoth my mother. 
 
 *' Not a cherry-stone," said my father. " He may as well batter away 
 his means upon that as anything else.'* 
 
 "To be sure," said my mother. So here ended the proposition, the 
 reply, and the rejoinder, I told you of. 
 
 " It will be some amusement to him too," said my father. 
 
 "A very great one," answered my mother, "if he should have 
 chi'ilren." 
 
 " Lord have rnercy upon me !" said my father to himself. ***** 
 
 CHAPTER XL. 
 
 I AM now beginning to get fairly into my work ; and by the help of a 
 vegetable diet, with a few of the cold seeds, I make no doubt but I shall 
 
236 TRISTRAM SHANDY. VOL. VI 
 
 be able to go on with my Uncle Toby's story and my own in a tolerably 
 straight line. Now — 
 
 [Four crooked lines.] 
 
 These were the four lines I moved in, through my first, second, 
 third, and fourth volumes. In the fifth volume I have been very good, 
 the precise line I have described in it being this — 
 
 [One crooked line with lettering.] 
 
 By which it appears that, except at the curve marked A, where I took 
 a trip to Navarre, and the indented curve B, w^hich is the short airing 
 when I was there with the Lady Baussiere and her page, I have \\(A 
 taken the least frisk of a digression, till John de la Casse's devils led 
 me the round you see marked D ; for as for cc ccc they are nothing 
 but parentheses, and the common ins and outs incident to the lives of 
 the greatest ministers of state ; and, when compared with what men 
 have done, or with my own transgressions at the letters ABD, they 
 vanish into nothing. 
 
 In this last volume I have done better still, for from the end of Le 
 Fevre's episode, to the beginning of my Uncle Toby's campaigns, I 
 have scarce stepped a yard out of my way. 
 
 If I mend at this rate, it is not impossible, by the good leave of his 
 Grace of Benevento's devils, but I may arrive hereafter at the excellency 
 of going on even thus — 
 
 '^vhich line, drawn as straight as I could draw it by a writing-master's 
 ruler (borrowed for that purpose), turning neither to the right hand nor 
 to the left. 
 
 This right line, the pathway for Christians to walk in, say divines. 
 
 The emblem of moral rectitude, says Cicero. 
 
 The best line, say cabbage planters, is the shortest line, say Archi- 
 medes, which can be drawn from one given point to another. 
 
 Oh ! I wish your ladyships would lay this matter to heart in your 
 next birthday suits I 
 
 What a journey ! 
 
 Pray, can you tell me — that is, without anger — before I write my 
 chapter upon straight lines, by what mistake, who told them so, or 
 how it has come to pass, that your men of wit and genius have all 
 along confounded this line with the line of gravitation ? 
 
VOLUME VI L 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 No, I think I said I would v/rite two volumes every year, provided the 
 vile cough which then tormented me, and which to this hour I dread 
 worse than the devil, would but give me leave ; and in another place 
 (but where I can't recollect now), speaking of my book as a machine, and 
 laying my pen and ruler down crosswise upon the table in order to gain 
 the greater credit to it, I swore it should be kept agoing at that rate 
 these forty years if it pleased but the Fountain of Life to bless me s(* 
 long with health and good spirits. 
 
 Now, as for my spirits, little have I to lay to their charge — nay, so 
 very little (unless the mounting me upon a long stick, and playing the 
 fool with me nineteen hours out of the twenty-four, be accusations) that, 
 on the contrary, I have much, much to thank 'em for : cheerily have 
 ye made me tread the path of life with all the burdens of it (except its 
 cares) upon my back ; in no one moment of my existence, that I remem- 
 ber, have ye once deserted me, or tinged tlie objects which came in my 
 way either with sable or with a sickly green ; in dangers ye gilded my 
 horizon with hope, and when Death himself knocked at my door ye 
 bade him come again, and in so gay a tone of careless indifference did 
 ye do it that he doubted of his commission. 
 
 *' There must certainly be some mistake in this matter," quoth he.. 
 
 Now there is nothing in this world I abominate worse than to be 
 interrupted in a story, and I was that moment telling Eugenius a most 
 tawdry one in my way, of a nun who fancied herself a shellfish, and of a 
 monk damned for eating a mussel, and was showing him the grounds 
 and justice of the procedure — 
 
 * * Did ever so grave a personage get into so vile a scrape ? " quoth 
 Death. — "Thou hast had a narrow escape, Tristram," said Eugeniu^, 
 taking hold of my hand as I finirhed my story. 
 
 " But there is no livinjr, Eugenius," replied I, "at this rate ; for, as 
 this son of a has found out my lodgings " 
 
 *' You call him rightly," said Eugenius ; **for by .sin we are told he 
 entered the world." — " 1 care not which way he entered," quoth I, 
 "provided he be not in such a hurry to take me out with him, for I 
 have forty volumes to write, and forty thousand things to say and do, 
 which nobody in the world will say and do for me, except thyself; and 
 as thou seest he has got me by the throat (for Eugenius could scarce 
 
238 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. vii. 
 
 hear me speak across the table), and that I am no match for him in the 
 open field, had I not Vetter, whilst these few scattered spirits remain 
 and these two spider legs of mine (holding one of them up to him) are 
 able to support me — had I not better, Eugenius, fly for my life ? *' — 
 *' 'Tis my advice, my dear Tristram," said Eugenius. — "Then, by 
 heaven, I will lead him a dance he little thinks of, for I will gallop,'* 
 quoth I, *' without looking once behind me, to the banks of the Garonne ; 
 and if I hear him clattering at my heels, I'll scamper away to Mount 
 Vesuvius, from thence to Joppa, and from Joppa to the world's end, 
 where, if he follows me, I pray God he may break his neck.*^ 
 " He runs more risk there," said Eugenius, **than thou.*' 
 Eugenius's wit and aifection brought blood into the cheek from 
 whence it had been some months banished ; 'twas a vile moment to bid 
 adieu in ; he led me to my chaise. *' Allons ! " said I ; the post-boy 
 gave a crack with his whip ; off I went like a cannon, and in half a 
 dozen bounds got into Dover. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 *'Now, hang it," quoth I, as I looked towards the French coast, "a 
 mnn should know something of his own country too, before he goes 
 abroad, and I never gave a p&ep into Rochester Church, or took noiice 
 of the dock of Chatham, or visited St. Thomas at Canterbury, though 
 they all three lay in my way. 
 
 But mine, indeed, is a particular case. 
 
 So without arguing the matter further with Thomas A'Becket, or any 
 one else, I skipped into the boat, and in five minutes we got under sai\ 
 and scudded away like the wind. 
 
 ** Pray, captain," quoth I, as I was going down into the cabin, *' is a 
 man ever overtaken by Death on this passage ? " 
 
 "Why, there is not time for a man to be sick in it," replied he. — 
 ** What a cursed liar ! for I am sick as a horse," quoth I, "already.'* 
 What a brain ! Upside down ! Heyday ! the cells are broke loose one 
 into another, and the blood, and the lymph, and the nervous juices, 
 with the fixed and volatile salts, are all jumbled into one mass. Good 
 G — ! everything turns round in it like a thousand whirlpools ! I'd 
 give a shilling to know if I shan't write the clearer for it. 
 
 Sick ! sick ! sick ! sick ! 
 
 ** When shall we get to hmd, captain? " They have hearts like stones. 
 Oh ! I am deadly sick ! "Reach me that thing boy." 'Tis the most 
 discomfiting sickness. I wish I was at the bottom. " Madam, how 
 
 is it with you?" — "Undone! undone! un Oh! undone, sir!'' 
 
 — "What, the first time?" — "No, 'tis the second, third, sixth, tenth 
 time, sir." Heyday ! what a trampling overhead ! " Hollo, cabin- 
 boy ! what's the matter ? '* 
 
 '' The wind chopped about ! " — S'Death ! then I shall meet him full in 
 the face. 
 
 " What luck ? " — ** 'Tis chopped about again, master." — " Oh ! the 
 devil chop it." 
 
 ^' Captain/' quoth she "for heaven's sake let us get ashore,^^ 
 
VOL. VII.] TRISTRAM SHAND V. 239 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 It is a great inconvenience to a man in a haste, that there are three 
 distinct roads between Calais and Paris, in behalf of which there is so 
 much to be said by the several deputies from the towns which lie along 
 them, that half a day is easily lost in settling which you'll take. 
 
 First, the road by Lisle and Arras, which is the most about, but most 
 interesting and instructing. 
 
 The second, that by Amiens, which you may go if you would see 
 Chantilly. 
 
 And that by Beauvais, which you may go if you will. 
 
 For this reason a great many choose to go by Beauvais. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ** Now, before I quit Calais,'* a travel writer would say, '* it would not 
 be amiss to give some account of it." Now, I think it very much amiss 
 that a man cannot go quietly through a town and let it alone, when it 
 does not meddle with him, but that he must be turning about and 
 drawing his pen at every kennel he crosses over, merely, on my 
 conscience, for the sake of drawing it ; because, if we may judge from 
 what has been wrote of these things, by all who have wrote and galloped, 
 or who have galloped and wrote, which is a different way still ; or who, 
 for more expedition than the rest, have wrote galloping, which is the 
 way I do at present, from the great Addison, who did it with his 
 satchel of school-books hanging at his back, and galling his beast's 
 crupper at every stroke ; there is not a galloper of us all who might tiot 
 have gone on ambling quietly in his own ground (in case he had any) 
 and have wrote all he had to write dry-shod as well as not. 
 
 For my own part, as heaven is my judge, and to which I shall ever 
 make my last appeal, I know no more of Calais (except the little my 
 barber told me of it as he was whetting liis razor) than I do this 
 moment of Grand Cairo ; for it was dusky in the evening when I 
 landed, and dark as pitch in the morning when I set out, and yet by 
 merely knowing what is what, and by drawing this from that in one 
 part of the town, and by spelling and putting this and that together in 
 another, I would lay any travelling odds that I this moment write a 
 chapter upon Calais as long as my arm ; and with so distinct and satis- 
 factory a detail of every item which is worth a stranger's curiosity in 
 the town, that you would take me for the town-clerk of Calais itself ; 
 and where, sir, would be the wonder ? Was not Democritus, who 
 laughed ten times more than I, town-clerk of Abdera ? and was not (I 
 forget his name), who had more discretion than us both, town-clerk of 
 Ephesus ? It should be penned, moreover, sir, with so much knowledge 
 and good sense, and truth and precision. 
 
 Nay, if you don't believe me, you may read the chapter for your 
 pains? 
 
240 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. vilo 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Calais> Calatium, Calusium, Calesium. 
 
 This town, if we may trust its archives, the authority of which I see 
 no reason to call in question in this place, was once no more than a 
 small village belonging to one of the first Counts de Guines ; and as it 
 boasts at present of no less than fourteen thousand inhabitants, exclu- 
 sive of four hundred and twenty distinct families in the basse ville^ or 
 suburbs, it must have grown up, by little and little I suppose, to its 
 present size. 
 
 Though there are four convents, there is but one parochial church in 
 the whole town — I had not an opportunity of taking its exact dimen- 
 sions — but it is pretty easy to make a tolerable conjecture of 'em ; for 
 as there are fourteen thousand inhabitants in the town, if the church 
 holds them all, it must be considerably large ; and if it will not, 'tis a 
 very great pity they have not another. It is built in form of a cross, 
 and dedicated to the Virgin Mary ; the steeple, which has a spire to it, 
 is placed in the middle of the church, and stands upon four pillars, 
 elegant and light enough, but sufficiently strong at the same time ; it is 
 decorated with eleven altars, most of which are rather fine than beau- 
 tiful. The great altar is a masterpiece in its kind ; 'tis of white marble, 
 and, as I was told, near sixty feet high : had it been much higher, it 
 had been as high as Mount Calvary itself ; therefore, I suppose it must 
 be high enough in all conscience. 
 
 There was nothing struck me more than the great square, thougli I 
 cannot say 'tis either well paved or well built ; but 'tis in the heart 
 of the town, and most of the streets, especially those in that quarter, 
 al Jterminate in it. Could there have been a fountain in all Calais, 
 which it seems there cannot, as such an object would have been a 
 great ornament, it is not to be doubted but that the inhabitants 
 would have had it in the very centre of this square — not that it is 
 properly a square, because 'tis forty feet longer from east to west 
 than from north to south — so that the French in general have more 
 reason on their side in calling them Dlaces than squares, which, strictly 
 speaking, to be sure they are not. 
 
 The town-house seems to be but a sorry building, and not to be kept 
 in the best repair ; otherwise it had been a second great ornament to 
 this place; it answers, however, its destination, and serves very well 
 for the reception of the magistrates, who assemble in it from time 
 to time ; so that 'tis presumable justice is regularly distributed. 
 
 I had heard much of it, but there is nothing at all curious in the 
 Courgain ; 'tis a distinct quart-er of the town, inhabited solely by 
 sailors and fishermen ; it consists of a number of small streets, neatly 
 built, and mostly of brick ; 'tis extremely populous, but as that may be 
 accounted for from the principles of their diet, there is nothing curious 
 in that neither. A traveller may see it to satisfy himself ; he must not 
 omit, however, taking notice of La Tour de Guet upon any account : 'tis 
 so called from its particular destination, because in war it serves to dis- 
 cover and give notice of the enemies which approach the place, either 
 
VOL. VII.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 241 
 
 by sea or land ; but 'tis monstrous high, and catches the eye so continually 
 you cannot avoid taking notice of it, if you would. 
 
 It was a singular disappointment to me that I could not have per- 
 mission to take an exact survey of the fortifications, which are the 
 strongest in the world, and which, from first to last — that is, from the 
 time they were set about by Philip of France, Count of Boulogne, to 
 the present war, w^herein many reparations were made — have cost (as I 
 learned afterwards from an engineer in Gascony) above a hundred 
 millions of livres. It is very remarkable that at the Tete de Gravelines, 
 and where the town is naturally the weakest, they have expended the 
 most money ; so that the outwoiks stretch a great way into the cham- 
 pag^ne, and consequently occupy a large tract of ground. However, after 
 all that is said and done, it must be acknowledged that Calais was never 
 upon any account so considerable from itself as from its situation and 
 that easy entrance which it gave our ancestors upon all occasions into 
 France. It was not without its inconveniences also, being no less 
 troublesome to the English in those times than Dunkirk has been to us 
 in ours, so that it was deservedly looked upon as the key to both king- 
 doms, which no doubt is the reason that there have arisen so many 
 contentions who should keep it ; of these the siege of Calais, or rather 
 the blockade (for it was shut up both by land and sea) was the most 
 memorable, as it withstood the efforts of Edward the Third a whole 
 year, and was not terminated at last but by famine and extreme misery ; 
 the gallantry of Eustace de St. Pierre, who first offered himself a victim 
 for his fellow-citizens, has ranked his name with heroes. As it will not 
 take up above fifty pages, it would be injustice to the reader not to give 
 him a minute account of that romantic transaction, as well as of the 
 siege itself, in Rapin's own words. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 But, courage, gentle reader ! I scorn it ; 'tis enough to have thee in my 
 power, but to make use of the advantage which the fortune of the pen 
 has now gained over thee would be too much. No ! by that all-power- 
 ful fire which warms the visionary brain and lights the spirits through 
 unworldly tracts, ere I would force a helpless creature upon this hard 
 service, and make thee pay, poor soul, for fifty pages which I have no 
 right to sell thee, naked as I am, I would browse upon the mountains, 
 and smile that the north wind brought me neither my tent nor my 
 supper. 
 
 So, put on, my brave boy, and make the best of thy way to Boulogne, 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Boulogne — ha ! So we are all got together, debtors and sinners before 
 heaven, a jolly set of us ; but I can't stay and quaff it off with you — I'm 
 pursued myself like a hundred devils, and shall be overtaken before I 
 can well change horses. For heaven's sake, make haste. — " 'Tis for 
 high treason," quoth a very little man, whispering as low as he could to 
 
242 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. Vil. 
 
 a very tall man that stood next him. — *' Or else for murder," quoth the 
 tall man.—*' Well thrown, Size- Ace ! " quoth I.—** No," quoth a third, 
 " the gentleman has been committing ." 
 
 *'^/i, ma ch^re fille!" said I, as she tripped by from her matins, 
 **you look as rosy as the morning" (for the sun was rising, and it 
 made the compliment the more gracious). — *' No ; it can't be that," 
 quoth a fourth — [she made a curtsey to me — I kissed my hand] — ** 'tis 
 debt," continued he. — '"Tis certainly for debt," quoth a fifth. — "I 
 would not pay that gentleman's debts," quoth Ace, ** for a thousand 
 pounds." — " Nor would I," quoth Size, " for six times the sum."— 
 ** Well thrown, Size- Ace, again !" quoth I ; " but I have no debt but 
 the debt of Nature, and I want but patience of her, and I will pay her 
 every farthing I owe her. How can you be so hard-hearted, madam, to 
 arrest a poor traveller going along, without molestation to any one, upon 
 his lawful occasion ? Do stop that death-looking, long-striding scoundrel 
 of a scare- sinner who is posting after me — (he never would have followed 
 me but for you) — if it be but for a stage or two, just to give me start of 
 him, I beseech you, madam Do, dear lady." 
 
 ** Now, in troth, 'tis a great pity," quoth mine Irish host, '* that all 
 this good courtship should be lost ; for the young gentlewoman has been 
 after going out of hearing it all along." 
 
 " Simpleton ! " quoth I. 
 
 " So you have nothing else in Boulogne worth seeing ? " 
 
 " By Jasus ! there is the finest Seminary for the Humanites." 
 
 ** There cannot be a finer," quoth I. 
 
 CHAPTER Vni. 
 
 When the precipitancy of a man's wishes hurries on his ideas ninety 
 times faster than the vehicle he rides in, woe be to truth ! and woe be to 
 the vehicle and its tackling (let 'em be made of what stuff you will) 
 upon which he breathes forth the disappointment of his soul ! 
 
 As I never give general characters either of men or things in choler, 
 " the most haste the worse speed " was all the reflection I made upon the 
 affair, the first time it happened ; the second, third, fourth, and fifth 
 time, I confined it respectively to those times, and accordingly blamed 
 only the second, third, fourtli, and fifth post-boy for it, without carrying 
 my reflections further ; but the event continuing to befall me from the 
 fifth to the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth time, and without 
 one exception, I then could not avoid making a national reflection of it, 
 which I do in these words : 
 
 That something is always wrong in a French post-chaise upon first 
 setting out. 
 ; Or the proposition may stand thus : 
 
 A French postilion has always to alight before he has got three 
 hundred yards out of town. 
 
 WJiat's wrong now ? — Diable ! a rope's broke ; a knot has slipt ; 
 a staple's drawn ; a bolt's to whittle ; a tag, a rag, a jag, a strap, a 
 buckle, or a buckle's tongue, wants altering. 
 
Vol. viiO TRISTRAM SHANDY, 243 
 
 Now, true as all this is, I never think myself empowered to ex- 
 communicate thereupon either the postchaise or its driver, nor do I take 
 it into my head to swear by the living G — , I would rather go a-foot ten 
 thousand times — or that I will be damn'd if ever I get into another — but 
 I take the matter coolly before me, and consider, that some tag, or rag, 
 or jag, or bolt, or buckle, or buckle's tongue, will ever be a wanting, or 
 want altering, travel where I will, so I never chaff, but take the good 
 and the bad as they fall in my road, and get on. " Do so, my lad ! " 
 said I ; he had lost five minutes already in alighting in order to get at a 
 luncheon of black bread, which he had crammed into the chaise-pocket, 
 and was remounted and going leisurely on, to relish it the better. '* Get 
 on, my lad," said I briskly, but in the most persuasive tone imaginable, 
 for I jingled a four-and-twenty sous piece against the glass, taking care 
 to hold the flat side towards him, as he looked back ; the dog grinned 
 intelligence from his right ear to his left, and behind his sooty muzzle 
 discovered such a pearly row of teeth, that sovereignty would have 
 pawned her jewels for them. 
 
 Justheaven! { ^Jj^t' b^clr " ' 
 
 and so, as he finished the last mouthful of it, we entered the town of 
 
 Montreuil. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 There is not a town in all France, which, in my opinion, looks better 
 in the map, than Montreuil ; I own it does not look so well in the book 
 of post-roads ; but when you come to see it, to be sure it looks most 
 pitifully. 
 
 There is one thing, however, in it at present very handsome ; and 
 that is, the innkeeper's daughter ; she has been eighteen months at 
 Amiens, and six at Paris, in going through her classes ; so knits, and 
 sews, and dances, and does the little coquetries very well. 
 
 A slut ! in running them over within these five minutes that I have 
 stood looking at her, she has let fall at least a dozen loops in a white - 
 thread stocking. ** Yes, yes, I see, you cunning gipsy ! 'tis long, and 
 taper, you need not pin it to your knee, and that 'tis your own, and fits 
 exactly." 
 
 That Nature should have told this creature a word about a statue's 
 thumb ! 
 
 But as this sample is worth all their thumbs, besides, T have her 
 thumbs and fingers in at the bargain, if they can be any guide to me, 
 and as Janatone withal (for that is her name) stands so well for a draw- 
 ing, may I never draw more, or rather may I draw like a draught- horse, 
 by main strength, all the days of my life, if I do not draw her in all 
 her proportions, and with as determined a pencil, as if I had her in the 
 wettest drapery. 
 
 But your worships choose rather that I give you the length, breadth, 
 and perpendicular height of the great parish church, or a drawing of 
 the fa9ade of the abbey of St. Austreberte, which has been transported 
 from Artois hither, everything is just I suppose as the masons and car- 
 penters left them, and if the belief in Christ continues so long, will be 
 
244 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [voL. VII. 
 
 so these fifty years to come, so your worships and reverences may all 
 measure them at your leisures, but he who measures thee, Janatone, 
 must do it now, thou carriest the principles of change within thy 
 frame ; and considering the chances of a transitory life, I woull not 
 answer for thee a moment ; and ere twice twelve months are passed and 
 gone, thou mayest grow out like a pumpkin, and lose thy shapes, or 
 thou mayest go off like a flower, and lose thy beauty ; nay, thou mayest 
 go off like a hussy, and lose thyself. I would not answer for my Aunt 
 Dinah, was she alive, 'faith scarce for her picture, were it but painted 
 by Reynolds. 
 
 But if I go on with my drawing, after naming that son of Apollo, I'll 
 be shot. 
 
 So you must e'en be content with the original ; which if the evening 
 is fine in passing through Montreuil, you will see at your chaise-door, 
 as you change horses ; but unless you have as bad a reason for haste as 
 I have, you had better stop. She has a little of the devote, but that, 
 3ir, is a tierce to a nine in your favour. 
 
 Lord help me ! I could not count a single point, so had been piqued, 
 and repiqued, and capotted to the devil. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 All which being considered, and that Death moreover might be much 
 nearer me than I imagined. " I wish I was at Abbeville, " quoth I, were 
 it only to see how they card and spin. " So off we set. 
 
 De Montreuil a Nampont — poste et demi 
 
 De Nampont a Bernay — poste 
 
 De Bernay a Nouvion — poste 
 
 De Nouvian a Abbeville poste.* 
 But the carders and spinners were all gone to bed. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 What a vast advantage is travelling ! only it heats one. But there is 
 a remedy for that, which you may pick out of the next chapter. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 Was I in a condition to stipulate with death, as I am this moment with 
 my apothecary how and where I will take his glister, I should certainly 
 declare against submitting to it before my friends ; and therefore I 
 never seriously think upon the mode and manner of this great cata- 
 strophe, which generally takes up and torments my thoughts as much as 
 
 * Vide ** Book of French Post-roads," p. 36, edition of 1762. 
 
VOL. vii.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 245 
 
 the catastrophe itself ; but I constantly draw the curtain across it with 
 this wish, that the Disposer of all things may so order it that it happen 
 not to me in my own house, but rather in some decent inn. At home, 
 I know it, the concern of my friends, and the last services of wiping 
 my brows and smoothing my pillow, which the quivering hand of pale 
 Affection shall pay me, will so crucify my soul that I shall die of a dis- 
 temper which my physician is not aware of. But in an inn, the few 
 cold offices I wanted would be purchased with a few guineas, and paid 
 me with an undisturbed but punctual attention. But mark : this inn 
 should not be the inn at Abbeville. If there was not another inn 
 in the universe I would strike that inn out of the capitulation. 
 So — 
 
 "Let the horses be in the chaise exactly by four in the morning — 
 yes, by four, sir — or, by Genevieve \ I'll raise a clatter in the house 
 shall wake the dead I " 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 '* Make them like unto a wheel " is a bitter sarcasm, as all the 
 learned know, against the *' grand tour," and that restless spirit for 
 making it which David prophetically foresaw would haunt the children 
 of men in the latter days ; and therefore, as thinketh the great Bishop 
 Hall, 'tis one of the severest imprecations which David ever uttered 
 against the enemies of the Lord, and as if he had said, " I wish them 
 no worse luck than always to be rolling about." *' So much motion," 
 continues he, for he was very corpulent, " is so much unquietness ; 
 and so much of rest, by the same analogy, is so much of heaven." 
 
 Now I, being very thin, think differently ; and that so much of 
 'motion is so much of life and so much of joy, and that to stand still or 
 get on but slowly is death and the devil. 
 
 Hollo ! ho ! the whole world's asleep ! Bring out the horses, grease 
 the wheels, tie on the mail, and drive a nail into that moulding. I'll 
 not lose a moment ! 
 
 Now the wheel we are talking of, and whereinto (but not whereonto, 
 for that would make an Ixion's wheel of it) he curseth his enemies, 
 according to the Bishop's habit of body, should certainly be a post- 
 chaise wheel, whether they were set up in Palestine at that time or 
 not. And my wheel, for the contrary reasons, must as certainly be a 
 cart-wheel groaning round its revolution once in an age, and of which 
 sort, were I to turn commentator, I should make no scruple to affirm 
 they had great store in that hilly country. 
 
 I love the Pythagoreans (much more than I ever dare tell my dear 
 Jenny) for their x'^P'-^l^^^^ ^"^^ "^oO Sw/xarcs, eis' ro KaXcDs <pL\o<70(p€iv 
 [their] ** getting out of the body, in order to think well." No man 
 thinks right whilst he is in it, blinded, as he must be, with his con- 
 genial humours, and drawn differently aside, as the Bishop and myself 
 have been, with too lax or too tense a fibre. Reason is half of it 
 sense ; and the measure of heaven itself is but the measure of our pre- 
 sent appetites and concoctions. 
 
246 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. VII. 
 
 ** But which of the two, in the present case, do you think to be mostly 
 in the wrong ? " 
 
 ** You, certainly," quoth she, '* to disturb a whole family so early." 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 But she did not know I was under a vow not to shave my beard till 
 I got to Paris ; yet I hate to make mysteries of nothing. 'Tis the 
 cold cautiousness of one of those little souls from which Lessius (lib. 
 13, De Moribus Divinis^ cap. 24) hath made his estimate, wherein he 
 setteth forth, that one Dutch mile, cubically multiplied, will allow 
 room enough and to spare, for eight hundred thousand millions, which 
 he supposes to be as great a number of souls (counting from the fall of 
 Adam) as can possibly be damned to the end of the world. 
 
 From what he has made this second estimate — unless from the 
 parental goodness of God — I don't know. I am much more at a loss 
 what could be in Franciscus Ribbera's head, who pretends that no less 
 a space than one or two hundred Italian miles multiplied into itself, 
 will be sufficient to to h(;ld the like number ; he certainly must have 
 gone upon some of the old Roman souls, of which he had read, with- 
 out reflecting how much, by a gradual and most tabid decline, in a 
 course of eighteen hundred years, they must unavoidably have shrunk 
 so as to have come, when he wrote, almost to nothing. 
 
 In Lessius's time, who seems the cooler man, they were as little as 
 can be imagined. 
 
 We find them less now. 
 
 And next winter we shall find them less again ; so that if we go on 
 from little to less, and from less to nothing, I hesitate not one moment 
 to affirm, that in half a century, at this rate, we shall have no souls at 
 all ; which being the period beyond which I doubt likewise of the 
 existence of the Christian faith, 'twill be one advantage that both of 
 'em will be exactly worn out together. 
 
 Blessed Jupiter ! and blessed every other heathen god and goddess ! 
 for now ye will all come into play again, and with Priapus at your 
 tails — what jovial times ! But where am I ? and into what a delicious 
 riot of things am I rushing ? I — I who must be cut short in the midst 
 of my days, and taste no more of 'em than what I borrow from my 
 imagination. Peace to thee, generous fool, and let me go on. 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 " So hati«g, I say, to make mysteries of nothing," I entrusted it with 
 the postboy, as soon as ever I got off the stones ; he gave a crack with 
 his whip to balance the compliment ; and with the thill-horse trotting, 
 and a s:ort of an ii[) and down of the other, we danced it along to Ailly 
 ■>\\ Ciu<jh,<;!;.. liaacJ in days of yore for the finest ghimes in the world j 
 
VOL. VII.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 247 
 
 but we danced through it without music — the chimes being greatly out 
 of order — (as in truth they were through all France). 
 
 And so making all possible speed, from Ailly au Clochers I got to 
 Hixcourt, from Hixcourt I got to Pequigna)'-, and from Pequignay I got 
 to Amiens ; concerning which town I have nothing to inform you, but 
 what I have informed you once before, and that was, that Janatone went 
 there to school. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 In the whole catalogue of those whiffling vexations which come puffing 
 across a man's canvas, there is not one of a more teasing and tor- 
 menting nature than this particular one which I am going to describe 
 — and for which (unless you travel with an avance-courier, which 
 numbers do in order to prevent it) there is no help ; and it is this : — 
 
 That be you in never so kindly a propensity to sleep, though you 
 are passing perhaps through the finest country, upon the best roads, 
 and in the easiest carriage for doing it in the world ; nay, were you sure 
 you could sleep fifty miles straight foi*wards, without once opening 
 your eyes ; nay, what is more, were you as demonstratively satisfied as 
 you can be of any truth in Euclid, that you should upon all accounts be 
 full as well asleep as awake ; nay, perhaps better — yet the incessant 
 returns of paying for the horses at every stage — with the necessity 
 thereupon of putting your hand into your pocket, and counting out 
 from thence three livres fifteen sous (sous by sous), puts an end to 
 5o much of the project, tliat you cannot execute ai)ove six miles of 
 it (or suppose it is a post and a half, that is but nine) were it to save 
 your soul from destruction. 
 
 "I'll be even with 'em," quoth I, "for I'll put the precise sum into 
 a piece of paper, and hold it ready in my hand all the way. Now I 
 shall have nothing to do," said I (composing myself to rest), "but to 
 drop this gently into the post-boy's hat, and not say a word. Then 
 there wants two sous more to drink ; or there is a twelve-sous piece 
 of Louis XIV., which will not pass ; or a livre and some odd liards to 
 be brought over from the last stage, which Monsieur had forgot ; 
 which altercations (as a man cannot dispute very well asleep) rouse 
 him ; still is sweet sleep retrievable ; and still might the flesh weigh 
 down the s]>irit, and recover itself of these blows ; but ttien, by Heaven ! 
 you have paid but for a single po-^t, whereas, 'tis a post and a half; and 
 this obliges you to pull out your book of post-roads, the print of which 
 is so very small it forces you to open your eyes, whether you will or 
 no : then Monsieur le Cur^ offers you a pinch of snuff, or a poor soldier 
 shows you his leg, or a shaveling his box, or the priestess of the cistern 
 will water your wheels — they do not want it — but she swears by her 
 priesthood (throwing it back) that they do ; then you have all these 
 points to argue, or consider over in your mind ; in doing of which the 
 rational powers get so thoroughly awakened you may get 'em to sleep 
 again as you can. 
 
 It was entirely owing to one of these misfortuneS| or \ ha4 passed 
 clean by the stables of Chantilly. 
 
248 TRISTRAM SHANDY. VOL. Vil. 
 
 But the postilion first affirming, and then persisting in it to my face, 
 that there was no mark upon the two-sous piece, I opened my eyes 
 to be convinced, and seeing the mark upon it, as plain as my nose, 
 I leaped out of the chaise in a passion, and so saw everything at 
 Chantilly in spite. I tried it but for three posts and a half, but 
 believe it is the best principle in the world to travel speedily upon ; 
 for as few objects look very inviting in tliat mood, you have little or 
 nothing to stop you ; by which means it was that I passed through St. 
 Dennis, without turning my head so much as on the side towards the 
 Abbey. 
 
 Richness of their treasury! stuff and nonsense ! bating their jewels, 
 which are all false, I would not give three sous for any one thing in it, 
 but Jaidas's lantern— nor for that either, only as it grows dark, it might 
 be of use. 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 "Crack, crack ; crack, crack; crack, crack ; so this is Paris," quoth I 
 (continuing in the same mood) — "and this is Paris ! humph! Paris !'* 
 cried I, repeating the name a third time. 
 
 The first, the finest, the most brilliant. 
 
 The streets, however, are nasty. 
 
 But it looks, I suppose, better than it smells. "Crack, crack ; crack, 
 crack. What a fuss thou makest ! as if it concerned the good people 
 to be informed that a man with a pale face, and clad in black, had the 
 honour to be driven into Paris at nine o'clock at night, by a postilion 
 in a tawny-yellow jerkin turned up with red calamanco — crack, crack ; 
 crack, crack ; crack, crack — I wish thy whip " 
 
 *' But 'tis the spirit of thy nation ; so crack, crack on." 
 
 Pla ! and no one gives the wall ; but in the school of urbanity her- 
 self, if the walls are defiled, how can you do otherwise. 
 
 And pr'ythee when do they light the lamps? What; never in the 
 summer months? Ho ! 'tis the time of salads. O rare salad and soup ! 
 — soup and salad ! — salad and soup ! Encore I 
 
 'Tis too much for sinners. 
 
 Now I cannot bear the barbarity of it. Plow can that unconscionable 
 coachman talk so much bawdy to that lean horse ? Don't you see, 
 friend, the streets are so villanously narrow that there is not room in 
 all Paris to turn a wheelbarrow. In the grandest city of the whole 
 world it would not have been amiss if they had been left a thought 
 wider ; nay, were it only so much in every single street as that a man 
 might know — was it only for satisfaction — on which side of it he was 
 walking. 
 
 One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Ten cooks* 
 shops ! and twice the numlier of barbers' ! and all within three minutes' 
 driving. One would think that all the cooks in the world, on some 
 great merry-meeting with the barbers, by joint consent, had said, 
 " Come, let us all go live at Paris. The French love good eating ; 
 they are all gourmands ; we shall rank high ; if their god is their belly, 
 their cooks must be gentlemen ; and forasmuch as the periwig maketh 
 the man, and the periwig-maker maketh the periwig, ergo," would the 
 
VOL. VII.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, HO 
 
 barbers say, *' we shall rank higher still; we shall be above you all ; we 
 shall be capitouls* at least ; pardi, we shall all wear swords 1 " 
 
 And so, one would swear — that is, by candlelight, but there is no 
 depending upon it — they continue to do to this day. 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 The French are certainly misunderstood ; but whether the fault is 
 theirs, in not sufficiently explaining themselves, or speaking with that 
 exact limitation and precision which one would expect on a point of 
 such importance, and which, moreover, is so likely to be contested by 
 us, or whether the fault may not be altogether on our side, in not 
 understand inf' their language always so critically as to know " what 
 they would be at," I shall not decide ; but 'tis evident to me when they 
 affirm, "That they who have seen Paris, have seen everything," they 
 must mean to speak of those who have seen it by daylight. 
 
 As for candlelight, I give it up. I have said before there was no 
 depending upon it, and 1 repeat it again ; but not because the lights 
 and shades are too sharp, or the tints confounded, or that there is 
 neither beauty nor keeping, &c., for that's not truth ; but it is an 
 uncertain light in this respect, that in all the five hundred grand hotels 
 which they number up to you in Paris, and the five hundred good 
 things, at a modest computation — for 'tis only allowing one good thing 
 to an hotel — which by candlelight are best to be "seen, felt, heard, 
 and understood " — which by-the-by is a quotation from Lilly — the 
 ^evil a one of us out of fifty can get our heads fairly thrust in amongst 
 them. 
 
 This is no part of the French computation ; 'tis simply this : 
 That by the last survey taken in the year one thousand seven hundred 
 and sixteen — since which time there have been considerable aug- 
 mentations — Paris doth contain nine hundred streets — viz. : 
 
 In the quarter called the City there are fifty-three streets. 
 
 In St. James's of the Shambles, fifty-five streets. 
 
 In St. Oportune, thirty-four streets. 
 
 In the quarter of the Louvre, twenty-five streets. 
 
 In the Palace-Royal or St. Honorius forty-nine streets. 
 
 In Mount Martyr, forty-one streets. 
 
 In St. Eustace, twenty-nine streets. 
 
 In the Halles, twenty-seven streets. 
 
 In St. Dennis, fifty-five streets. 
 
 In St. Martin, fifty-four streets. 
 
 In St. Paul, or the Mortellerie, twenty-seven streets. 
 
 The Greve, thirty-eight streets. 
 
 In St. Avoy, or the Verrerie, nineteen streets. 
 
 In the Marais, or the Temple, fifty-two streets. 
 
 In St. Antony's, sixty-eight streets. 
 
 In the Place Maubert, eighty-one streets. 
 
 In St. Bennet, sixty streets. 
 
 ♦ Chief magistrate in Toulouse, Sec, Sic. &c. 
 
2 jo TRISTRAM SHAND K [vOL. VtL 
 
 In St Andrew's de Arcs, fifty-one streets. 
 la the quarter of the Luxembourg, sixty-two streets. 
 And in that of St. Germain, fifty-five streets, into any of which you may 
 walk ; and that when you liave seen them, with all that belongs to them, 
 fairly by daylight — their gates, their bridges, their squares, their statues 
 — and have crusaded it, moreover, through all their parish churches, by 
 no means omitting St. Roche and Sulpice, and, to crown all, have taken 
 a walk to the four palaces, which you may see either with or without 
 the statues and pictures, just as you choose. 
 
 Then you will have seen 
 
 But 'tis what no one needeth to tell you, for you will read it yourself 
 upon the portico of the Louvre in these words : 
 
 Earth no such folks ! no folks e'er such a town 
 As Paris is ! — Sing, derry, derry, down.* 
 
 The French have a gay way of treating everything that is great, and 
 that is all can be said upon it. 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 In mentioning the word gay (as in the close of the last chapter) it puts 
 one (t.^., an author) in mind «f the word spleen, especially if he has any 
 thing to say upon it : not that by any analysis, or that from any table of 
 interest or genealogy, there appears much more ground of alliance 
 betwixt them than betwixt light and darkness, or awy two of the most 
 unfriendly opposites in nature, only 'tis an undercraft of authors to keep 
 up a good understanding amongst words as politicians do amongst men, 
 not knowing how near they may be under a necessity of placing them to 
 each other ; which point being now gained, and that I may place mine 
 exactly to my mind, I write it down here. 
 
 Spleen. 
 
 This, upon leaving Chantilly, I declared to be the best principle in 
 the world to travel speedily upon ; but I gave it only as a matter of 
 opinion. I still continue in the same sentiments, only I had not then 
 experience enough of its working to add this : that though you do get 
 on at a tearing rate, yet you get on but uneasily to yourself at the same 
 time ; for which reason I here quit it entirely and for ever, and 'tis 
 heartily at any one's service. It has spoiled me the digestion of a good 
 , supper, and brought on a bilious diarrhoea, which has biought me back 
 again to my first principle on which I set out, and with which I shall 
 now scamper it away to the banks of the Garonne. 
 
 No ; I cannot stop a moment to give you the character of the people 
 — their genius, their manners, their customs, their laws, their religion, 
 their government, their manufactures, their commerce, their finances, 
 with all the sources and hidden springs which sustain them, qualified 
 as I may be by spendmg three days and two nights amongst them, and 
 
 * Non Orbis gentem, non urbem gens habet ullum 
 ulla parem. 
 
VOL. VII.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 251 
 
 during all that time making these things the entire subject of my inqui- 
 ries and reflections. 
 
 Still — still, I nuist away ; the roads are paved, the posts are short, 
 the days are long ; 'tis no more than noon. I shall be at Fontainebleau 
 before the king. 
 
 Was he going there ? Not that I know. 
 
 CHAPTER XX. , 
 
 Now I hate to hear a person, especially if he be a traveller, complain 
 that we do not get on so fast in France as we do in England ; whereas 
 we get on much faster, consideratis considerandis , thereby always 
 meaning that if you weigh their vehicles with the mountains of baggage 
 which you lay both before and behind upon them, and then consider 
 their puny horses, with the very little they give them, 'tis a wonder 
 they get on at all ; their suffering is most unchristian, and 'tis evident 
 thereupon to me that a French post-horse would not know what in the 
 
 world to do was it not for the two words and in which there 
 
 is as much sustenance as if you gave him a peck of com. Now as these 
 words cost nothing, I long from my soul to tell the reader what they 
 are ; but here is the question, they must be told him plainly, and with the 
 most distinct articulation, or it will answer no end ; and yet to do it in 
 that plain way, though their reverences may laugh at it in the bed- 
 chamber, full well I wot they will abuse it in the parlour ; for which 
 cause I have been volving and revolving in my fancy some tkne, but to 
 no })urpose, by what clean device or facete contrivance I might modulate 
 them, that whilst I satisfy that ear which the reader chooses to lend me, 
 I might not dissatisfy the other which he keeps to himself. 
 
 My ink burns my finger to try, and when I have 'twill have a worse 
 consequence ; it will burn (I fear) my paper. 
 
 No, I dare not. 
 
 But if you wish to know how the Abbess of Andouillets and a novice 
 of her convent got over the difficulty (only first wishing myself all 
 imaginable success), I'll tell you without the least scruple. 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 The Abbess of Andouillets, which, if you look into the large set of 
 provincial maps now publishing at Paris, you will find situated amongst 
 the hills whicli divide Burgundy from Savoy, being in danger of an 
 ancholysis, or stiff joint (the sinovia of her knee becoming hard by long 
 maiins), and having tried every remedy ; first, prayers and thanksgiving ; 
 then invocations to all the saints in heaven promiscuously ; then 
 particularly to every saint who had ever had a stiff leg before her ; then 
 touching it with all the relics of the convent, principally with the 
 thigh-bone of the man of Lystra, who had been impotent from his 
 youth ; then wrapping it up in her veil when she went to bed ; then 
 crossways her rosary ; then bringing in to her aid the secular arm and 
 
2S2 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. vil. 
 
 anointing it with oi.s and hot fat of animals ; then treating it with 
 emollient and resolving fomentations ; tlien with poultices of mirsh 
 mallows, mallows, bonus Henricus, white lilies, and fenugreek ; then 
 taking the woods — I mean the smoke of 'em — holding her scapulary 
 across her lap ; then decoctions of wild chicory, watercresses, chervil, 
 sweet cecily and cochlearia ; and nothing all this while answering, was 
 prevailed on at last to try the hot baths of Bourbon. So having first 
 obtained leave of the Visitor-General to take care of her existence, she 
 ordered all to be got ready for her journey. A novice of the convent, 
 of about seventeen, who had been troubled with a whitloe in her middle 
 finger, by sticking it constantly into the Abbess's cast poultices, &c. , had 
 gained such an interest, that, overlooking a sciatical old nun, who 
 might have been set up for ever by the hot baths of Bourbon, Margarita, 
 the little novice, was elected as the companion of the journey. 
 
 An old calesh belonging to the Abbess, lined with green frieze, was 
 ordered to be drawn out into the sun ; the gardener of the convent, 
 being chosen muleteer, led out the two old mules to clip the hair from 
 the rump ends of their tails, whilst a couple of lay-sisters were busied, 
 the one in darning the lining, and the other in sewing on the shreds of 
 yellow binding which the teeth of time had unravelled'; the under 
 gardener dressed the muleteer's hat in hot wine lees ; and a tailor sat 
 musically at it in a shed over against the convent, in assorting four 
 dozen of bells for the harness, whistling to each bell as he tied it on with 
 a thong. 
 
 The carpenter and the smith of Andouillets held a council of wheels ; 
 and by seven, the morning after, all looked spruce, and was ready at 
 the gate of the convent for the hot baths of Bourbon — two rows of the 
 unfortunate stood ready there an hour before. 
 
 The Abbess of Andouillets, supported by Margarita the novice, ad- 
 vanced slowly to the calesh, both clad in white, with their black rosaries 
 hanging at their breasts. 
 
 There was a simple solemnity in the contrast : they entered the 
 calesh ; the nuns in the same uniform, sweet emblem of innocence, each 
 occupied a window ; and as the Abbess and Margarita looked up — each 
 (the sciatical poor nun excepted) — each streamed out the end of her veil 
 in the air, then kissed the lily hand which let it go ; the good Abbess 
 and Margarita laid their hands saintways upon their breasts, looked up 
 to heaven, then to them, and looked " God bless you, dear sisters." 
 
 I declare I am interested in this story, and wish I had been there. 
 
 The gardener, who I shall now call the muleteer, was a little, hearty, 
 1)roadset, good-natured, chattering, toping kind of a fellow, who troubled 
 his head very little with the hows and whens of life, so had mortgaged a 
 month of his conventical wages in a borrachio, or leathern cask of wine, 
 which he had disposed behind the calesh with a large russet-coloured 
 riding-coat over it to guard it from the sun ; and as the weather was 
 hot, and he not a niggard of his labours, walking ten times more than 
 he rode, he found more occasions than those of nature to fall back to 
 the rear of his carriage ; 'till by frequent coming and going, it had so 
 happened that all his wine had leaked out at the legal vent of the 
 borrachio before one half of the journey was finished. 
 
 Man is a creature born to habitudes. The day had been sultry, the 
 evening was delicious ; the wine was generous, the Burgundian hill on 
 
#0L. vii.] TRISTRAM SHAND Y. 253 
 
 which it grew was steep ; a little tempting bush over the door of a cool 
 cottage at the foot of it hung vibrating in full harmony with the passions ; 
 a gentle air rustled distinctly through the leaves — " Come, come, thirsty 
 muleteer; come in." 
 
 The muleteer was a son of Adam — I need not say one word more. 
 He gave the mules, each of them, a sound lash, and looking to the 
 Abbess's and Margarita's face (as he did it), as much as to say " Here I 
 am," he gave a second good crack as much as to say to his mules " Get 
 on ; " so slinking behind, he entered the little inn at the foot of the hill. 
 
 The muleteer, as I told you, was a little, joyous, chirping fellow, who 
 thought not of to-morrow, nor of what had gone before, or what was to 
 follow it, provided he got but his scantling of Burgundy, and a little chit- 
 chat along with it ; so entering into a long conversation as how he was 
 chief gardener to the convent of Andouillets, &c. &c. ; and out of friend- 
 ship for the Abbess and Mademoiselle Margarita, who was only in her 
 novitiate, he had come along with them from the confines of Savoy, 
 &c. &c. ; and as how she had got a white swelling by her devotions, and 
 what a nation of herbs he had procured to mollify her humours, &c. &c. ;. 
 and that if the waters of Bourbon did not mend that leg she might as 
 well be lame of both, &c. &c. &c. He so contrived his slory as abso- 
 lutely to forget the heroine of it, and witii her, the little novice, and 
 what was a more ticklish point to be forgot than both, the two mules ; 
 who being creatures that take advantage of the world, inasmuch as 
 their parents took it of them, and they not being in a condition to 
 return the obligation downwards (as men and women and beasts are),, 
 they do it sicieway?, and longways, and backways, and up hill, and 
 down hill, and which way they can. Philosophers, with all their ethics, 
 have never considered this rightly ; how should the poor muleteer then, in 
 his cu[)S, consider it at all ? He did not in the least, 'tis time we do ; let 
 us leave him then in the vortex of his element, the happiest and most 
 thoughtless of mortal men, and for a moment let us look after the mules, 
 the Abbess, and Margarita. 
 
 By virtue of the muleteer's two last strokes, the mules had gone 
 quietly on, following their own consciences up the hill, 'till they had 
 conquered about one half of it ; when the elder of them, a shrewd crafty 
 old devil, at the turn of an angle, giving a side glance, and no muleteer 
 behind them — 
 
 **By my fig!" said she, swearing, *'I'll go no further." — "And 
 if I do," replied the other, *' they shall make a drum of my hide." 
 
 And so with one con-ent they slopped thus. 
 
 CHAPTER XXn. 
 
 "Get on with you," said the Abbess, 
 
 " Wh — ysh — ysh," cried Margarita. 
 
 " Sh — a — shu-u — shu — u — sh — aw," shaw'd the Abbess. 
 
 *'Whu — v — w — whew — w — w," whuv'd Margarita, pursing up her 
 sweet lips betwixt a hoot and a whistle. 
 
 ** Thump — thump— thump," obstreperated the Abbess of Andouil- 
 lets, with the end of her gold-headed cane against the bottom of the 
 calesh 
 
5S4 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. vit 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 "We are ruined and undone, my child," said the Abbess to Margarita; 
 ** we shall be here all night, we shall be plundered — — *-" 
 
 ** Sancta Maria ! " cried the Abbess (forgetting the O !) "why was I 
 governed by this wicked stiff joint ? why did I leave the convent of 
 Andouillets ? and why didst thou not suffer thy servant to go unpolluted 
 to her tomb? " 
 
 **0 my finger! my finger!" cried the novice, catching fire at the 
 word servant, **why was I not content to put it here, or there, any- 
 where, rather than be in this strait ? " 
 
 " Strait ! " said the Abbess. 
 
 ** Strait," said the novice ; for terror had struck their understandings, 
 the one knew not what she said, the other what she answered. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV, 
 
 ** My dear mother," quoth the novice, coming a little to herself, "there 
 are two certain words, which, I have been told, will force any horse, 
 or ass, or mule, to go up a hill whether he will or no ; be he never 
 so obstinate or ill-willed, the moment he hears them uttered, he 
 obeys. — "They are words magic!" cried the Abbess, in the utmost 
 horror. — " No," replied Margarita calmly, ** but they are words sinful." 
 — " What are they?" quoth the Abbess, interrupting her. — "They are sin- 
 ful in the first degree," answered Margarita ; *'they are mortal, and if we 
 
 die unabsolved of them, we shall both " — ** But you may pronounce 
 
 them to me," quoth the Abbess of Andouillets. — "They cannot, my 
 dear mother," said the novice, " be pronounced at all ; they will make 
 all the blood in one's body fly up into one's face." — "But you may 
 whisper them in my ear," quoth the Abbess. 
 
 ^ Heaven ! hadst thou no guardian angel to delegate to the inn at the 
 bottom of the hill ? Was there no generous and friendly spirit unem- 
 ployed — no agent in Nature, by some nionitory shivering, creeping along 
 the artery which led to his heart, to rouse the muleteer from his ban- 
 quet — no sweet minstrelsy to bring back the fair idea of the Abbess and 
 Margarita, with their black rosaries ? 
 
 Rouse ! rouse ! But 'tis too late. The horrid words are pronounced 
 this moment. And how to tell them? Ye who can speak of every- 
 thing existing with unpolluted lips, instruct me, guide me ! 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 *' All sins whatever," quoth the Abbess, turning casuist in the di^tm^s 
 they were under, " are held by the confessor of our convent to be either 
 mortal or venial. There is no further division. Now a venial sin, 
 being the slightest and least of all sins, being halved — by taking either 
 
Vol. Vli.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 255 
 
 only the half of it and leaving the rest — or by taking it all, and amicably 
 halving it betwixt yourself and another person, in course becomes 
 diluted to no sin at all. 
 
 " Now I see no sin saying bow, bou, bou, bou, bou, a hundred times 
 together; nor is there any turpitude in pronouncing the syllable, ger, 
 ger, ger, ger, ger, were it from our matins to our vespers. Therefore, 
 my dear daughter," continued the Abbess of And( uillets, ** I will say 
 bou, and thou shalt say ger ; and then alternately. As there is no more 
 sin in fou than in bou, thou shalt say fou, and I will come in (like fa, 
 sol, la, re, mi, ut, at our complines) with ter.'' Add Accordingly the 
 Abbess, giving the pitch-note, set off thus ; 
 
 Abbess, T " Bou, bou, bou." 
 
 Margarita, /"Ger, ger, ger." 
 
 Margarita, > "Fou, fou, fou." 
 
 Abbess, j * * Ter, ter, ter. " 
 
 The two mules acknowledged the notes by a mutual lash of their 
 tails, but it went no further. " 'Twill answer by-and-by," said the 
 novice. 
 
 Abbess, ") "Bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou." 
 
 Margarita, j" Ger, ger, ger, ger, ger, ger." 
 
 " Quicker still," cried Margarita. 
 
 " Fou, fou, fou, fou, fou, fou, fou, fou, fou." 
 
 " Quicker still," cried Margarita. 
 
 " Bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou." 
 
 "Quicker still — God preserve me !" said the Abbess. — ** They do 
 not understand us," cried Margarita. — " But the devil does," said the 
 Abbess of Andouillets. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 What a tract of country have I run ! How many degrees nearer to 
 the warm sun am I advanced, and how many fair and goodly cities 
 have I seen during the time you have been reading and reflecting, 
 madam, upon this story 1 There's Fontainebleau, and Sens, and Joigny, 
 and Auxerre, and Dijon the capital of Burgundy, and Challon, and 
 Macon the capital of the Maconese, and a score more upon the road to 
 Lyons. And now I have run them over, I might as well talk to you 
 of so many market-towns in the moon as tell you one word about them. 
 It will be this chapter at the least, if not both this and the next entirely 
 lost, do what I will. 
 
 * ' Why, 'tis a strange story, Tristram." 
 
 " Alas, madam ! had it been upon some melancholy lecture of the 
 Cross, the peace of meekness, or the contentment of resignation, I had 
 not been incommoded ; or had I thought of writing it upon the purer 
 abstractions of the soul, and that food of wisdom and holiness and con- 
 templation upon which the spirit of man, when separated from the 
 body, is to subsist for ever — you would have come with a better appetite 
 from it. 
 
 " I wish I never had wrote it ; but as I never blot anything out, let 
 U - use sotiic honest means to get it out of our heads directly. 
 
^S6 TRISTRAM SHAND K [vol. vit 
 
 *^ Pray reach me my foors cap. I fear you sit upon it, madam ; 'tis 
 under the cushion. I'll p\it it on." 
 
 "Bless me! you have had it upon your head this half-hour."— 
 ** There then let it stay, with a — 
 
 Fa-ra diddle di 
 
 And a fa-ri diddle- d 
 And a high-dum— dye-dum 
 
 Fiddle— dumb-c. 
 
 And now, madam, we may venture, I hope, a liltle to go on.' 
 
 CHAPTER XXVII. 
 
 All you need say of Fontainebleau (in case you are asked) is, that 
 it stands about forty miles (south something) from Paris, in the middle 
 of a large forest. That there is something great in it. That the king 
 goes there once, every two or three years, with his whole Court, for the 
 pleasure of the chase, and that, during that carnival of sporting, any 
 English gentleman of fashion (you need not forget yourself) may be 
 accommodated with a nag or two to partake of the sport, taking care 
 only not to out-gallop the king. 
 
 Though there are two reasons why you need not talk loud of this to 
 every one. 
 
 First, because 'twill make the said nags the harder to be got ; and, 
 
 Secondly, 'tis not a word of it true. — AUons ! 
 
 As for Sens, you may dispatch it in a word : 'tis an archiepiscopal 
 see. 
 
 For Joigny, the less, I think, one says of it, the better. 
 
 But for Auxerre, I could go on for ever : for in my grand tour through 
 Europe, in which, after all, my father (not caring to trust me with any 
 one) attended me himself, with my Uncle Toby and Trim, and Obadiah, 
 and indeed most of the family, except my mother, who being taken up 
 with a project of knitting my father a pair of large worsted breeches 
 (the thing is common sense), and she not caring to be put out of her way, 
 slie stayed at home at Shandy Hall, to keep things right during the 
 expedition ; in which, I say, my father stopping us two days at Auxerre, 
 and his researches being ever of such a nature that they would have 
 found fruit even in a desert, he has left me enough to say upon Auxerre ; 
 in short, wherever my father went, but 'twas more remarkably so in this 
 journey through France and Italy than in any other stages of his life, 
 his road seemed to lie so much on one side of that, wherein all other 
 travellers had gone before him ; he saw kings and courts, and silks of 
 all colours, in such strange lights, and his remarks and reasonings upon 
 the characters, the manners and customs of the countries we passed 
 over, were so opposite to those of all other mortal men, particularly 
 those of my Uncle Toby and Trim (to say nothing of myself) ; and 
 to crown all, the occurrences and scrapes which we were perpetually 
 meeting and getting into, in consequence of his systems and opiniatry, 
 they were of so odd, so mixed, and tragi-comical a contexture, that the 
 whole put together, it appears of so different a shade and tint from any 
 
VOL. VII.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 2-;r 
 
 tour of Europe which was ever executed, that I will venture to pro- 
 nounce the fault must be mine, and mine only, if it be not read by all 
 travellers and travel- readers, till travelling is no more ; or, which comes 
 to the same point, till the world finally takes it into its head, to stand 
 still. 
 
 But this rich bale is not to be opened now ; except a small threaa or 
 two of it, merely to unravel the mystery of my father's stay at 
 Auxerre. 
 
 As I have mentioned it, 'tis too slight to be kept suspended ; and 
 when 'tis wove in, there's an end of it. 
 
 ** We'll go, brother Toby," said my father, " whilst dinner is coddling, 
 to the Abbey of St. Germain, if it be only to see these bodies, of 
 which Monsieur Sequier has given such a recommenda'tion." — ** I'll go 
 see anybody," quoth my Uncle Toby ; for he was all compliance through 
 every step of the journey. — "Defend me !" said my father, "they are 
 all mummies." — *' Then one need not shave," quoth my Uncle Toby. — 
 " Shave, no !" cried my father, " 'twill he more like relations to go with 
 our beards on." — So out we sallied, the Corporal lending his master his 
 arm, and bringing up the rear to the Abbey of St. Germain. 
 
 ** Everything is very fine, and very rich, and very superb, and very 
 magnificent," said my father, addressing himself to the sacristan, who 
 who was a young brother of the order of Benedictines, " but our curiosity 
 has led us to see the bodies of which Monsieur Sequier has given the 
 world so exact a description." The sacristan made a bow, and lighting 
 a torch first, which he had always in the vestry ready for the purpose, he 
 led us into the tomb of St. Heribald. " This," said the sacristan, 
 laying his hand upon the tomb, " was a renowned prince of the house 
 of Bavaria, who, under the successive reigns of Charlemagne, Louis 
 le Debonair, and Charles the Bald, bore a great sway in the govern- 
 ment, and had a principal hand in bringing everything into order and 
 discipline. " 
 
 " Then he has been as great," said my uncle, "in the field as in the 
 cabinet. I dare say he has been a gallant soldier." — " He was a monk," 
 said the sacristan. 
 
 My Uncle Toby and Trim sought comfort in each other's faces, but 
 found it not ; my father hated a monk, and the very smell of a monk 
 worse than all the devils in hell ; yet the shot hitting my Uncle Toby 
 and Trim so much harder than him, 'twas a relative triumph ; and put 
 him into the gayest humour in the world. 
 
 " And pray what do you call this gentleman?" quotli my father, rather 
 sportingly. — " This tomb, " said the young Benedictine, looking down- 
 wards, "contains the bones of St. Maxima, who came from Ravenna on 
 purpose to touch the body " 
 
 " Of St. Maximus," said my father, popping in with his saint beibre 
 him; "they were two of the greatest saints in the whole martyrolog}'," 
 added my father. — "Excuse me," said the sacristan, "'twas to touch 
 the bones of St. Germain, the builder of the abbey." — "And what did 
 she get by it ?" said my Uncle Toby. — " What does any woman get by 
 it?" said my father. — " Martyrdom," replied the young Benedictine, 
 making a bow down to the ground, and uttering the word with so 
 humble but decisive a cadence, it disarmed my father for a moment. — • 
 *"Tis supposed," continued the Benedictine, *'that St. Maxima has lain 
 
258 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. vii. 
 
 in this tomb four hundred years, and two hundred before her canoniza- 
 tion." — ** 'Tis but a slow rise, brother Toby," quoth my father, *' in this 
 self-same army of martyrs." — "A desperate slow one, an' please your 
 honour," said Trim, ** unless one could purchase." — **I should rather 
 sell out entirely," quoth my Uncle Toby. — *' I am pretty much of your 
 opinion, brother Toby," said my father. 
 
 " Poor St. Maxima ! " said my Uncle Toby, low to himself as we 
 turned from her tomb. — " She was one of the fairest and most beautiful 
 ladies either of Italy or France," continued the sacristan. — " But who 
 the deuce has got lain down here, besides her ? " quoth my father, point- 
 ing with his cane to a large tomb as we walked on. — ** It is St. Optat, 
 Sir," answered the sacristan. — " And properly is St. Optat placed, " said 
 my father. "And what is St. Optat's story? "continued he. — "St. 
 Optat," replied the sacristian, "was a bisliop." 
 
 * * I thought so, by heaven ! " cried my father, interrupting him ; 
 "St. Optat! how should St. Optat fail!" So snatching out his 
 pocket-book, and the young Benedictine holding him the torch as 
 he wrote, he set it down as a new prop to his system of Christian 
 names, and I will be bold to say, so disinterested was he in the search 
 of truth that had he found a treasure in St. Optat's tomb, it would not 
 have made him half so rich : 'twas as successful a short visit as ever was 
 paid to the dead ; and so highly was his fancy pleased with all that 
 had passed in it, that he determined at once to stay another day in 
 Auxerre. 
 
 " I'll see the rest of these good genti-y to-morrow," said my father, 
 as we crossed over the square. — " And while you are paying that visit, 
 brother Shandy," quoth my Uncle Toby, *' the Corporal and I will 
 mount the ramparts." 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 
 Now this is the most puzzled skein of all, for in this last cliapter, as far 
 at least as it has helped me through Auxerre, I have been getting for- 
 wards in two different journeys together, and with the same dash of the 
 pen, for I have got entirely out of Auxerre in this journey which I am 
 writing now, and I am got half-way out of Auxerre in that which I 
 shall write hereafter. There is but a certain degree o^ perfection in 
 everything ; and by pushing at something beyond that, \ have brought 
 myself into such a situation as no traveller ever stood bcjx^re me ; for 
 I am this moment walking across the market-place of Auxerre with 
 my father and my Uncle Toby, in our way back to dinner, and I am 
 this moment also entering Lyons with my postchaise broke into a 
 thousand pieces, and I am moreover this moment in a handsome 
 pavilion biiilt by Pringello,* upon the banks of the Garonne, which 
 Monsieur Sligniac has lent me, and where I now sit rhapsodizing all 
 these affairs. 
 
 Let me collect myself and pursue my journey. 
 
 * The same Don Pringello, the celebrated Spanish architect, of whom my cousin 
 Antony has made such honourable mention in a scholium to the tale inscribed to his 
 name. 
 
VOL. VII.] TRISTRAM SHAND V. 25$ 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 ** I AM glad of it)" said I, settling the account with myself as I walked 
 into Lyons, my chaise being all laid higgledy-piggledy with my baggage 
 in a cart, which was moving slowly before me. *' I am heartily glad/' 
 said I, " that 'tis all broke to pieces ; for now I can go directly by water 
 to Avignon, which will carry me on a hundred and twenty miles of my 
 journey, and not cost me seven livres ; and from thence," continued I, 
 bringing forwards the account, *' I can hire a couple of mules, or asses, 
 if I like (for nobody knows me), and cross the plains of Languedoc for 
 almost nothing. I shall gain four hundred livres by the misfortune 
 clear into my purse, and pleasure worth — worth double the money by it. 
 With what velocity,'* continued I, clapping my two hands together, 
 ** shall I fly down the rapid Rhone, with the Vivares on my right hand 
 and Dauphiny on my left, scarce seeing the ancient cities of Vienne, 
 Valence, and Vivieres. What a flame will it rekindle in the lamp, to 
 snatch a blushing grape from the Hermitage and Cote Roti, as I shoot 
 by the foot of them ! And what a fresh spring in the blood to behold 
 upon the banks, advancing and retiring, the castles of romance, whence 
 courteous knights have whilome rescued the distressed, and see verti- 
 ginous, the rocks, the mountains, the cataracts, and all the hurry which 
 Nature is in with all her great works about." 
 
 As I went on thus methought my chaise, the wreck of wliich looked 
 stately enough at the first, insensibly grew less and less in its 
 size. The freshness of the painting was no more, the gilding lost its 
 lustre, and the whole affair appeared so poor in my eyes, so sorry, so 
 contemptible, and, in a word, so much worse than the Abbess of 
 Andouillets's itself, that I was just opening my mouth to give it to the 
 devil, when a pert vamping chaise-undertaker, stepping nimbly across 
 the street, demanded if monsieur would have his chaise refitted. " No, 
 no," said I, shaking my head sideways. — " Would monsieur choose to 
 sell it?" rejoined the undertaker. — "With all my soul," said I ; "the 
 iron work is worth forty livres, and the glasses worth forty more, and 
 the leather you may talce to live on." 
 
 ** What a mine of wealth," quoth I, as he counted me the money, 
 ** has this post-chaise brought me in ! " And this is my usual method 
 of book-keeping — at least with the disasters of life — making a penny of 
 every one of them as they happen to me. 
 
 For which reason I think myself inexcusable for blaming Fortune so 
 often as I have done for pelting me all my life long, like an ungracious 
 duchess as I called her, with so many small evils. Surely if I have any 
 cause to be angry with her, 'tis that she has not sent me great ones ; a 
 score of good cursed, bouncing losses would have been as good as a 
 pension to me. 
 
 One of a hundred a year or so is all I wish. I would not be at the 
 plague of paying land-tax for a larger. 
 
26o TRISTRAM SHANDY. [v^OL, VII. 
 
 CHAPTER XXX. 
 
 To those who call vexations, vexatiofts, as knowing what they are, there 
 could not be a greater than to be the best part ot a day in Lyons, the 
 most opulent and flourishing city in France, enriched with the most 
 fragments of antiquity, and not be able to see it. To be withheld upon 
 any account must be a vexation ; but to be y'ithheld by a vexati jn must 
 certainly be what philosophy justly calls 
 
 Vexation upon Vexation. 
 
 I had got my two dishes of milk coffee — which, by-the-by, is ex- 
 cellently good for a consumption, but you must boil the milk and coffee 
 together, otherwise 'tis only coffee and milk — and as it was no more 
 than eight in the morning, and the boat did not go off till noon, I had 
 time to see enough of Lyons to tire the patience of all the friends I had 
 in the world with it. I will take a walk to the cathedral, said I, look- 
 ing at my list, and see the wonderful mechanism of this great clock of 
 Lippius of Basle, in the first place. 
 
 Now, of all things in the world, I understand the least of mechanism. 
 I have neither genius, nor taste, nor fancy ; and have a brain so entirely 
 inapt for everything of that kind, that I solemnly declare I was never 
 yet able to comprehend the principles of motion of a squirrel cage or a 
 common knife-grinder's wheel ; though I have many an hour of my life 
 looked up with great devotion at the one, and stood by with as much 
 patience as any Christian ever could do at the other. 
 
 *' I'll go see the surprising movements of this great clock," said T, 
 ** the very first thing I do ; and then I will pay a visit to the great 
 libraiy of the Jesuits, and procure, if possible, a sight of the thirty 
 volumes of the general history of China, wrote, not in the Tartarian, but 
 in the Chinese language, and in the Chinese character too. 
 
 Now I almost know as little] of the Chinese language as I do of the 
 mechanism of Lippius's clockwork ; so why those should have jostled 
 themselves into the two first articles of my list I leave to the curious as 
 a problem of Nature. I own it looks like one of her ladyship's 
 obliquities ; and they who court her are interested in finding out her 
 humours as much as I. 
 
 ** When these curiosities are seen," quoth T, half addressing myself 
 to my valet de piace^ who stood behind me, " 'twill be no hurt if we 
 go to the church of St. Ireneus, and see the pillar to which Christ was 
 tied; and after that the house where Pontius Pilate lived." — " 'Twas 
 at the next town," said the vald de place, *' at Vienne." — *' I am glad 
 of it," said I, rising briskly from my chair and walking across the room 
 with strides twice as long as my usual pace, " for so much the sooner 
 sliall I be at the tomb of the two lovers." 
 
 What was the cause of this movement, and why I took such long 
 strides in uttering this, I might leave to the curious too ; but as no 
 principle of clockwork is concerned in it, 'twill be as well for the reader 
 if I explain it myself. 
 
VOL. vii.] TRISTRAM SHAND K 261 
 
 CHAPTER XXXI. 
 
 O ! THERE is a sweet era in the life of man, when, the brain being 
 tender and fibrillous, and more like pap than anything else, a story 
 read of two fond lovers separated from each other by cruel parents, and 
 by still more cruel destiny — 
 
 Amandus — he, 
 
 Amanda — she, 
 
 each ignorant of the other's course- 
 He-— east, 
 She — west, 
 
 Amandus taken captive by the Turks, and carried to the Emperor of 
 Morocco's court, where the Princess of Morocco,^ falling in love with 
 him, keeps him twenty years in prison for the love of his Amanda, — 
 
 She (Amanda) all the time wandering barefoot, and with dishevelled 
 hair, o'er rocks and mountains, inquiring for " Amandus ! Amandus i 
 Amandus ! " making every hill and valley to echo back his name, 
 
 "Amandus ! Amandus!" 
 
 at every town and city sitting down forlorn at the gate, ** Has Amanda?, 
 has my Amandus, entered ? " till, going round and round and round 
 the world, chance unexpectedly bringing them at the same moment of 
 the night, though by different ways, to the gate of Lyons, their native 
 city, and each in well-known accents calling out aloud, 
 
 " Is Amandus ) , mi -i- p „ 
 
 " Is my Amanda j 
 
 they fly into each other's arms, and both drop down dead for joy. 
 
 There is a soft era in every gentle mortal's life, where such a story 
 affords more pabulum to the brain than all the frusts, and crusts, and 
 rusts of antiquity which travellers can cook up for it. 
 
 'Twas all that stuck on the right side of the cuUander in my own, of 
 what Spon and others, in their accounts of Lyons, had strained into it ; 
 and finding, moreover, in some itinerary — but in what, God knows — that, 
 sacred to the fidelity of Amandus and Amanda, a tomb was built 
 without the gates, where to this hour lovers call upon them to aMest 
 their troths, I never could get into a scrape of that kind in my life 
 but this tomb of the lovers would somehow or other come rci at the 
 close ; nay, such a kind of empire had it established over me that I 
 could seldom think or speak of Lyons — and sometimes not so much as 
 see even a Lyons waistcoat — but this remnant of antiquity would 
 present itself to my fancy, and I have often said, in my wild way of 
 running on, though I fear with some irreverence, I thought this shrine 
 (neglected as it was) as valuable as that at Mecca, and so little short, 
 except in wealth, of the Santa Casa itself, that some time or other I 
 
 I 2 
 
362 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [VOL.VII. 
 
 would go a pilgrimage (though I had no other business at Lyons) on 
 purpose to pay it a visit. 
 
 Ill my list, therefore, of vivcnda at Lyons, this, though last, was 
 not, you see, least. So, taking a dozen or two of longer strides than 
 usual across my room, just while it pas.^ed my brain, I walked down 
 calmly into the basse cour^ in order to sally forth, and having called 
 for my bill (as it was uncertain vvliether I should return to my inn), I had 
 paid it — had, moreover, given the maid ten sous — and was just receiving 
 the dernier compliments of Monsieur Le Blanc for a pleasant voyage 
 down the Rhone, when I was stopped at the gate. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIL 
 
 'TWAS by a poor ass, who had just turned in, with a couple of large 
 panniers upon his back, to collect eleemosynary turnip-tops and 
 cabbage-leaves, and stood dubious, with his two forefeet on the inside 
 of the threshold, and with his two hinder feet towards the street, as 
 not knowing very well whether he was to go in or no. 
 
 Now, 'tis an animal, be in what hurry I may, I cannot bear to strike. 
 There is a patient endurance of suffering wrote so unaffectedly in his 
 looks and carriage which pleads so mightily for him that it always 
 disarms me, and to that degree that I do not like to speak unkindly to 
 him. On the contrary, meet him where I wdll — whether in town oi 
 country, in cart or under panniers, whether in liberty or bondage — I 
 have ever something civil to say to him on my part. And as one word 
 begets another (if he has as little to do as I), I generally fall into con- 
 versation with him ; and surely never is my ima<;ination so busy as in 
 framing his responses from the etchings of his countenance, and where 
 those cany me not deep enough, in flying from my own heart into his, 
 and seeing what is natural for an ass to think, as well as a man, upon 
 the occasion. In truth, it is the only creature of all the classes of beings 
 below me with whom I can do this. For parrots, jackdaws, &c., I 
 never exchange a word with them ; nor with the apes, &c., for pretty near 
 the same reason. They act by rote, as the others speak by it, and 
 equally make me silent. Nay, my dog and my cat, though I value 
 them both (and for my dog he would speak if he could), yet, somehow 
 or other, they neither of them possess the talents for conversation. I 
 can make nothing of a discourse with them beyond the proposition, the 
 reply, and rejoinder, which terminated my father's and my mother's 
 conversations in his beds of justice ; and those uttered, there's an end 
 of the dialogue. 
 
 But with an ass I can commune for ever. 
 
 "Come, Honesty," said I, seeing it was impracticable to pass 
 betwixt him and the gate, ** art thou for coming in or going out ?" 
 
 The ass twisted his head round to look up the street. 
 
 "Well," replied I, ** we'll wait a minute for thy driver." 
 
 He turned his head thoughtfully about, and looked wistfully the oppo- 
 site way. 
 
 " I understand thee perfectly," answered I. "If thou takest a wrong 
 step in this affair he will cudgel thee to death. Well, a minute is but 
 
VOL. VII.] TRISTRAM SHAND K 263 
 
 a minute, and if it saves a feiiow-creature a drubbing, it shall not be set 
 down as ill spent." 
 
 He was eating the stem of an artichoke as this discourse went on ; 
 and in the little peevish contentions of nature, betwixt hunger and un- 
 savouriness, had dropped it out of his mouth half-a-dozeu times and 
 picked it up again. " God help thee, Jack," said I, " thou hast a bitter 
 breakfast on't ; and many a bitter day's labour and many a bitter blow^, 
 I fear, for its wages. 'Tis all, all bitterness to thee, whatever life is to 
 others. And now thy mouth, if one knew the truth of it, is as bitter, 
 I dare say, as soot [for he had cast aside the stem], and thou hast not 
 a friend, perhaps, in all this world that will give thee a macaroon." In 
 saying this I pulled out a paper of 'em which I had just purchased, and 
 gave him one. And at this moment that I am telling it, my heart 
 smites me that there was more pleasantry in the conceit of seeing how 
 an ass would eat a macaroon than of benevolence in giving him one, 
 wliich presided in the act. 
 
 When the ass had eaten his macaroon, I pressed him to come in. The 
 poor beast was heavy loaded ; his legs seemed to tremble under hin:\ 
 He hung rather backwards, and as I pulled at his halter, it broke shoi]( 
 in my hand. He look'd up pensive in my face. " Don't thrash m^ 
 with it; but if you will, you may."— "If I do," said I, '* I'll b| 
 d d." 
 
 The word was but one half of it pronounced, like the Abbess ot 
 Andouillets's (so there was no sin in it), when a person coming in, let 
 fail a thundering bastinado upon the poor devil's crupper, which put 
 an end to the ceremony. 
 
 ** Out upon itl^'' cried I, but the interjection was equivocal, and, \ 
 think, wrong placed too ; for the end of an osier, which had started out 
 from the contexture of the ass's pannier, had caught hold of my breeches 
 pocket as he rush'd by me, and rent it hi the most disastrous directfon 
 you can imagine, so that the 
 
 Out upon it! in my opinion, should have come in here ; but this I 
 leavQ to be settled by 
 
 The Reviewers of my Breeches, 
 
 which I have brought over along with me for that purpose. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII. 
 
 When all was set to rights, I came downstairs again into the basse 
 cour with my valet de place ^ in order to sally out towards the tomb of 
 the two lovers, &c., and was a second time stopped at the gate — not by 
 the ass, but by the person who struck him ; and who by that time 
 had taken possession (as is not uncommon after a defeat) of th very 
 spot of ground where the ass stood. 
 
 It was a commissary sent to me from the post-office, with a rescript 
 in his hand for the payment of some six livres odd sous. 
 
 *' Upon wliftt account?*' said I. — " 'Tis upon the part of the king," 
 neplied the commissary, heaving up both his shoulders. 
 * *' My good friend," quoth I, " as sure as I am I, and you are you " 
 
 " And who are you? " said he. — " Don't puzzle me," said I. 
 
264 TRISTRAM SHAND V. [voL. vil. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV. 
 
 " But it is an indubitable verity," continued I, addressing myself to 
 the commissary, changing only the form of my asseveration, '* that I 
 owe the King of France nothing but my good-will ; for he is a very 
 honest man, and I wish him all health and pastime in the world." 
 
 ^^ Pardonnez w^/," replied the commissary, ** you are indebted to 
 him six livres four sous for the next post from hence to St. Fons, in 
 your route to Avignon, which being a post- royal, you pay double for 
 the horses and postillion, otherwise 'twould have amounted to no more 
 than three livres two sous." 
 
 " Beit I don't go by land," said I. 
 
 ** You may if you please," replied the commissary. 
 
 ** Your most obedient servant," said I, making him a low bow. 
 
 The commissary, with all the sincerity of grave good breeding, made 
 me one as low again. I never was more disconcerted with a bow in 
 my life. 
 
 " The devil take the serious character of tliese people ! " quoth I. 
 (Aside) — " They understand no more of irony than this " 
 
 The comparison v,'as standing close by with his panniers, but some- 
 thing sealed up my lips, I could not pronounce the name. 
 
 ** Sir," said I, collecting myself, "it is not my intention to take 
 post." 
 
 " But you may," said he, persisting in his first reply ; "you may take 
 post if you choose." 
 
 '* And I may take salt to my pickled herring," said I, " if I choose. 
 But I do not choose." 
 
 *' But you must pay for it whether you do or no." 
 
 " Ay, for the salt ! " said I. "I know." 
 
 " And for the post too," added he. 
 
 " Defend me! " cried I. " I travel by water ; I am going dowiT the 
 Rhone this very afternoon ; my baggage is m the boat, and I have 
 actually paid nine livres for my passr.ge." 
 
 ** Cest tout egal — 'tis all one," said he. 
 
 * ' Bo7i Dieu ! what, pay for the way I go and for the way I do not 
 go !" 
 
 " Cesi tout egaly'^ replied the commissary. 
 
 '* The devil it is ! " said I ; " but 1 will go to ten thousand Bastiles 
 first.'' 
 
 "O England, England! thou land of liberty and climate of good 
 sense, thou tenderest of mothers and gentlest of nurses ! " cried, I kneeling 
 upon one knee as I was beginning my apostrophe — 
 
 When, the director of Madame Le Blanc's conscience coming in at that 
 instant, and seeing a person in black with a face as pale as ashes at his 
 devotions, looking still paler by the contrast and distress of his drapery, 
 »feked if I stood in want of the aids of the Church. 
 
 " I go by water," said I, " and here's another will be for making me 
 pay for going by oil. 
 
VOL. vit] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 26^ 
 
 CHAPTER XXXV. 
 
 As 1 perceived tlie commissary of the post-office would have his six 
 livres four sons, I had notliing else for it but to say some smart thing 
 upon the occasion worth the money. 
 
 And so I set off thus : 
 
 *' And i)ray, Mr. Commissary, by what law of courtesy is a defence- 
 less stranger to be used just the reverse from what you use a Frenchman 
 in this matter ? " 
 
 " By no means," said he. 
 
 *' Excuse me," said I, *'for you have begun, sir, with first tearing off 
 my breeches, and now you want my pocket. Whereas, had you first 
 taken my pocket, as you do with your own people, and then left me 
 bare-legged after, I had been a beast to have complained. As it is — 
 
 ** 'Tis contrary to the law of nature. 
 
 ** 'Tis contrary to reason. 
 
 ** 'Tis contrary to the gospel " 
 
 " But not to this," said he^ putting a printed paper into my hand. 
 
 Par le Roy. 
 
 **'Tis a pithy prolegomenon," quoth I; and so read on : * * 
 4t* ****** 
 
 " By all which it appears," quoth I, having read it over a little too 
 rapidly, ** that if a man sets out in a post-chaise from Paris, he must go 
 on travelling in one all the days of his life, or pay for it." — "Excuse 
 me," said the commissary, *' the spirit of the ordinance is this, that if 
 you set out with an intention of running post from Paris to Avignon, &c., 
 you shall not change that intention or mode of travelling without first 
 satisfying the fermiers for two posts further than the place you repent at, 
 and 'tis founded," continued he, "upon this, that the revenues are not 
 to fall short through your fickleness." 
 
 "Oh, by heavens!" cried I, '*if fickleness is taxable in France, we 
 have nothing to do but to make the best peace with you we can." 
 
 And so the peace ivas 7uade. 
 
 And if it is a bad one, as Tiistiam Shandy laid the corner-stone of it, 
 nobody but Tristram Shandy ought to be hanged. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVI. 
 
 Though I was sensible I had said as many clever things to the com- 
 missary as came to six livres four sous, -yet I was determined to note 
 down the imposition amongst my remarks before I retired from the 
 place; so putting my hand into my coat-pocket for my remarks (which^ 
 
1266 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vot. Vli. 
 
 by-the-by, may be a caution to travellers to take a little more care of 
 their remarks for the future) my remarks were stolen. Never did 
 sorry traveller make such a pother and racket about his remarks as I 
 did about mine upon the occasion. 
 
 ** Heaven, earth, sea, fire ! " cried I, calling in everything to my aid 
 but what I should, " my remarks are stolen ! What shall 1 do? Mr. 
 Commissary, pray did I drop any remarks as 1 stood beside you ? " 
 
 *' You dropped a good many very singular ones," replied lie. " Pooh ! *' 
 saidl^ ** those were but a few, not worth above six livres two sous ; but 
 these are a large parcel." — He shook his head, — " Monsieur le Blanc, 
 Madame le Blanc, did you see any papers of mine ? You, maid of the 
 house, run up stairs ; Fran9ois, run up after her. I must have my 
 remarks, they were the best remarks," cried I, ** that ever were made 
 — the wisest, tlie wittiest. What shall I do ? Which way shall I turn 
 myself? " 
 
 Sancho Panza, when he lost his ass's furniture, did not exclaim more 
 bitterly. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVIL 
 
 When the first transport was over, and the registers of the brain were 
 beginning to get a little out of the confusion into which this jumble of 
 cross accidents had cast tliem, it then presently occurred to me that I 
 had left my remarks in the pocket of the chaise, and that in selling my 
 chaise I had sold my remarks along with it to the chaise-vamper. 
 
 I leave this void space that the reader may swear 
 into it any oath that he is most accustomed to. For my own part, if 
 ever I Swore a whole oath into a vacancy in my life, I think it was 
 into that. * *r * * ^ said I. And so my remarks through France, 
 which were as full of wit as an egg is full of meat, and as well worth 
 four hundred guineas as the said egg is worth a penny, have I been 
 selling here to a chaise-vamper for four louis d'ors, and giving him a 
 post-chaise, by heaven, worth six into the bargain. Had it been to 
 Dodsley or Becket, or any creditable bookseller, who was either leaving 
 off business and wanted a post-chaise, or who was beginning it and 
 wanted my remarks, and two or three guineas along with them, I could 
 have borne it ; but to a chaise-vamper ! " Show me to him this 
 moment, Fran9ois," said I. The valet de place put on his hat and led 
 the way ; and I pulled off mine as I passed the commissioner, and 
 followed him. 
 
 I 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVHI. 
 
 When we arrived at the chaise-vamper's house, both the house and 
 the shop were shut up ; it was the 8th of September, the nativity of 
 . tjie blessed Virgin Mary, mother of God. 
 
 Tantarra-ra-tan-tivi ! The whole world was going out a Ma^ -poling 
 •—frisking here, capering there, nobody cared a button for me or my 
 remarks \ so X sat me down upon a bench by the door, philoso^ hizing 
 
VOL. VIL] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 267 
 
 upon my condition. By a better fate than usually attends me, I 
 had not waited half an hour, when the mistress came in, to take the 
 papilliotes from off her hair, before she went to the May-poles. 
 
 The French women, by-the-by, love May-poles d la folie, that i^, as 
 much as their matins ; give 'em but a May-pole, whether in May, Jui-e, 
 July, or September — they never count the times — down it goes ; 'tis 
 meat, drink, washing, and lodging to 'em — and had we but the policy, 
 an' please your worships (as wood is a little scarce in France) to send 
 them but plenty of May-poles 
 
 The women would set them up; and when they had done, they 
 would dance round them (and the men for company) 'till they were 
 all Wind. 
 
 The wife of the chaise-vamper stepped in, I told you, to take the 
 papilliotes from off her hair — the toilet stands still for no man — so she 
 jerked off her cap, to begin with them as she opened the door, in doing 
 which one of them fell upon the ground. I mstantly saw it was my 
 own writing. 
 
 '*0 Seigneur ! " cried I, **you have got all my remarks upon your 
 head, madam 1 " — " jTen suis bien 77iortifiee^^ said she. 'Tis well, thinks I, 
 they have stuck there, for could they have gone deeper, they would 
 have made such confusion in a French woman's noddle, she had better 
 have gone with it unfrizzled to the day of eternity. 
 
 " Teitcz,''^ said she; so without any idea of the nature of my suffering, 
 he took them from her curls, and put them gravely, one by one, into 
 my hat ; one was twisted this way, another twisted that : " Ay ! by my 
 faith ; and when they are published,'' quoth I, 
 
 " They will be worse twisted still." 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIX. 
 
 ** And now for Lippius's clock ! " said I, with the air of a man who 
 had got through all his difficulties. " Nothing can prevent us seeing that, 
 and the Chinese history, &c., except the time," said Francois, "for 'tis 
 almost eleven." — ** Then we must speed the faster," said I, striding it 
 away to the cathedral. 
 
 I cannot say, in my heart, that it gave me any concern in being told 
 by one of the minor canons, as I was entering the west door, that 
 Lippius's great clock was all out of joints, and had not gone for some 
 years. It will give me the more time, thought I, to peruse the Chinese 
 history ; and besides I shall be able to give the world a better account 
 of the clock in its decay, than I could have done in its flourishing 
 condition. 
 
 And so away I posted to the college of the Jesuits. 
 
 Now it is with the project of getting a peep at the history of China 
 in Chinese characters, as with many others I could mention, which 
 strike the fancy only at a distance ; for as I came nearer and nearer to 
 the point, my blood cooled, the freak gradually went off, till at length 
 I would not have given a cherry-stone to have it gratified. The truth 
 was, my time was short, and my heart was at the tomb of the lovers. 
 " 1 wish to God," said I, as I got the rapper m my hand, *' that the 
 Jfey of the library m<iy l>e but lost ? " It fell out as well. 
 
268 TRISTRAM SHAND K [vol. vil. 
 
 For all the Jesuits had got the cholic, and to that degree, as never 
 was known in the memory of the oldest practitioner. 
 
 CHAPTER XL. 
 
 As I knew the geography of the tomb of the lovers as well as if I had 
 lived twenty years in Lyons, nnmely, that it was upon the turning of 
 my right hand, just without the gate, leading to the Fauxbourg de Vaise, 
 I dispatched Fran9ois to the boat, that I might pay the homage I so 
 long owed it, without a witness of my weakness. I walked with all 
 imaginable joy towards the place ; when I saw the gate which inter- 
 cepted the tomb, my heart glowed within me. 
 
 " Tender and faithful spirits ! " cried I, addressing myself to Amandus 
 and Amanda, **long, long have I tarried to drop this tear upon your 
 tomb — I come — I come." 
 
 When I came there was no tomb to drop it upon. 
 
 What would I have given for my Uncle Toby to have whistled *' Lillo- 
 buUero." 
 
 CHAPTER XLL 
 
 No matter how or in what mood, but I flew from the tomb of the 
 lovers — or, rather, I did not fly from it, for there was no such thing 
 existing — and just got time enough to the boat to save my passage ; and 
 ere I had sailed a hundred yards the Rhone and the Saon met together, 
 and carried me down merrily betwixt them. 
 
 But I have described this voyage down the Rh6ne before I made it. 
 
 So now I am at Avignon, and as there is nothing to see but the old 
 house in which the Duke of Orm.ond resided, and nothing to stop me 
 but a short remark upon the place, in three minutes you will see me 
 crossing the bridge upon a mule, with Francois upon a horse with my 
 portmanteau behind him, and the owner of both striding the way before 
 us with a long gun upon his shoulder and a sword under his arm, lest 
 perad venture we should run away with his cattle. Had you seen my 
 breeches in entering Avignon — though you'd have seen them better, I 
 think, as I mounted — you would not have thought the precaution amiss, 
 or found in your heart to have taken it in dudgeon. For my own part, 
 I took it most kindly, and determined to make him a present of them, 
 when we got to the end of our journey, for the trouble they had put him 
 to of arming himself at all points against them. 
 
 Before I go further let me get rid of my remark upon Avignon, which 
 is this : That I think it wrong, merely because a man's hat has been 
 blown off" his head by chance the first night he comes to Avigncn, that 
 he should therefore say, " Avignon is more subject to high winds than 
 any town in all France ; " for which reason I laid no stress upon the 
 accident till I had inquired of the master of the inn about it, who telling 
 me seriously it was so, and hearing, moreover, the windiness of Avignon 
 spoke of in the country about as a proverb, I set it down merely to ask 
 the learned what can be the cause— the consequences I saw, for they are 
 
VOL. VII.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 269 
 
 all dukes, marquises, and counts there — the deuce a baron in all Avignon 
 — so that there is scarce any talking to them on a windy day. 
 
 " Prithee, friend," said I, " take hold of my mule for a moment '' — 
 for I wanted to pull off one of my jack -boots which hurt my heel. The 
 man was standing quite idle at the door of the inn, and as I had taken 
 It into my head he was some way concerned about the house or stable, 
 I put the bridle into his hand, so began with my boot. When I had 
 finished the affair, I turned about to take the mule from the man and 
 <>hank him. 
 
 But Monsieur le Marquis had walked in. 
 
 CHAPTER XLTI. 
 
 I HAD now the whole south of France, from the banks of the Rh6ne to 
 those of the Garonne, to traverse upon my mule at my own leisure — at 
 my own leisure — for I had left Death, the Lord knows, and He only, 
 how far behind me. ** I have followed many a man through France," 
 quoth he, "but never at this mettlesome rate." Still he followed, and 
 still I fled him, but I fled him cheerfully ; still he pursued, but, like one 
 who pursued his prey without hope, as he lagged, every step he lost 
 softened his looks. Why should I fly him at this rate ? 
 
 So, notwithstanding all the commissary of the post-ofhce had said, I 
 changed the mode of my travelling once more ; and after so precipitate 
 and rattling a course as I had run, I flattered my fancy with thinking 
 of my mule, and that I should traverse the rich plains of Languedo(? 
 upon his back as slowly as foot could fall. 
 
 . There is nothing more pleasing to a traveller, or more terrible to 
 travel- writers, than a large rich plain, especially if it is without great 
 rivers or bridges, and presents nothing to the eye but one unvaried pic- 
 ture of plenty ; for after they have once told you that 'tis delicious or 
 delightful (as the case happens), that the soil was grateful, iand that 
 
 Nature pours out all her abundance, &c they have then a large 
 
 plain upon their hands which they know not what to do with, and 
 which is of little or no use to them but to carry them to some town, 
 and that town, perhaps, little more but a new place to start from to the 
 next plain, and so on. 
 
 This is most terrible work ; judge if I don't manage my plains 
 better. 
 / 
 
 * , CHAPTER XLHI. 
 
 I HAD not gone above two leagues and a half, before the man with his 
 gun began to look at his priming. 
 
 I had three several times loitered terribly behind ; half a mile at least 
 every time ; once, in deep conference with a drum-maker, who was 
 making drums for the fairs of Baucaira and Tarascone. I did not 
 understand the principles. 
 
 The second time, I cannot so properly say, I stopped ; for, meeting a 
 couple of Franciscans straitened more for time than myself, and not 
 
576 TRISTl^A M SHAND K. [vol. vir. 
 
 being able to get to the bottom of what I was about, 1 had turned back 
 with them. 
 
 The third was an affair of trade with a gossip, for a hand-basket 
 of Provence figs for four sous ; this would have been transacted at once, 
 but for a case of conscience at the close of it ; for when the figs were 
 paid for it turned out that there were two dozen of eggs covered over 
 with vine-leaves at the bottom of the basket ; as I had no intention of 
 buying eggs, I made no sort of claim of them, as for the space they had 
 eccupied, what signified it ? I had figs enough for my money. 
 
 But it was my intention to have the basket, it was the gossip's 
 intention to keep it, without which she could do nothing with her eggs ; 
 and unless I had the basket, I could do as little with my figs, which 
 were too ripe already, and most of 'em burst at the side ; this brought 
 on a short contention, which terminated in sundry proposals, what we 
 should both do. 
 
 How we disposed of our eggs and figs, I defy you, or the devil him- 
 self, had he not been there (which I am persuaded he was), to form the 
 least probable conjecture. You will read the whole of it, not this year, 
 for I am hastening to the story of my Uncle Toby's amours ; but you 
 will read it in the collection of those which have arose out of the journey 
 across this plain, and which, therefore, I call my 
 
 PLAIN STORIES. 
 
 How far my pen has been fatigued like those of other travellers, in 
 this journey of it, over so barren a tract, the world must judge ; but the 
 traces of it, which are now aU set a- vibrating together this moment, tell 
 me 'tis the most fruitful and busy period of my life ; for as I had made 
 no convention with my man with the gun as to time, by stopping and 
 talking to every soul I met who was not in a full trot, joining all parties 
 before me, waiting for every soul behind, hailing all those who were 
 coming through cross-roads, arresting all kinds of beggars, pilgrims, 
 fiddlers, friars ; not passing by a woman in a mulberry-tree without 
 commending her legs, and tempting her into conversation with a pinch 
 of snuff. In short, by seizing every handle, of what size or shape 
 soever, which chance held out to me in this journey, I turned my plain 
 into a city ; I was always in company, and with great variety too ; and 
 as my mule loved society as much as myself, and had some proposals 
 always on his part to offer to every beast he met, I am confident 
 we could have passed through Pall Mall or St. James's Street for a 
 month together, with fewer adventures, and seen less of human nature. 
 
 O ! there is that sprightly frankness which at once unpins every plait 
 of a Languedocian's dress, that, whatever is beneath it, it looks so like 
 the simplicity which poets sing of in better days. I will delude my 
 fancy, and believe it is so. 
 
 'Twas in the road betwixt Nismes and Lunel, where there is the best 
 Muscatto wine in all France, and which, by-the-by, belongs to the honest 
 canons of Montpellier ; and foul befall the man who has drank it at their 
 table, who grudges them a drop of it. 
 
 The sun was set— they had done their work ; the nymphs had tied up 
 their hair afresh, and the swains were preparing for a carousal. My 
 mule made a dead point. — ** 'Tis the fife and tambourin," said I.-— 
 
VOL. VII.] TRISTRAM SHA ND K 27 1 
 
 ** I'm frightened to death," quoth he. — "They are running at the ring 
 of pleasure," said I, giving him a prick. — '*By St. Boogar, and all the 
 saints at the back -side of the door of purgatory," said he (making the 
 same resolution with the Abbess of Andouillets), * ' Til not go a step 
 further." — *' 'Tis very well, Sir," said I, " I will never argue a point with 
 one of your family as long as I live." So leaping off his back, and kick- 
 ing off one boot into this ditch, and t'other into that — **I'll take a 
 dance," said I, " so stay you here." 
 
 A sunburnt daughter of Labour rose up from the group to meet me, 
 as I advanced towards them ; her hair, which was a dark chestnut, 
 approaching rather to a black, was tied up in a knot, all but a single 
 tress. 
 
 *' We want a cavalier," said she, holding out both her hand?, as if to 
 offer them. — *'And a cavalier ye shall have," said I, taking hold of 
 both of them. 
 
 " Hadst thou, Nannette, been arrayed like a duchess ! But that 
 cursed slit in thy petticoat ! " 
 
 Nannette cared not for it. 
 
 " We could not have done without you,*' said she, letting go one hand, 
 with self-taught politeness, leading me up with the other. 
 
 A lame youth, whom Apollo had recompensed with a pipe, and to 
 which he had added a tambourin of his own accord, ran sweetly over 
 the prelude, as he sat upon the bank. — ** Tie me up this tress instantly," 
 said Nannette, putting a piece of string into my hand. It taught me 
 to forget I was a stranger. The whole knot fell down. We had been 
 seven years acquainted. 
 
 The youth struck the note upon the tambourin, his pipe followed, 
 and off we bounded — " the deuce take that slit ! " 
 
 The sister of the youth who had stolen her voice from heaven sung ' 
 r.lternately with her brother, 'twas a Gascoigne roundelay — 
 
 Viva la joia ! 
 Fidon la tristessa ! 
 
 The nymphs joined in unison, and their swains an octave below 
 them. 
 
 I would havt given a crown to have it sewed up ; Nannette would 
 not have given a sous ; Viva la joia ! was in her lips — Viva la joia ! was 
 in her eyes. A transient spark of amity shot across the space betwixt 
 us. She looked amiable. Why could I not live and end my days 
 thus ? ' ' Just Disposer of our joys and sorrows," cried I, *' why could not 
 a man sit down in the lap of content here, and dance and sing, and say 
 his prayers, and go to heaven with this nut-brown maid ? " Capriciously 
 did she bend her head on one side, and dance up insidious. *'Then 
 'tis time to dance off, " quoth I : so, changing only partners and tunes, I 
 danced it away from Lunel to Montpellier ; from thence to Pes^nas, 
 Beziers ; I danced it along through Narbonne, Carcasson, and Castle 
 Naudairy, till at last I danced myself into Perdrillo's pavilion, where, 
 pulling a paper of blank lines, that I might go on straight forwards 
 without digression or parenthesis, in my Uncle Toby's amours. — 
 
 I began thus. ^^ ^ 
 
VOLUME VIII. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 But bofiiy, lor in these sportive plains, and under this genial sun, 
 where, at this instant, all flesh is running out piping, fiddling, and 
 dancing to the vintage, and every step that's taken, the judgment is 
 surprised by the imagination, I defy, notwithstanding all that has been 
 said upon straight lines* in sundry pages of my book — I defy the 
 best cabbage planter that ever existed, whether he plants backwards 
 or forwards, it makes little difference in the account (except that he 
 will have more to answer for in the one case than in the other) — I defy 
 him to go on coolly, critically, and canonically, planting his cabbages 
 one by one, in straight lines and stoical distances, especially if slits in 
 petticoats are unsewed up, without ever and anon straddling out, or 
 fiddling into some bastardly digression. In Freezeland, Fogland, and 
 some other lands I wot of, it may be done. 
 
 But in this clear climate of fantasy and perspiration, where every 
 idea, sensible and insensible, gets vent ; in this land, my dear Eugenius 
 — in this fertile land of chivaliy and romance, where I now sit unscrew- 
 ing my ink-horn to write my Uncle Toby's amours, and with all the 
 meanders of Julia's tract in quest of her Diego, in full view of my study 
 window, if thou comest not and takest me by the hand — 
 
 What a work is it likely to turn out ! 
 
 Let us begin it. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 But now I am talking of beginning a book, and have long had a thing 
 upon my mind to be imparted to the reader, which, if not imparted 
 now, can never be imparted to him as long as I live (whereas the com- 
 parison may be imparted to him any hour in the day). I'll just mention 
 it, and begin in good earnest. 
 
 The thing is this. 
 
 That of all the several ways of beginning a book, which are now in 
 practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of 
 doing; it is the best. I'm sure it is the most religious, for I begin with 
 writing the first sentence, and trusting to Almighty God for the second. 
 
 'Twould cure an author for ever of the fuss and folly of opening his 
 
 * Vide p. 236, 
 
voL.vin.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 273 
 
 street door, and calling in his neighbours, and friends, and kinsfolk, 
 with the devil and all his imps, with their hammers and engines, &c., 
 only to observe how one sentence of mine follows another, and how the 
 plan follows the whole. 
 
 I wish you saw me half starting out of my chair, with what confi- 
 dence, as I grasp the elbow of it, I look up, catching the idea, even 
 sometimes before it half-way reaches me. 
 
 I believe in my conscience, I intercept many a thought which heaven 
 intended for another man. 
 
 Pope and his portrait * are fools to me ; no martyr is ever so full of 
 faith or fire — I wish I could say of good works too ; but I have no 
 
 Zeal or anger, or 
 Anger or zeal. 
 
 And till gods and men agree together to call it by the same name, the 
 errantest Tartufe, in science, in politics, or in religion, shall never kindle 
 a gpark within me, or have a worse word or a more unkind greeting, 
 than what he will read in the next chapter. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Why weavers, gardeners and gladiators, or a man wiih a pined leg 
 (proceeding from some ailment in the foot), should ever have had some 
 tender nymph breaking her heart in secret for them, are points well and 
 duly settled and accounted for by ancient and modern physiologists. 
 
 A water-drinker, provided he is a professed one, and does it without 
 fraud or covin, is precisely in the same predicament ; not that, at first 
 sight, there is any consequence or show of logic in it, " That a rill of 
 cold water, dril:>bling through my inward parts, should light up a torch 
 in my Jenny's." 
 
 The proposition does not strike one ; on the contrary, it seems to 
 run opposite to the natural workings of causes and effects. 
 
 But it shows the weakness and imbecihty of human reason. 
 
 ** And in perfect good health with it ? " 
 
 The most })erfect, madam, that Friendship herself could wish me. 
 
 " And drink nothing ! — nothing but water ! " 
 
 Impetuous fluid ! the moment thou pressest against the flood-gates 
 of the brain, see how they give way ! 
 
 In swims Curiosity, beckoning to her damsels to follow ; they dive 
 into the centre of the current. 
 
 Fancy sits musing upon the bank, and with her eyes following the 
 stream, turns straws and bulrushes into masts and bowsprits. And 
 Desire, with vest held up to the knee in one hand, snatches at them as 
 they swim by her, with the other. 
 
 O, ye Mater-drinkers ! is it then by this delusive fountain that ye 
 have so often governed and turned this world about like a mill-wheel, 
 grinding the faces of the impotent, bepowdering their ribs, bepepper- 
 ing their noses, and changing sometimes even the very frame and face 
 of Nature ? 
 
 • Vide Pope's portrait. 
 
274 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [VOL. VIil. 
 
 "If I was you/' quoth Yorick, ** I would drink more water, 
 Eugenius." — *'And if I was you, Yorick," replied Eugenius, "so 
 would I." 
 
 Which shows they had both read Longinus. 
 
 For my own part, I am resolved never to read any book but my own 
 as long as I live. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 I WISH my Uncle Toby had been a water-drinker, for then the thing 
 had been accounted for, that the first moment Widow Wadman saw 
 him, she felt something stirring within her in his favour. Something ! 
 something. 
 
 Something, perhaps, more than friendship, less than love ; something 
 — no matter what — no matter where — I would not give a single hair of 
 my mule's tail, and be obliged to pluck it off myself (indeed the villain 
 has not many to spare, and is not a little vicious into the bargain), to be 
 let by your worships into the secret. 
 
 But the truth is, my Uncle Toby was not a water-drinker ; he drank 
 it neither pure nor mixed, or anyhow, or anywhere, except fortuitously 
 upon some advanced posts, where better liquor was not to be had, or 
 during the time he was under cure ; when the surgeon telling him it 
 would extend the fibres, and bring them sooner into contact, my Uncle 
 Toby drank it for quietness sake. 
 
 Now, as all the world knows that no effect in Nature can be produced 
 without a cause ; and as it is as well known that my Uncle Toby was 
 neither a weaver, a gardener, or a gladiator, unless as a captain, you 
 will needs have him one ; but then he was only a captain of foot, and 
 besides the whole is an equivocation — there is nothing left for us to 
 suppose, but that my Uncle Toby's leg ; but that will avail us little in the 
 present h)rpothesis, unless it had proceeded from some ailment in the foot, 
 whereas his leg was not emaciated from any disorder in his foot, for my 
 Uncle Toby's leg was not emaciated at all. It was a little stiff and 
 awkward from a total disuse of it for three years he lay confined at my 
 father's house in town ; but it was plump and muscular, and in all other 
 respects as good and promising a leg as the other. 
 
 I declare I do not recollect any one opinion or passage of my life 
 where my understanding was more at a loss to make ends meet, and 
 torture the chapter I had been writing to the service of the chapter fol- 
 lowing it, than in the present case. One would think I took a pleasure 
 in running into difficulties of this kind merely to make fresh experi- 
 ments of getting out of them. Inconsiderate soul that thou art ! What ! 
 are not the unavoidable distresses with which, as an author and a man, 
 thou art hemmed in on every side of thee — are they, Tristram, not 
 sufficient, but thou must entangle thyself still more ? 
 
 Is it not enough that thou art in debt, and that thou hast ten cart- 
 loads of thy fifth and sixth volumes still — still unsold, and almost at thy 
 wit's end how to get them off thy hands. 
 
 To this hour art thou not tormented with the vile asthma thou gattest 
 in skating against the wind in Flanders ? and is it but two months ago 
 that in a fit of lau^'^hter thou breakest a vessel in thy lungs, whereby in 
 
VOL. VIII.] TRISTRAM SHAND V. 27s 
 
 two hours tliou lost as many quarts of blood ; and hadst thou lost as 
 much more, did not the faculty tell thee it would have amounted to a 
 gallon ? 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 But for Heaven's sake let us not talk of quarts or gallons ; let us take 
 the story straight before us ; it is so nice and intricate a one it will 
 scarce bear the transposition of a single tittle ; and, somehow or other, 
 you have got me thrust almost into the middle of it. 
 I beg we may take more care. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 My Uncle Toby and the Corporal had posted down with so much heat 
 and precipitation to take possession of the spot of ground we have so 
 often spoke of, in order to open their campaign as early as the rest of 
 the Allies, that they had forgot one of the most necessary articles of the 
 whole affair : it was neither a pioneer's spade, a pickaxe, nor a shovel. 
 
 It was a bed to lie on ; so that as Shandy Hall was at that time un- 
 furnished, and the little inn where poor Le Kevre died not yet built, 
 my Uncle Toby was constrained to accept of a bed at Mrs. Wadman's 
 for a night or two, till Corporal Trim — who to the character of an 
 excellent valet, groom, cook, sempster, surgeon, and engineer, super- 
 added that of an excellent upholsterer too — with the help of a carpenter 
 and a couple of tailors, constructed one in my Uncle Toby's house. 
 
 A daughter of Eve — for such was W^idow Wadman — and 'tis all the 
 character I intend to give of her — 
 
 ' * That she was a perfect woman " — 
 had better be fifty leagues ofT, or in her warm bed, or playing with a 
 case-knife, or anything you please, than make a man the object of her 
 attention when the house and all the furniture is her own. 
 
 There is nothing in it out of doors and in broad daylight, where a 
 woman has a power, physically speaking, of viewing a man in more 
 lights than one ; but here, for her soul, she can see him in no light 
 without mixing something of her own goods and chattels along with 
 him, till by reiterated acts of such combinations he gets foisted into her 
 inventory — 
 
 And then good-night. 
 
 But this is not matter of system, for I have delivered that above ; 
 nor is it matter of breviary, for I make no man's creed but my own ; 
 nor matter of fact — at least that I know of; but 'tis matter copulative 
 and introductory to what follows. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 I DO not speak it with regard to the coarseness or cleanness of them, or 
 the strength of their gussets, but pray do not night-3hifts differ from 
 
276 TRISTRAM SHA ND V, [vol. viii 
 
 clay-shifts as much in this particular as in anything else in the world ; 
 that they so far exceed the others in length that when you are laid 
 down in them they fall almost as much below the feet as the day-shifts 
 fall short of them ? 
 
 Widow Wadman's night-shifts (as was the mode, I suppose, in King 
 William's and Queen Anne's reigns) were cut, however, after this fashion ; 
 and if the fashion is changed (for in Italy they are come to nothing) so 
 much the worse for the public. They were two Flemish ells and a half 
 in length ; so that, allowing a moderate woman two ells, she had half 
 an ell to spare to do what she would with. 
 
 Now, from one little indulgence gained after another in the many 
 bleak and Decemberly nights of a seven years' widowhood, things had 
 insensibly come to this pass, and for the two last years had got esta- 
 blished kito one of the ordinances of the bedchamber — that as soon as 
 Mrs. Wadman was put to bed, and had got her legs stretched down to 
 the bottom of it, of which she always gave Bridget notice — Bridget, 
 with all suitable decorum having first opened the bed-clothes at the 
 feet, took hold of the half-ell of cloth we are speaking of, and having 
 gently, and with both her hands, drawn it downwards to its furthest 
 extension, and then contracted it again sidelong, by four or five even 
 plaits, she took a large corking-pin out of her sleeve, and, with the 
 point directed towards her, pinned the plaits all fast together a little 
 above the hem ; which done, she tucked all in tight at the feet, and 
 wished her mistress a good-night. 
 
 This was constant, and without any other variation than this — that 
 on shivering and tempestuous nights, when Bridget untucked the feet 
 of the bed, &c., to do this, she consulted no thermometer but that of 
 her own passions ; and so performed it standing, kneeling, or squat- 
 ting, according to the different degrees of faith, hope, and charity 
 she was in and bore towards her mistress that night. In every other 
 respect the etiquette was sacred, and might have vied with the most 
 mechanical one of the most inflexible bedchamber in Christendom. 
 
 The first night, as soon as the Corporal had conducted my Uncle 
 Toby upstairs, which was about ten, Mrs. Wadman threw herself into 
 her arm-chair, and crossing her left knee with her right, which formed 
 a resting-place for her elbow, she reclined her cheek upon the palm of 
 her hand, and leaning forward, ruminated till midnight upon both 
 sides of the question. 
 
 The second night she went to her bureau, and having ordered 
 Bridget to bring her up a couple of fresh candles and leave them upon 
 the table, she took out her marriage settlement and read it over with 
 great devotion. And the third night, which was the last of my Uncle 
 Toby's stay, when Bridget had pulled down the night-shift, and was 
 essaying to stick in the corking-pin — 
 
 With a kick of both heels at once, but at the snme time the most 
 natural kick that could be kicked in her situation, for supposing 
 ***** to be the sun in its meridian, it was a north-east kick. 
 :She kicked the pin out of her fingers ; the etiquette which hung upon 
 it, down — down it fell to the ground, and was shivered into a thousand 
 atoms. 
 
 From all which it was plain that Widow Wadman was in love with 
 my Uncle Toby, 
 
VOL. vm.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 27? 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 My Uncle Toby's head at that time was full of other matters, so that 
 'twas not till the demolition of Dunkirk, when all the other civilities of 
 Europe were settled, that he found leisure to return this. 
 
 This made an armistice (that is, speaking with regard to my Uncle 
 Toby, but with respect to Mrs. Wadman a vacancy) of almost eleven 
 years. But in all cases of this nature, as it is the second blow, happen 
 at what distance of time it will, which makes the fray, I choose, for 
 that reason, to call these the amours of my Uncle Toby with Mrs. 
 Wadman, rather than the amours of Mrs. Wadman with my Uncle Toby. 
 
 This is not a distinction without a difference. 
 
 It is not like the affair of an old hat cocked, and a cocked old hat, 
 about which your reverences have so often been at odds with one 
 another ; but there is a difference here in the nature of things. 
 
 And let me tell yon, gentry, a wide one too. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 Now, as Widow Wadman did love my Uncle Toby, and my Uncle 
 Toby did not love Widow W^adman, there was nothing for Widow 
 Wadman to do but to go on and love my Uncle Toby, or let it alone. 
 
 Widow Wadman would do neither the one nor the other. 
 
 Gracious heaven I but I forget I am a little of her temper myself; 
 for whenever it so falls out, which it sometimes does about the equi- 
 noxes, that an earthly goddess is so much this, and that, and t'other, 
 that I cannot eat my breakfast for her, and that she carelh not three- 
 halfpence whether I eat my breakfast or no. 
 
 Curse on her ! And so I send her to Tartary, and from Tartary to 
 Terra del Fuego, and so on to the devil— in short, there is not an 
 infernal niche where I do not take her divinityship and stick it. 
 
 But as the heart is tender, and the passions in these tides ebb and 
 flow ten times in a minute, I instantly bring her back again ; and as I 
 do all things in extremes, I place her in the very centre of the Milky- 
 way. 
 
 Brightest of stars ! thou wilt slied thy influence upon some one. 
 
 The deuce take her and her influence too — for at that word I lose 
 all patience. Much good may it do him ! *' By all that is hirsute aixi 
 ghastly," I cry, taking off" my furred cap, and twisting it round my 
 finger, " I would not give sixpence for a dozen such ! " 
 
 But 'tis an excellent cap too (putting it upon by head, and pressmg 
 it close to my ears), and warm, and soft ; especially if you stroke it 
 the right way. But alas ! that will never be my luck (so here my 
 philosophy is shipwrecked again). 
 
 No ; I shall never have a finger in the pie (so here 1 break my 
 metaphor) . 
 
 Cnist and crumb, 
 
 Inside and out, 
 
27S TklSl'RAM SHANDY. ' [vol. vm. 
 
 Top and bottom— I detest it, I jhate it, I repudiate it — I'm sick at 
 the sight of it. 
 'Tis all pepper, 
 garlick, 
 staragen, 
 salt, and 
 
 devil's dung. By the great arch-cook of cooks, who does 
 nothing, I think, from morning to night, but sit down by the fire-side 
 and invent inflammatory dishes for us, I would not touch it for the 
 world. 
 
 " O Tristram ! Tristram ! " cried Jenny. 
 
 *' O Jenny ! Jenny ! " replied I, and so went on with the twelfth 
 chapier. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 **NoT touch it for the world,'* did I say. Lord, how I have heated 
 my imagination with tliis metaphor I 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 Which shows, let your reverences and worships say what you will of 
 it (for as for thinking, all who do think, think pretty much alike both 
 upon it and other matters), love is certainly, at least alphabetically 
 speaking, one of the most 
 
 A gitating, 
 
 B ewitching, 
 
 C onfounded, 
 
 D evilish affairs of life, the most 
 
 E xtravagant, 
 
 F utilitous, 
 
 G alligaskinish, 
 
 H andy-dand)dsh, 
 
 I racundulous (there is no K to it), and 
 
 L yrical of all human passions ; at the same time the most 
 
 M isgiving, 
 
 N innyhammering 
 
 O bstipating, 
 
 P ragmaticai, 
 
 S tridulous, 
 
 R idiculous, though by-the-by the R should have gone first ; but in 
 short it is of such a nature, as my father once told my Uncle Toby upon 
 the close of a long dissertation upon the subject, " You can scarce," said 
 he, " combine two ideas together upon if, brother Toby, without an 
 hypallage." — '* What's that?" cried my Uncle Toby. 
 ** The cart before the horse," replied my father. 
 ** And what has he to do there ? " cried my Uncle Toby. 
 " Nothing," quoth my father, "but to get in, or let it alone." 
 Now Widow Wadman, as I told you before, would do neither the one 
 nor the other. 
 
VOL. VIII.] TRlSTkAM SHANDW 279 
 
 She stood, however, ready harnessed and caparisoned at all points to 
 watch accidents. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 The Fates, who certamly all foreknew of these amours of Widow Wad- 
 man and my Uncle Toby, had, from the first creation of matter and 
 motion (and with more courtesy than they usually do things of this 
 kind), established such a chain of causes and effects hanging so fast to 
 one another, that it was scarce possible for my Uncle Toby to have 
 dwelt in any other house in the world, or to have occupied any other 
 garden in Christendom, but the very house and garden which joined and 
 lay parallel to Widow Wadman's ; this, with the advantage of a thick- 
 set arbour in Mrs. Wadman^s garden, but planted in the hedgerow of 
 my Uncle Toby's, put all the occasions into her hands which love- 
 militancy wanted ; she could observe my Uncle Toby's motions, and^ 
 was mistress likewise of his councils of war ; and as his unsuspecting 
 heart had given leave to the Corporal through the mediation of Bridget, 
 to make her a wicker-gate of communication to enlarge her walks, 
 it enabled her to carry on her approaches to the very door of the sentry- 
 box ; and sometimes out of gratitude to make the attack, and endeavour 
 to blow my Uncle Toby up in the very sentry-box itself. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 Now, through all the lumber rooms of military furniture, including both 
 of liorse and foot, from the great arsenal of Venice to the Tower of 
 London (exclusive), if Mrs. Wadman had been rummaging for seven 
 years together, and with Bridget to help her, she could not have found 
 any one blind or mantelet so fit for her purpose, as that which the expe- 
 diency of my Uncle Toby's affairs had nxed up ready to her hand. 
 
 I believe I have not told you, but I don't know, possibly I have, be it 
 as it will, *tis one of the number of those many things which a man had 
 better do over again than dispute about it ; that whatever town or 
 fortress the Corporal was at work upon during the course of their cam- 
 paign, my Uncle Toby always took care on the inside of his sentry-box, 
 which was towards his left hand, to have a plan of the place fastened up 
 with two or three pins at the top, but loose at the bottom, for the con- 
 venience of holding it up to the eye, &c., as occasions required ; so that 
 when an attack was resolved upon, Mrs. Wadman had nothing more to 
 do when she had got advanced to the door of the sentry-box but to 
 extend her right hand, and edging in her left foot at the same movement, 
 to take hold of the map or plan, or upright, or whatever it was, and with 
 outstretched neck meeting it half-way, to advance it towards her ; on 
 which my Uncle Toby's passions were sure to catch fire, for he would 
 instantly take hold of the other corner of the map in his left hand, and 
 with the end of his pipe in the other, begin an explanation. 
 
 W^hen the attack was advanced to this point, the world will naturally 
 enter into the reasons of Mrs. Wadman's next stroke of generalship, 
 
28o TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. Vill. 
 
 which was to take my Uncle Toby's tobacco-pipe out of his hand as 
 soon as she possibly could, which, under one pretence or other, but 
 generally that of pointing more distinctly at some redoubt or breastwork 
 in the map, she would effect before my Uncle Toby (poor soul !) had 
 well marched above half a dozen toises with it. 
 
 It obliged my Uncle Toby to make use of his forefinger. 
 
 The difference it made in the attack was this : that in going upon it, 
 as in the first case, with the end of her forefinger against the end of my 
 Uncle Toby's tobacco-pipe, she might have travelled with it along the 
 lines from Dan to Beersheba, had my Uncle Toby's lines reached so far, 
 without any effect ; for as there was no arterial or vital heat in the enc' 
 of the tobacco-pipe it could excite no sentiment ; it could neither giv 
 fire by pulsation, or receive it by sympathy, 'twas nothing but smoke. 
 
 Whereas, in following my Uncle Toby's forefinger with hers close 
 through all the little turns and indentings of his works, pressing some- 
 times against the side of it, then treading upon its nail, then tripping it 
 up, then touching it here, then there, and so on ; it set something at 
 least in motion. 
 
 This, though slight skirmishing, and at a distance from the main body, 
 yet drew on the rest ; for here, the map usually falling with the back of 
 it close to the side of the sentry-box, my Uncle Toby, in the simplicity 
 of his soul, would lay his hand flat upon it in order to go on with his 
 explanation, and Mrs. Wadman, by a manoeuvre as quick as thought, 
 would as certainly place hers close beside it ; this at once opened a com- 
 munication large enough for any sentiment to pass or repass, which a 
 person skilled in the elementary and practical part of love-making has 
 occasion for. 
 
 By bringing up her forefinger parallel (as before) to my Uncle 
 Toby's, it unavoidably brought the thumb into action, and the fore- 
 finger and thumb being once engaged, it naturally brought in the whole 
 hand. Thine, dear Uncle Toby ! was never now in its right place. 
 Mrs. Wadman had it ever to take up, or, with the gentlest pushings, 
 protrusions, and equivocal compressions, that a hand to be removed is 
 capable of receiving, to get it pressed a hair's-breadthof one side out of 
 her way. 
 
 Whilst this was doing, how could she forget to make him sensible that 
 it was her leg (and no one's else) at the bottom of the sentry-box, which 
 slightly pressed against the calf of his ; so that my Uncle Toby being 
 thus attacked and sore pushed on both his wings, was it a wonder if, now 
 and then, it put his centre into disorder ? 
 
 **The deuce take it ♦. " said my Uncle Toby. ''■ 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. ■ 
 
 These attacks of Mrs. Wadman, you will readily conceive to be of 
 different kinds ; varying from each other, like the attacks which history 
 is full of, and from the same reasons. A general looker-on would scarce 
 allow them to be attacks at all, or, if he did, would confound them 
 all together, but I write not to them ; it will be time enough to be 
 a little more exact in my descriptions of them, as I come up to them, 
 
VOL. VIII.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 281 
 
 which will not be for some chapters ; having nothing more to add 
 in this, but that in a bundle of original papers and drawings, which my 
 father took care to roll up by themselves, there is a plan of Bouchain in 
 perfect preservation (and shall be kept so, whilst I have power to 
 preserve anything), upon the lower corner of which, on the right-hand 
 side, there is still remaining the marks of a snuffy finger and thumb, 
 which there is all the reason in the world to imagine were Mrs. Wad- 
 man's ; for the opposite side of the margin, which I suppose to 
 have been my Uncle Toby's, is absolutely clean. This seems an 
 authenticated record of one of these attacks ; for there are vestigia of 
 the two punctures partly grown up, but still visible on the opposite 
 corner of the map, which are unquestionably the very holes through 
 which it has been pricked up in the sentry-box. 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 " I THINK, an' please your honour,'* quoth Trim, " the fortifications are 
 quite destroyed, and the bason is upon a level with the mole." — ** I 
 think so too," replied my Uncle Toby, with a sigh half suppressed ; 
 **but step into the parlour, Trim, for the stipulation, it lies upon 
 the table." 
 
 ** It has lain there these six weeks," replied the Corporal, " till this 
 \ery morning that the old woman kindled the fire with it." 
 
 "Then," said my Uncle Toby, " there is no further occasion for our 
 services." — '*The more, an' please your honour, the pity," said the 
 Corporal ; in uttering which he cast his spade into the wheel-barrow, 
 which was beside him, with an air the most expressive of disconsolation 
 that can be imagined, and was heavily turning about to look for his pick- 
 axe, his pioneer's shovel, his piquets, and other little military stores, in 
 order to carry them off the field — when a heigh-ho ! from the sentry-box, 
 which, being made of thin slit deal, reverberated the sound more 
 sorrowfully to his ear, forbade him. 
 
 "No," said the Corporal to himself, "I'll do it before his honour 
 rises to-morrow morning ; " so taking his spade out of the wheel-barrow 
 again, with a little earth in it, as if to level something at the foot 
 of the glacis, but with a real intent to approach nearer to his master, in 
 order to divert him, he loosened a sod or two, pared their edges with his 
 spade, and having given them a genile blow or two with the back of it, 
 he sat himself down close by my Uncle Toby's {^^t^ and began as follows. 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 "It was a thousand pities, though I believe, an' please your honour, 
 
 I am going to say but a foolish kind of a thing for a soldier " 
 
 " A soldier," cried my Uncle Toby, interrupting the Corporal, ** is 
 no more exempt from saying a foolish thing, Trim, than a man of 
 letters." — "But not so often, an' please your honour," replied the 
 Corporal. My Uncle Toby gave a nod, 
 
282 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. viil. 
 
 "It was a thousand pities then," said the Corporal, casting his eye 
 upon Dunkirk and the mole, as Servius Sulpicius> in returning out of 
 Asia (when he sailed from iEgina towards Megara) did upon Corinth 
 and Pyraeus 
 
 ** It was a thousand pities, an' please your honour, to destroy these 
 works, and a thousand pities to have let them stand," 
 
 " Thou art right. Trim., in both cases," said my Uncle Toby. — " Tliis," 
 continued the Corporal, "is the reason that, from the beginning of their 
 demolition to the end, I have never once whistled, or sung, or laughed, 
 or cried, or talked of past-done deeds, or told your honour one story, 
 good or bad." 
 
 **Thou hast many excellences, Trim," said my Uncie Toby, "and I 
 hold it not the least of them, as thou happenest to be a story-teller, that 
 of the number thou hast told me, either to amuse me in my painful 
 hours, or divert me in my grave ones, thou hast seldom told me a bad 
 one." 
 
 " Because, an' please your honour, except one of a king of Bohemia 
 and his seven castles, they are all true ; for they are about myself." 
 
 " I do not like the subject the worse. Trim,* sail my Uncle Toby," 
 ** on that score. But prithee, what is this story? T'ikxi hast excited my 
 curiosity." 
 
 *' I'll tell it, your honour," quoth the Corpora], '* directly." — "Pro* 
 vided," said my Uncle Toby, looking earnestly towards Dunkirk and 
 the mole again, "provided it is not a merry one; to such. Trim, a 
 man should ever bring one half of the entertainment along with him ; 
 and the disposition I am in at present would wrong both thee. Trim, 
 and thy story." — "It is not a merry one by any means," replied the 
 Coi-poral. — " Nor would I have it altogether a grave one," added my 
 Uncle Toby. — " It is neither the one nor the other," replied the 
 Corporal, " but will suit your honour exactly." — *' Then I'll thank thee 
 for it with all my heart," cried my Uncle Toby, "so pr^ylhee begin it, 
 Trim." 
 
 The Corporal made his reverence ; and though it is not so easy a 
 matter as the world imagines to pull off a lank Montero cap with 
 grace, or a whit less difficult, in my conceptions, when a man is sitting 
 squat upon the ground, to make a bow so teeming with respect as the 
 Corporal was wont ; yet by suffering the palm of his right hand, which 
 was towards his master, to slip backward upon the grass, a little be- 
 yond his body, in order to allow it the greater sweep, and by an un- 
 forced compression, at the same time, of his cap with the thumb and 
 the two forefingers of his left, by which the diameter of the cap became 
 reduced, so that it might be said, rather to be insensibly squeezed than 
 pulled off with a flatus, the Corporal acquitted himself of both in a 
 better manner than the posture of his affairs promised ; and having 
 hemmed twice, to find in what key his story would best go, and best 
 suit his master's humour, he exchanged a single look of kindness with 
 him, and set off thus. 
 
 The Story of the King of Bohemia and his Seven Casti^es. 
 
 "There was a certain king of Bo — he " 
 
 As the Corporal was entering the confines of Bohemia, my Uncle 
 Toby oblii^cd him to halt for a single moment ', he had set out t>are- 
 
VOUviiL] TklSTRAM StiANDV, 283 
 
 headed, having since he pulled off his Montero cap in the latter end t& 
 the last chapter, left it lying beside him on the ground. 
 
 The eye of Goodness espieth all things, so that before the Cor- 
 poral had well got through the first five words of his story, had my 
 Uncle Toby twice touched his Montero cap with the end of his cane, 
 interrogatively, as much as to say, *' Why don't you put it on, 
 Trim?" Trim took it up with the most respectful slowness, and 
 casting a glance of humiliation as he did it upon the embroidery oC 
 the fore-part, which being dismally tarnished, and frayed, moreover, 
 in some of the principal leaves and boldest parts of the pattern, he 
 laid it down again betwixt his two feet in order to moralize upon the 
 subject. 
 
 "'Tis every word of it but too true," cried my Uncle Toby, " that 
 thou art about to observe." 
 
 ** Nothing in this world, Trim, is made to last for ever. ' 
 
 *' But when tokens, dear Tom, of thy love and remembrance wear 
 out," said Trim, " what shall we say ? " 
 
 *' There is no occasion, Trim," quoth my Uncle Toby, " to say any- 
 thing else ; and was a man to puzzle his brains till doomsday, I be- 
 lieve, Trim, it would be impossible." 
 
 The Corporal perceiving my Uncle Toby was in the right, and that 
 it would be in vain for the wit of man to think of extracting a purer 
 moral from his cap, without further attempting it, he put it on; and 
 passing liis hand across his forehead to rub out a pensive wrinkle, 
 which the text and the doctrine between them had engendered, he 
 returned, with the same look and tone of voice, to his story of the 
 king of Bohemia and his seven castles. 
 
 The Story of the King of Bohemia and his Seven 
 Castles —cojitimted, 
 
 " There was a certain king of Bohemia, but in whose reign, except 
 his own, I am not able to inform your honour." 
 
 ** I do not desire it of thee. Trim, by any means," cried my Uncle 
 Toby. 
 
 "It was a little before the time, an' please your honour, when giants 
 were beginning to leave off breeding : but in what year of our Lord 
 that was " 
 
 *' I would not give a halfpenny to krK)w," said my Uncle Toby. 
 
 " Only, an' please your honour, it makes a story look the better in 
 the face." 
 
 ** 'Tis thy own, Trim, so ornament it after thy own fashion ; and 
 take any date," continued my Uncle Toby, looking pleasantly upon 
 him ; *' take any date in the whole world thou choosest, and put it to — 
 thou art heartily welcome." 
 
 The Corporal bowed ; for, of every centuiy, and of every year of 
 that ceniury, from the first creation of the world down to Noah's flood ; 
 and from Noah's flood to the birth of Abraham; through all the 
 pilgrimages of the patriarchs, to the departure of the Israelites out of 
 Egypt, and throughout all the Dynasties, Olympiads, Urbeconditas, 
 and other memorable epochas of the different nations of the world, 
 
284 TRISTRAM SHANDV. [VOL. Vill. 
 
 down to the coming of Christ, and from thence to the very moment in 
 which the Corporal was telling his story, had my Uncle Toby subjected 
 this vast empire of time and all its abysses at his feet ; but as Modesty 
 scarce touches with a finger what Liberality offers her with both hands 
 open, tlie Corporal contented himself with the very worst year of the 
 wliole bunch ; which, to prevent your honours of the majority and 
 minority from tearin;^ the very flesh off your bones in contestation, 
 ** Whether ihat year is not always the last cast-year of the last cast- 
 ahiianac." I (e)l you p];ii'.i1y it was; but from a different reason thar 
 you wot not. 
 
 It was the year next him — which being the year of our Lord seven 
 teen hundred and twelve — when the Duke of Ormond was playing 
 the devil in Flanders, the Corporal took it and set out with it afresh 
 on his expedition to Bohemia. 
 
 The Story of the King of Bohemia amd his Seven 
 Castles — continued, 
 
 ** In the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and twelve 
 there was, an' please your honour " 
 
 '* To tell thee truly, Trim," quoth my Uncle Toby, *'any other date 
 would iiave pleased me much better, not only on account of the sad 
 stain upon our history that year in marching off our troops, and refus- 
 ing to cover the siege of Quesnoi, though Fagel was carrying on the 
 works with such incredible vigour ; but likewise on the score. Trim, of 
 tliy own story, because if there are — and which from what thou hast 
 dropt, I partly suspect to be the fact — if there are giants in it " 
 
 * ' There is but one, an' please your honour " 
 
 '"Tisas bad as twenty," replied my Uncle Toby. "Thou shouldst 
 have carried him back some seven or eight hundred years out of harm's 
 way, both of critics and other people, and therefore I would advise 
 thee, if ever thou tellest it again " 
 
 *'If I live, an* please your honour, but or>ce to get through it, I 
 will never tell it again," quoth Trim. *' either to man, woman, or 
 child." — " Pooh, pooh !" said my Uncle Toby; but with accents of 
 such sweet encouragement did he utter it, that the Corporal went on 
 with his story with more alacrity than ever. 
 
 The Story of the King of Bohemia and his Seven 
 C astl es — contimied. 
 
 *' There was, an' please your honour," said the Corporal, raising his 
 voice, and rubbing the palms of his two hands cheerily together, as 
 he began, " a certain King of Bohemia " 
 
 " Leave out the date entirely, Trim," quoth my Uncle Toby, leaning 
 forwards, and laying his hand gently upon the Corporal's shoulder to 
 temper the interruption. *' Leave it oat entirely, Trim ; a story passes 
 very well without these niceties, unless one is pretty sure of them.' — 
 *' Sure of them I " said the Corporal, sh.^king his head. 
 
 *' Right," answered my Uncle Toby; " it is not easy, Trim, for one 
 
VOL. VIII.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 285 
 
 bred up as thou and I have been to arms, who seldom looks further 
 forward than to the end of his musket, or backwards beyond his knap- 
 sack, to know much about this matter. — "God bless your honour!" 
 said the Corporal, won by the manner of my Uncle Toby's reasoning, 
 as much as by the reasoning itself ; '* he has something else to do. If 
 not on action or a march, or upon duty in his garrison ; he has his fire- 
 lock, an' please your honour, to furbish, his accoutrements to take care 
 of, his regimentals to mend, himself to shave and keep clean, so as to 
 appear always like what he is upon the parade. What business," added 
 the Corporal, triumphantly, " has a soldier, an' please your honour, to 
 know anything at all of Geography ! " 
 
 " Thou wouldst have said Chronology, Trim," said my Uncle Toby. 
 *' For as for geography, 'tis of absolute use to him ; he must be ac- 
 quainted intimately with every country and its boundaries where his 
 profession carries him ; he should know every town and city, and village 
 and hamlet, with the canals, the roads, and hollow-ways which lead up 
 to them. There is not a river or rivulet he passes. Trim, but he should 
 be able, at first sight, to tell thee what is its name, in what mountains 
 it takes its rise, what is its course, how far it is navigable, where ford- 
 able, where not ; he should know the fertility of every valley, as 
 well as the hind who ploughs it ; and be able to describe, or, if it is 
 required, to give thee an exact map of all the plains and defiles, the 
 forts, the acclivities, the woods and morasses, through and by which 
 his army is to march ; he should know their produce, their plants, 
 their minerals, their waters, their animals, their seasons, their climates, 
 their heats and colds, their inhabitants, their customs, their language, 
 their policy, and even their religion. 
 
 " Is it else to be conceived, Corporal," continued my Uncle Toby, 
 rising up in his sentry-box, as he began to w^arm in this part of his dis- 
 course, how Marlborough could have marched his army from the banks 
 of the Maes to Belgurg ; from Belburg to Kerpenord — (here the Cor- 
 poral could sit no longer), from Kerpenord, Trim, to Kalsaken ; from 
 Kalsaken to Newdors ; from Newdors to Landenbourg ; from Landen- 
 bourg to Mildenheim ; from Mildenheim to Elchingen ; from Elchingen 
 to Gingen ; from Gingen to Balmerchoffen ; from Balmerchoffen to 
 Skellenbourg, where he broke in upon the enemy's works ; forced his 
 passage over the Danube ; crossed the Lech, pushed on his troops into 
 the heart of the empire, marching at the head of them through Friburg, 
 Hokenwert, and Schonevelt, to the plains of Blenheim and liochstet ? 
 Great as he was. Corporal, he could not have advanced a step, or made 
 one single day's march without the aids of Geography. As for Chrono- 
 logy, I own. Trim," continued my Uncle Toby, sitting down again 
 coolly in his sentry-box, " ihat, of all others, it seems a science which 
 a soldier might best spare, was it not for the lights which that science 
 must one day give him, in determining the invention of powder; the 
 furious execution of which, reversing everything like thunder before it, 
 has become a new era to us of military improvements, changing so 
 totally the nature of attacks and defences both by sea and land, and 
 awakening so much art and skill in doing it, that the world cannot be 
 too exact in ascertaining the precise time of its discovery, or too in- 
 quisitive in knowing what great man was the discoverer, and what 
 occasions gave birth to it. 
 
286 TRISTRAM SHANDY. , [vol. via 
 
 ** I am far from controverting," continued my Uncle Toby, ** what 
 historians agree in, that in the year of our Lord 1380, under the 
 reign of Wencelaus, son of Charles the Fourth, a certain priest, 
 whose name was Schwartz, showed the use of powder to the Vene- 
 tians, in their wars against the Genoese ; but 'tis certain he was not 
 the first ; because if we are to believe Don Pedro the Bishop of Leon, 
 how came priests and bishops, an' please your honour, to trouble 
 their heads so much about gunpowder? God knows," said my 
 Uncle Toby, " his providence brings good out of everything, and he 
 avers, in his chroncle of King Alphonsus, who reduced Toledo, that 
 in the 1343, which was full thiity-seven years before that time, the 
 secret of powder was well known, and employed with succes?^ both by 
 Moors and Christians, not only in their sea-combats, at that period, but 
 in many of their most memorable sitges in Spahi and Barbary. And 
 all the world knows that Friar Bacon had wrote expressly about it, and 
 had generously given the world a receipt to make it by, above a hun- 
 dred and fifty years before even Schwartz was born ; and that the 
 Chinese," added my iJncle Toby, *' embarrass us, and all accounts of it 
 still more, by boasting of the invention some hundreds of years even 
 before him." 
 
 ** They are a pack of liars, I believe," cried Trim. 
 
 *'niey are somehow or other deceived," said my Uncle Toby, '' in this 
 matter, as is plain to me from the present miserable state of military 
 architecture amongst them ; which consists of nothing more than a fosse 
 with a brick wall without flanks, and for what they give us as a bastion 
 at each angle of it, 'tis so barbarously constructed, that it looks for all 
 
 the world " — ''Like one of my seven castles, an' please your 
 
 honour," quoth Trim. 
 
 My Uncle Toby, though in the utmost distress for a comparison, 
 most courteously refused Trim's offer, till Trim telling him he had a 
 dozen more in Bohemia, which he knew not how to get off his hands, 
 my Uncle Toby was so touched with the pleasantry of heart of the 
 Corporal, that he discontinued his dissertation upon gunpowder, and 
 begged the Corporal forthwith to go on with his story of the King of 
 Bohemia and his seven castles. 
 
 The Story of the King of Bohemia and his Seven 
 Castles — continued. 
 
 "This unfortunate King of Bohemia," said Trim. — ** Was he un- 
 fortunate, then ? " cried my Uncle Toby, for he had been so wrapt up 
 in his dissertation upon gimpowder and other military affairs, that 
 though he had desired the Corporal to go on, yet the many interrup- 
 tions he had given dwelt not so strong upon his fancy as to account for 
 the epithet. '* Was he unfortunate then, Trim ? " said my Uncle 
 Toby, pathetically. The Corporal, wishing first the word and all its 
 synonyms at the devil, forthwith began to run back in his mind the 
 principal events in the King of Bohemia's story ; from every one of 
 which it appearing that he was the most fortunate man that ever existed 
 in the world, it put the Corporal to a stand. For aot caring to rctra^ 
 
VOL. vni.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 287 
 
 his epithet, and less to explain it, and least of all to twist his tale (like 
 men of lore) to serve a system, he looked up in my Uncle Toby s face 
 for assistance, but seeing it was the very thing my Uncle Toby sat in 
 expectation of himself, after a " hum" and a **haw," he went on — 
 
 ** The King of Bohemia, an' please your honour," replied the Cor- 
 poral, ** was unfortunate, as thus — that taking great pleasure and de^ 
 light in navigation and all sort of sea affairs, and there happening 
 throughout the whole kingdom of Bohemia to be no seaport town what- 
 ever " 
 
 " How the deuce should there, Trim ? " cried my Uncle Toby ; *' for 
 Bohemia being totally inland, it could have hapi^med no otherwise. — 
 ** It might," said Trim, **if it had pleased God." 
 
 My Uncle Toby never spoke of the being and natural attributes of 
 God but with diffidence and hesitation. 
 
 ** I believe not," replied my Uncle Toby, after some pause ; **for 
 being inland, as I said, and having Silesia and Moravia to the east, 
 Lusatia and Upper Saxony to the north, Franconia to the west, and 
 Bavaria to the south, Bohemia could not have been propelled to the sea 
 without ceasing to be Bohemia ; nor could the sea, on the other hand, 
 have come up to Bohemia without overflowing a great part of Germany 
 and destroying millions of unfortunate inhabitants who could make no 
 
 defence against it " — " Scandalous ! " cried Trim. — ** Which would 
 
 bespeak," added my Uncle Toby, mildly, **such a want of compassion 
 in Him who is the father of it, that I think. Trim, the thing could have 
 happened no way." 
 
 The Corporal made the bow of unfeigned conviction, and went on : 
 
 *' Now the King of Bohemia, with his queen and courtiers, hap- 
 pening one fine summer's evening to walkout " — **Ay, there the 
 
 word happening is right. Trim," cried my Uncle Toby, *' for the King 
 of Bohemia and his Queen might have walked out or let it alone ; 'twas 
 a matter of contingency, which might happen or not, just as chance 
 ordered it." 
 
 " King William was of an opinion, an' please your honour," quoth 
 Trim, "that everything was predestined for us in this world; inso- 
 much that he would often say to his soldiers that * every ball had its 
 billet.'" — "He was a great man," said my Uncle Toby. — "And I 
 believe," continued Trim, " to this day that the shot which disabled 
 me at the battle of Landen was pointed at my knee for no other 
 purpose but to take me out of his service and place i^e in your 
 honour's, where I should be taken so much better care of in my 
 old age." — " It shall never. Trim, be construed otherwise," said my 
 Uncle Toby. 
 
 The hearts of both the master and the man were alike subject to 
 sudden overflowings. A short silence ensued. 
 
 ** Besides," said the Corporal, resuming the dir.course, but in a gayer 
 accent, "if it had not been for that single shot, I had never, an' please 
 your honour, been in love '' 
 
 " So, thou wast once in love, Trim ! " said Uncle Toby, smiling. 
 
 "Souse!" replied the corporal, "over head and ears! an' please 
 your honour." — ".Pr'ythee when ? where ? and how came it to pass ? I 
 never heard one word of it before," quoth my Uncle Toby. — " I dare 
 say," answered Trim, " that every dmmmer and Serjeant's son in the 
 
288 TRISTRAM SHAND Y\ [vol. vill. 
 
 regiment knew of it." — "It's high time I should," said my Uncle 
 Toby. 
 
 "Your honour remembers with concern," said the Corporal, **the 
 total rout and confusion of our camp and army at the affair of Landen ; 
 every one was left to shift for himself, and if it had not been for the 
 regiments of Wyndham, Lumley, and Galway, which covered the 
 retreat over the bridge of Neerspeeken, the king himself could scarce 
 have gained it : he was pressed hard, as your honour knows, on every 
 side of him." 
 
 ** Gallant mortal ! "cried my Uncle Toby, caught up with enthusiasm, 
 '* this moment, now that all is lost, I see him galloping across me, 
 Corporal, to the left, to bring up the remains of the English horse 
 along with him, to support the right, and tear the laurel from Luxem- 
 bourg's brows, if yet 'tis possible. I see him with the knot of his 
 scarf just shot off, infusing fresh spirits into poor Galway's regiment, 
 riding along the line, then wheeling about, and charging Conti at the 
 head of it." — "Brave! brave by Heaven?" cried my Uncle Toby, "he 
 deserves a crown." — " As richly as a thief a halter," shouted Trun. 
 
 My Uncle Toby knew the Corporal's loyalty; otherwise the com- 
 parison was not at all to his mind, it did not altogether strike the 
 Corporal's fancy when he had made it, but it could not be recalled, so 
 he had nothing to do but proceed. 
 
 ** As the number of wounded was prodigious, and no one had time to 
 think of anything but his own safety." — "Though Talmash," said my 
 Uncle Toby, ** brought off the foot with great prudence." — "But I was 
 left upon the field," said the Corporal. — "Thou wast so; poor fellow ! " 
 replied my Uncle Toby. — "So that it was noon the next day," con- 
 tinued the Corporal, " before I was exchanged, and put into a cart vidth 
 thirteen or fourteen more, in order to be conveyed to our hospital." 
 
 * * There is no part of the body, an' please your honour, where a wound 
 occasions more intolerable anguish than upon the knee." 
 
 "Except the groin," said my Uncle Toby. — "An' please your 
 honour," replied the Corporal, " the knee, in my opinion, must cer- 
 tainly be most acute, there being so many tendons and what-d'ye-call- 
 'ems all about it." 
 
 "It is for that reason," quoth my Uncle Toby, " that the groin is in- 
 finitely more sensible." 
 
 Mrs. Wadman, who had been all the time in her arbour, instantly 
 stopped her breath, unpinned her mob at the chin, and stood up upon one 
 leg. 
 
 The dispute was mai-ntained with amicable and equal force, betwixt 
 my Uncle Toby and Trim, for some time ; till Trim at length recollect- 
 ing that he had often cried at his master's sufferings, but never shed a 
 tear at his own, w'as for giving up the point, which my Uncle Toby 
 would not allow. "'Tis a proof of nothing, Trim," said he, "but the 
 generosity of thy temper." 
 
 So that whether the pain of a wound in the groin {ctxteris pai'ibus) is 
 greater than the pain of a wound in the knee — or 
 
 Whether the pain of a wound in the knee is not greater than the pain 
 of a wound in the groin, are points which to this day remain unsettled. 
 
VOL. vili.] TRISTRAM SHAND K ^89 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 '' The angiiish of my knee," continued the Corporal, ** was excessive in 
 itself ; ancl the uneasiness of the cart, wiih llie roughness of the roads, 
 which were terribly cut up, inakint,^ bad still worse, every step was 
 death to me ; so that, with the loss of blood, and the want of care- 
 taking of me, and a fever I felt coming on besides " — (" Poor fool ! '' 
 said my Uncle Toby ") — ■" all together, an' please your honour, was 
 more than I could sustain. 
 
 *• I was telling my sufferings to a young woman at a peasant's house, 
 where our cart, which was the last of the line, had halted ; they 
 had helped me in, and the young woman had taken a cordial out of her 
 pocket and dropped it upon some sugar, and seeing it had cheered me, 
 she had given it me a second and a third time. So I was telling her, an' 
 please your honour, the anguish I was \\\ and was saying it was so intolera- 
 l)le to me, that I had much rather lie down upon the bed, turning my face 
 tow^ards one which was in the corner of the room, and die, than go on ; 
 when, upon her attempting to lead me to it, I fainted away in her arms. 
 She was a good soul ! as your honour," said the Corporal, wiping his 
 eyes, '* will hear." 
 
 ** I thought love had been a joyous thing," quoth my Uncle Toby. 
 
 " 'Tis the most serious thing, 'an please your honour (sometimes) that, 
 is in the world." 
 
 *'By the persuasion of the young wom-an," continued the Corporal, 
 *' the cart with the wounded men set off without me; she had assured 
 them I should expire immediately if I was put into the cart. So when I 
 came to myself, I found myself in a still quiet cottage, with no one but 
 the young woman, and the peasant and his wife. 1 was laid across the 
 bed iji the corner of the room, with my wounded leg upon a chair, and 
 the young woman beside me, holding the corner of her handkerchief 
 dipped in vinegar to my nose in one hand, and rubbing my temples with 
 the other. 
 
 ** I took her at first for the daughter of the peasant (for it was no inn) 
 so had offered her a little purse with eighteen florins, which my poor 
 brother Tom (here Trim wiped his eyes) had sent me as a token, by a 
 recruit just before he set out for Lisbon. 
 
 *' I never told your honour that piteous story yet," here Trim wiped 
 his eyes a third time. 
 
 ** The young woman called the old man and his wife into the room to 
 show them the money, in order to gain me credit for a bed and what 
 little necessaries I should want, till I should be in a condition to be got 
 to the hospital." — "Come then!" said she, tying up the little purse^ 
 "I'll be your banker; but as that oflice alone will not keep me 
 employed, I'll be your nurse too." 
 
 *' I thought by her manner of speaking this, as well as by her dress, 
 which I then began to consider more attentively, that the young woman 
 could not be the daughter of the peasant. 
 
 " She was in black down to her toes, v/ith her hair concealed under a 
 ■cambric border, laid close to her forehead \ she was one of those kind of 
 
290 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol, vIM, 
 
 nuns, *an please your honour, of which your honour knows there are a 
 good many in Flanders which they let go loose.'' — ** By thy description. 
 Trim," said my Uncle Toby, '* 1 dare say she was a young Beguine, oif 
 which there are none to be found anywhere but in tlie Spanish Nether- 
 lands, except at Amsterdam ; they differ from nuns in this, that they can 
 quit their cloister if they choose to marry ; they visit and take care of 
 the sick by profession. I had rather, for my own part, they did it out of 
 good nature." 
 
 " She often told me," quoth Trim, "she did it for the love of Christ. 
 1 did not like it." — '* I believe, Trim, we are both wrong," said 
 my Uncle Toby ; ** we'll ask Mr. Yorick about it to-night at my brother 
 Shandy's, so put me in mind," added my Uncle Toby. 
 
 ** The young Beguine," continued the Corporal, **had scarce given 
 herself time to tell me *she would be my nurse,' when she hastily 
 turned about to begin the office of one and prepare something for me ; 
 and in a short time, though I thought it a long one, she came back with 
 flannels, &c. &c., and having fomented my knee soundly for a couple of 
 hours, &c., and made me a thin basin of gruel for my supper, she wished 
 me rest, and promised to be with me early in the morning. She wished 
 me, an' please your honour, what was not to be had. My fever ran 
 very high that night ; her figure made sad disturbance within me. I 
 was every moment cutting the world in two to give her half of it, and 
 every moment was I crying ' that I had nothing but a knapsack and 
 eighteen florins to share with her.' The whole night long was the fair 
 .Beguine, like an angel, close by my bedside, holding back my curtain 
 and offering me cordials ; and I was only awakened from my dream by 
 her coming there at the hour promised and giving them in reality. In 
 ■truth, she was scarce ever from me ; and so accustomed was I to receive 
 life from her hands that my heart sickened, and I lost colour when she 
 'left the room." 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 !As soon as the Corporal had finished the story of his amour — or rather 
 jmy Uncle Toby for him — Mrs. Wadman silently sallied forth from her 
 ■arbour, replaced the pin in her mob, passed the wicker-gate, and 
 ■ advanced slowly towards my Uncle Toby's sentry-box. The disposition 
 ; which Trim made in my Uncle Toby's mind was too favourable a crisis 
 to be let slip. 
 
 The attack was determined upon ; it was facilitated still more by my 
 Uycle Toby's having ordered the Corporal to wheel off the pioneer's 
 shovel, the spade, the pick axe, the piquets, and other military stores 
 >which lay scattered upon the ground where Dunkirk stood. The Cor- 
 ■poral had marched, the field was clear. 
 
 • Now consider, sir, what nonsense it is, either in fighting or writing or 
 anything else (whether in rliyme to it or not) whicli a man has occasion 
 to do, to act by plan ; for if ever plan, independent of all circumstances, 
 deserved registering in letters of gold (I mean in the archives of Gotham), 
 it was certainly the plan of Mrs. Wadman's attack of my Uncle Toby 
 in his sentry-box by plan. Now, the plan hanging up in it at this 
 junotuFe being the plan of Dunkir-k, j^nd the tale of Dunkirk a tale of 
 
•/ 
 
 VOL. VIII.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 29I 
 
 relaxation, it opposed every impression she could make ; and besides, 
 could she have gone upon it, the manoeuvre of fingers and hands in 
 the attack of the sentry-box was so outdone by that of the fair Beguine's 
 in Trim's story, that just then that particular attack, however successful 
 before, became the most heartless attack that could be made. 
 
 Oh ! let woman alone for this. Mrs. Wadman had scarce opened the 
 wicket-gate when her genius sported with the change of circumstances. 
 
 She formed a new attack in a moment. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 " I AM half-distracted, Captain Shandy," said Mrs. Wadman, holding 
 up her cambric handkerchief to her left eye as she approached the door 
 of my Uncle Toby's sentry-box. ** A mote, or sand, or something — I 
 know not what — has got into this eye of mine ; do look into it — it is 
 not in the white." 
 
 In saying which, Mrs. Wadman edged herself close in beside my 
 Uncle Toby, and squeezing herself down upon the comer of his bench, 
 she gave him an opportunity of doing it without rising up. ** Do look 
 into it,'* said she. 
 
 Honest soul ! thou didst look into it with as much innocence of heart 
 as ever child looked into a raree-show box ; and 'twere as much a sin 
 to have hurt thee. 
 
 If a man will be peeping of his own accord into things of that nature, 
 I've nothing to say to it. 
 
 My Uncle Toby never did, and I will answer for him that he would 
 have sat quietly upon a sofa from June to January (which, you know, 
 takes in both the hot and cold months) with an eye as fine as the 
 Thracian Rhodope's* beside him, without being able to tell whether it 
 was a black or a blue one. 
 
 The difficulty was to get my Uncle Toby to look at one at all. 
 
 'Tis surmounted. And — 
 
 I see him yonder, with his pipe pendulous in his hand, and the ashes 
 falling out of it, looking and looking, then rubbing his eyes and looking 
 again, with twice the good nature that ever Galileo looked for a spot 
 in the sun. 
 
 In vain, for, by all the powers which animate the organ, Widow 
 Wadman's left eye shines this moment as lucid as her right ; there is 
 neither mote, nor sand, nor dust, nor chaff, nor speck, nor particle of 
 opaque matter floating in it ; there is nothing, my dear paternal uncle, 
 but one lambent delicious fire, furtively shooting out from every part of 
 it, in all directions, into thine. 
 
 If thou lookest. Uncle Toby, in search of this mote one moment 
 longer, thou art undone. 
 
 " * Rhodope Thracia tam inevitabili fascino instructa, tain exacte oculis intuens 
 at traxit, ut si in illam quis incidissct, fieri non posset, quiti caperetur. I know noc 
 who. 
 
292 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. viil. 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 An eye is for all the world exactly like a cannon in this respect, that it 
 is not so much the eye or the cannon in tliemselves, as it is the carriage 
 of the eye, and the carriage of the cannon, by which both the one and 
 the other are enabled to do so much execution. I don't think the 
 comparison a bad one. However, as 'tis made and placed at the head 
 of the chapter as much for use as ornament, all I desire in return is 
 that whenever I speak of Mrs. Wad man s eye (except once in the next 
 period) that you keep it in your fancy. 
 
 *' I protest, madam," said my Uncle Toby, " I can see nothing 
 whatever in your eye." 
 
 ** It is not in the white," said Mrs. Wadman. My Uncle Toby 
 looked with might and main into the pupil. 
 
 Now of all the eyes which ever were created, from your own madam, , 
 up to those of Venus herself, which certainly were as venereal a pair of 
 eyes as ever stood in a head, there never was an eye of them all so fitted 
 to rob my Uncle Toby of his repose as the very eye at which he was 
 looking. It was not, madam, a rolling eye, a romping or a wanton one ; 
 nor was it an eye sparkling, petulant, or imperious, of high claims and 
 terrifying exactions, which would have curdled at once that milk of 
 human nature of which my Uncle Toby was made up ; but 'twas an 
 eye full of gentle salutations and soft responses, speaking, not like the 
 trumpet-stop of some ill-made organ, in wliich many an eye I talk to 
 holds coarse converse, but whispering soft, like the last low accents of 
 an expiring saint — ** How can you live comfortless, Captain Shandy, 
 and alone, without a bosom to lean your head on or trust your cares 
 to?" 
 
 It was an eye — 
 
 But I shall be in love with it myself if I say another word about it. 
 
 It did my Uncle Toby's business. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 There is nothing shows the characters of my father and my Uncle 
 Toby in a more entertaining light than their different manner of deport- 
 ment under the same accident — for I call not love a misfortune, from a 
 persuasion that a man's heart is ever the better for it. Great God ! 
 what must my Uncle Toby's have been when 'twas all benignity with- 
 out it. 
 
 My father, as appears from many of his papers, was very subject to 
 this passion before he married ; but from a little subacid kind of droUish 
 impatience in his nature, whenever it befell him, he would never submit 
 to it like a Christian, but would pish, and huff, and bounce, and kick, 
 and play the devil, and write the bitterest philippics against the eye that 
 ever man wrote. ITiere's one in verse upon somebody's eye or other, 
 
VOL. VIII.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 293 
 
 that for two or three nights together had put him by his rest, "which, in 
 his first transport of resentment against it, he begins thus : 
 
 A devil 'tis — and mischief such doth work 
 As never yet did Pagan, Jew, or Turk.* 
 
 In short, during the whole paroxysnt my father was all abuse and 
 foul language, approaching rather towards malediction ; only he did not 
 do it with as much method as Ernulphus — he was too impetuous ; nor I 
 with Ernulphus's policy, for though my father, with the most intolerant < 
 spirit, would curse both this and that, and everything under heaven 
 which was either aiding or abetting to his love, yet never concluded his | 
 chapter of curses upon it without cursing himself in at the bargain as " 
 one of the most egregious fools and coxcombs, he would say, that ever 
 was let loose in the world. 
 
 My Uncle Toby, on the contrary, took it like a lamb ; sat still, and 
 let the poison work in his veins without resistance ; in the sharpest 
 exacerbations of his wound — like that on his groin — he never dropped 
 one fretful or discontented word ; he blamed neither heaven nor earth, 
 nor thought nor spoke an injurious thing of anybody or any part of it ; 
 he sat solitary and pensive with his pipe, looking at his lame leg, then 
 whiffing out a sentimental " Heigh-ho ! " which, mixing with the smoke, 
 incommoded no one mortal. 
 
 He took it like a lamb, I say. 
 
 In truth, he had mistook it at first ; for having taken a ride with my 
 father that very morning to save, if possible, a beautiful wood which 
 the dean and chapter were hewing down to give to the poor,* which 
 said wood, being in full view of my Uncle Toby's house, and of singular 
 service to him in his description of the battle of Wynnendale, by 
 trotting on too hastily to save it upon an uneasy saddle, worse horse, 
 &c., it had so happened that the serous part of the blood had got 
 betwixt the two skins in the nethermost part of my Uncle Toby — the 
 first shootings of which, as my Uncle Toby had no experience of love, 
 lie had taken for a part of the passion, till the blister breaking in the 
 one case and the other remaining, my Uncle Toby was presently con- 
 vinced that his wound was not a skin-deep wound, but that it had gone 
 to his heart. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVII. 
 
 The world is ashamed of being virtuous. My Uncle Toby knew little 
 of the world ; and therefore when he felt he was in love with Widow 
 Wadman he had no conception that the thing was any more to be made 
 a mystery of than if Mrs. Wadman had given him a cut with a 
 gapped knife across his finger. Had it been otherwise, yet, as he ever 
 looked upon Trim as an humble friend, and saw fresh reasons every 
 day of his life to treat him as such, it would have made no variation 
 in the manner in which he informed him of the affair. 
 ** I am in love, Corporal ! '' quoth my Uncle Toby. 
 
 * This will be printed with my father's " Life of Socrates," &c &c. 
 t Mr. Shandy must mean the poor in spirit, innsmuch as they divided the money 
 amongst themselves. 
 
294 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. viil. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 
 ** In love," said the Corporal. " Your honour was very Vf^W. the day 
 before yesterday, when I was telling your honour the story of the 
 King of Bohemia."—'* Bohemia," said my Uncle Toby, musing a long 
 time. *' What became of that story, Trim ? " 
 
 *' We lost it, an' please your honour, somehow betwixt us ; but your 
 honour was as free from love then as I am." — ** 'Twas just whilst thou 
 went'st off with the wheel-barrow, with Mrs. Wadman," quoth my 
 Uncle Toby. "She has left a ball here," added my Uncle Toby, 
 pointing to his breast. 
 
 " She can no more, an' please your honour, stand a siege than she 
 can fly," cried the Corporal. 
 
 " But as we are neighbours, Trim, the best way I think is to let her 
 know it civilly first," quoth my Uncle Toby. 
 
 ** Now, if I might presume," said the Corporal, ** to differ from your 
 honour " 
 
 " Why else do I talk to thee, Trim ? " said my Uncle Toby, mildly. 
 
 **Then L would begin, an' please your honour, with making a 
 good thundering attack upon her in return, and telling her civilly after- 
 wards. For if she knows anything of your honour's being in love 
 beforehand. Lord help her !" — "She knows no more at present of it. 
 Trim," said my Uncle Toby, " than the child unborn." 
 
 Precious soul ! 
 
 Mrs. Wadman had told it, with all its circumstances, to Mrs. Bridget 
 twenty-four hours before ; and was at that very moment sitting in 
 council with her touching some slight misgivings with regard to the 
 ifc«ue of the affair, which the devil, who never lies dead in a ditch, had 
 put into her head before he would allow half time to get quietly through 
 her te Deum. 
 
 "I am terribly afraid," said Widow Wadman, "in case I should 
 marry him, Bridget, that the poor captain will not enjoy his health 
 with the monstrous wound upon his groin." 
 
 "It may not, madam, be so very large," replied Bridget, "as you 
 think ; and I believe besides," added she, " that 'tis dried up." 
 
 " I could like to know, merely for his sake," said Mrs. Wadman. 
 
 "We'll know the long and the broad of it in ten days," answered 
 Mrs. Bridget ; " for whilst the Captain is paying his addresses to you, 
 I'm confident Mr. Trim will be for making love to me. And I'll let 
 him as much as he will," added Bridget, " to get it all out of him." 
 
 The measures were taken at once, and my Uncle Toby and the 
 Corporal went on with theirs. 
 
 " Now," quoth the Corporal, setting his left hand akimbo, and giving 
 such a flourish with his right as just promised success, and no more, 
 " if your honour will give me leave to lay down the plan of this attack.'* 
 
 *' Thou wilt please me by it, Trim," said my Uncle Toby, ** exceed- 
 ingly. And as I foresee thou must act in it as my aide-de-camp, here's 
 a crown. Corporal, to begin with, to steep thy commission." 
 
 " Then, an' please your honour," said the Corporal (making a bow 
 
VOL. VIII.] TRISTRAM SHAND Y. 295 
 
 first for his commission), ** we will begin with getting your honour's 
 laced clothes out of the great campaign- trunk, to be well aired, and 
 have the blue and gold taken up at the sleeve ; and I'll put your white 
 ramallie-wig fresh into pipes, and send^or a tailor to have your honour's 
 
 thin scarlet breeches turned " 
 
 ** I had better take the red plush ones," quoth my Uncle Toby. — 
 *' They will be too clumsy," said the Corporal. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 ** Thou wilt get a brush and a little chalk to my sword." — " 'Twill be 
 only in your honour's way," replied Trim. 
 
 CHAPTER XXX. 
 
 **BuT your honour's two razors shall oe new set, and I will get my 
 Montero cap furbished up, and put on poor Lieutenant Le Fevre's 
 regimental coat, which your honour gave me to wear for his sake, and 
 as soon as your honour is clean-shaved, and has got your clean shirt 
 on, with your blue and gold or your fine scarlet — sometimes one and 
 sometimes t'other — and everything is ready for the attack, we'll march 
 up boldly as if 'twas to the face of a bastion ; and whilst your honour 
 engages Mrs. Wadman in the parlour, to the right, I'll attack Mrs. 
 Bridget in the kitchen, to the left ; and having seized that pass, I'll 
 answer for it," said the Corporal, snapping his fingers over his head, 
 ** that the day is your own." 
 
 " I wish I may but manage it right," said my Uncle Toby, ** but I 
 declare, Corporal, I had rather march up to the very edge of a 
 trench " 
 
 " A woman is quite a different thing," said the Corporal. 
 
 " I suppose so," quoth my Uncle Toby. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXI. 
 
 If anything in this world which my father said could have provoked 
 my Uncle Toby during the time he was in love, it was the perverse 
 use my father was always making of an expression of Hilarion the 
 hermit, who, in speaking of his abstinence, his watchings, flagellations, 
 and other instrumental parts of his religion, would say, though with 
 more facetiousness than became a hermit, " that they were the means 
 he used to make his ass (meaning his body) leave off kicking." 
 
 It pleased my father well ; it was not only a laconic way of express- 
 ing but of libelling at the same time the desires and appetites of the 
 lower part of us ; so that for many years of my father's life 'twas his 
 constant mode of expression — he never used the word passions once — 
 but ass always instead of them. So that he might be said truly to 
 
296 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. viil. 
 
 have been upon the bones or the back of his own ass, or else of some 
 other man's, during all that time. 
 
 I must here observe to you the difference betwixt my father's ass and 
 my hobby-horse, in order to keep characters as separate as may be in 
 our fancies as we go along. 
 
 For my hobby-horse, if you recollect a little, is no way a vicious 
 beast. He has scarce one hair or lineament of the ass about him ; 'tis 
 the sporting little filly folly which carries you out for the present hour — 
 a maggot, a butterfly, a picture, a fiddlestick, an Uncle Toby's siege, or 
 an anything which a man makes a shift to get astride on, to canter it 
 away from the cares and solicitudes of life. 'Tis as useful a beast as is 
 in the whole creation ; nor do I really see how the world could do 
 without it. 
 
 But for my father's ass — oh ! mount him, mount him, mount him 
 (that's three times, is it not?) — mount him not. 'Tis a beast concupi- 
 scent, and foul befall the man who does not hinder him from kicking. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII. 
 
 ** As the ancients agree, brother Toby," said my father, " that there are 
 two different and distinct kinds of love, according to the different parts 
 which are affected by it — the brain or liver — I think, when a man is in 
 love, it behoves him a little to consider which of the two he has fallen 
 into." 
 
 " What signifies it, brother Shandy," replied ray Uncle Toby, 
 " which of the two it is, provided it will but make a man maiTy, and 
 love his wife, and get a few children? " 
 
 "A few children !" cried my father, rising out of his chair and look- 
 ing full in my mother's face, as he forced his way betwixt hers and Dr. 
 Slop's. " A few children ! " cried my father, repeating my Uncle Toby's 
 words as he walked to and fro. 
 
 ** Not, my dear brother Toby," cried my father, recovering himself 
 all at once, and coming close up to the back of my Uncle Toby's chair, 
 ** not that I should be sorry hadst thou a score ; on the contrary, I 
 should rejoice, and be as kind, Toby, to every one of them as a father." 
 
 My Uncle Toby stole his hand unperceived behind his chair to give 
 my father a squeeze. 
 
 ** Nay, moreover," continued he, keeping hold of my Uncle Toby's 
 hand, ** so much dost thou possess, my dear Toby, of the milk of human 
 nature, and so little of its asperities, 'tis piteous the world is not peopled 
 by creatures which resemble thee ; but it is the system of love and 
 marriage thou goe«^t upon which I would set thee right in." 
 
 "There is, at least," said Yorick, *' a great deal of reason and 
 plain sense in Captain Shandy's opinion of love; and 'tis amongst 
 the ill-spent hours of my life, which I have to answer for, that I 
 have read so many flourishing poets and rhetoricians in my time 
 from whom I never could extract so much." 
 
 ** I wish, Yorick," said my father, ** you had read Plato, for there 
 you would have learnt that there are two loves." — ** I know there were 
 two religions," replied Yorick, **among>t the ancients — one for the 
 
VOL. viii.] TRISTRAM SHAND K i297, 
 
 vulgar and another for the learned ; but I think one loVe might have 
 served both of them very well." 
 
 " It could not," replied my father, " and for the same reasons ; for 
 of these loves, according to Ficinus's comment upon Velasius, the one 
 is rational, the other is natural ; the first ancient — without mother-^ 
 where V«nus had nothing to do ; the second, begotten of Jupiter and 
 Dione." 
 
 *• Pray, brother," quoth my Uncle Toby, ** what has a man who 
 believes in God to do witli this ? " My father could not stop to answer, 
 for fear of breaking the thread of his discourse. 
 
 *' The first, which is the golden chain let down from heaven, excites 
 to love heroic, which comprehends in it and excites to the desire of 
 philosophy and truth." 
 
 ** To be sure," said my mother, ** love keeps peace in the world." 
 
 '* In the house, my dear, I own." — ** It replenishes the earth," said 
 my mother. 
 
 *' But it keeps heaven empty, my dear," replied my father. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV. 
 
 My father had such a skirmishing, cutting kind of a slashing way with 
 him in his disputations, thrusting and ripping, and giving every one a 
 stroke to remember him by in his turn, that if there were twenty people 
 in company, in less than half an hour he was sure to have every one of 
 them against him. 
 
 What did not a little contribute to leave him thus without an ally, 
 was, that if there w^as any one post more untenable than the rest, he 
 would be sure to throw himself into it ; and, to do him justice, when he 
 was once there, he would defend it so gallanily, that 'twould have 
 been a concern, either to a brave man or a good-natured one, to have 
 seen him driven out. 
 
 Yorick for this reason, though he would often attack hkn, yet could 
 never bear to do it with all his force. 
 
 He was beginning to blow up all the convents in Christendom about 
 Slop's ears, when Corporal Trim came into the parlour to inform my 
 Uncle Toby that his thin scarlet breeches, in which the attack was to be 
 made upon Mrs. Wadman, would not do ; for that the tailor, in ripping 
 them up in order to turn them, had found they had been turned before. 
 — **Then turn them again, brother," said my father rapidly, **for there 
 will be many a turning of 'em yet before all's done in the affair." — 
 •* They are as rotten as dirt," said the Corporal. — ** Then, by all means,' 
 said my father, "bespeak a new pair, brother; for though I know," 
 continued my father turning himself to the company, " that Widow 
 Wadman has been deeply in love with my brother Toby for many years, 
 and has used every art and circumvention of woman to outwit him into 
 the same passion, yet now that she has caught him, her fever will be 
 past its height. She has gained her point." 
 
 " In this case," continued my father, ** which Plato, I am persuaded, 
 never thought of, love, you see, is not so much a sentiment as a situation 
 into which a man enters, as my brother Toby would do into a corps : no 
 
^^ TRISTRAM SHANDV\ [vOL.vill. 
 
 matter whether he loves the service or no, beings once in it, he acts as if 
 ke did, and takes every step to show himself a man of prowess." 
 
 The hypothesis, like the rest of my father's, was plausible enough, and 
 my Uncle Toby had but a single word to object to it, in which Trim 
 stood ready to second him, but my father had not drawn his conclusion. 
 
 **For this reason," continued my father (statiug the case over again), 
 ** notwithstanding all the world knows that Mrs. Wadman affects my 
 brother Toby, and my brother Toby contrariwise affects Mrs. Wadman, 
 and no obstacle in nature, yet will I answer for it that this self- same 
 tune will not be played this twelvemonth." 
 
 ** We have taken our measures badly," quoth my Uncle Toby, looking 
 up interrogatively in Trim's face. 
 
 **I would lay my Montero cap," said Trim. Now Trim's Montero 
 cap, as I once told you, was his constant wager, and having furbished it 
 up that very night in order to go upon the attack, it made the odds look 
 more considerable. ** I w^ould lay, an' please your honour, my Montero 
 cap to a shilling, was it proper," continued Trim (making a bow), " to 
 offer a wager before your honours." 
 
 "There is nothing improper in it," said my father, "'tis a mode of 
 expression ; for in saying thou wouldst lay thy Montero cap to a 
 shilling, all thou meanest is this, that thou belie vest " 
 
 ** Now, what dost thou believe ? " 
 
 **That Widow Wadman, an' please your worship, cannot hold it out 
 ten days." 
 
 " And whence," cried Slop, jeeringly, " hast thou all this knowledge 
 of woman, friend?" 
 
 ** By falling in love with a popish clergy woman, " said Trim. 
 
 *"Twas a Beguine," said my Uncle Toby. 
 
 Dr. Slop was too much in wrath to listen to the distinction, and my 
 father, taking that very crisis to fall in helter-skelter upon the whole order 
 of nuns and Beguines — a set of silly, fusty baggages — Slop could not stand 
 it, and my Uncle Toby having some measures to take about his breeches, 
 and Yorick about his fourth general division, in order for their several 
 attacks next day, the company broke up ; and my father being left alone, 
 and having half an hour upon his hands betwixt that and bedtime, he 
 called for pen, ink, and paper, and wrote my Uncle Toby the following 
 letter of instructions : — 
 
 ** My dear Brother Toby,— 
 
 '* What I am going to say to thee is upon the nature of women, 
 , and of love-making to them, and perhaps it is as well for thee, though 
 • not so well for me, that thou hast occasion for a letter of instructions 
 upon that head, and that I am able to write it to thee. 
 
 " Had it been the good pleasure of Him who disposes of our lots, and 
 thou no sufferer by the knowledge, I had been well content that thou 
 shouldst have dipped the pen this moment into the ink instead of my- 
 self ; but that not being the case — Mrs. Shandy being now close beside 
 me, preparing for bed — I have thrown together, without order, and just 
 as they have come into my mind, such hints and documents as I deem 
 -may be of use to thee, intending in this to give thee a token of my 
 ^ove, not doubting, my dear Toby, of the manner in which it will be 
 ^ccepte«i. 
 
VOL. Via] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 295. 
 
 ** In the first place, with regard to all which concerns religion in 
 the affair (though I perceive, from a glow in my cheek, that I blush 
 as I begin to speak to thee upon the subject, as well knowing, notwith- 
 standing thy unaffected secrecy, how few of its offices thou neglectest), 
 yet I would remind thee of one, during the continuance of thy court- 
 ship, in a particular manner which I would not have omitted, and that 
 is — never to go forth upon the enterprise, whether it be in the morning 
 or the afternoon, without first recommending thyself to the protection of 
 Almighty God, that He may defend thee from the evil one. 
 
 * ' Shave the whole top of thy crown clean, once at least, every four 
 or five days, but oftener if convenient, lest in taking off thy wig before 
 her, through absence of mind, she should be able to discover how much 
 has been cut away by Time, how much by Trim. 
 
 ** 'Twere better to keep ideas of baldness out of her fancy. 
 
 ** Always carry it in thy mind, and act upon it, as a sure maxim, Toby— 
 
 ** * That women are timid.* And 'tis well they are, else there would 
 be no dealii^ with them. 
 
 ** Whatever thou hast to say, be it more or less, forget not to utter it 
 iu alow, soft tone of voice. Silence, and whatever approaches it, weaves 
 dreams of midnight secrecy into the brain. For this cause, if thou canst 
 help it, never throw down the tongs and poker. 
 
 ** Avoid all kinds of pleasantry and facetiou^ness in thy discourse 
 with her, and do whatever lies in thy power, at tht s ime time, to keep 
 from her all books and writing which tend thereto. There are some 
 devotional tracts which, if thou canst entice her to read over, it will be well. 
 But suffer her not to look into Rabelais, or Scarron, or Don Quixote. 
 
 "Stick a pin in the bosom of thy shirt before thou enterest her 
 parlour. 
 
 "And if thou art permitted to sit upon the same sofa with her, 
 and she gives thee occasion to lay thy hand upon hers — l^eware of 
 taking it. Thou canst not lay thy hand on hers but she will feel the 
 temper of thine. Leave that, and as many other things as thou canst, 
 quite undetermined, and by so doing thou wilt have her curiosity on 
 thy side. And if she is not conquered by that, and thy ass continues still 
 continues kicking (which there is great reason to suppose), thou 
 must begin with first losing a few ounces of blood below the cars, 
 according to the practice of the ancient Scythians. 
 
 *' Avicenna, after tins, is for having the part anointed with the syrup 
 of hellebore, using proper evacuations and purges, and I believe rightly. 
 But thou must eat little or no goat's flesh, nor red deer, nor even 
 foaPs flesh, by any means ; and carefully abstain (that is, as much as 
 thou canst) from peacocks, cranes, coots, didappers, and water-hens. 
 
 *' As for thy drink, I need not tell thee it must be the infusion of 
 vervain and the herb hanea, of which ^lian relates such effects ; but if 
 thy stomach palls with it, discontinue it from time to time, taking 
 cucumbers, melons, purslane, water-lilies, woodbine and lettuce, in the 
 stead of them. 
 
 " There is nothing further for thee which occurs to me at present. 
 
 *• Unless the breaking out of a fresh war. So wishing everything, 
 dear Tpby, for the best, 
 
 ** J rest thy affectionate brother, 
 
 ^^^Valtek Shandy/' 
 
30O TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. viii. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXV. 
 
 Whilst my father was writing his letter of instructions, my Uncle 
 Toby and the Corporal were busy in preparing everything for the 
 attack. As the turning of the thin scarlet breeches was laid aside, at 
 least for the present, there was nothing which should put it off beyond 
 the next morning. So accordingly it was resolved upon for eleven 
 o'clock. 
 
 **Come, my dear," said my father to my mother, ** *twill be but like 
 a brother and sister if you and I take a walk down to my brother 
 Toby's, to countenance him in this attack of his." 
 
 My Uncle Toby and the Corporal had been accoutred both some 
 time, when my father and mother entered, and the clock striking eleven, 
 were that moment in motion to sally forth. But the account of this is 
 worth more than to be wove into the fag-end of the eighth volume of 
 such a work as this. My father had no time but to put the letter of 
 instructions into my Uncle Toby's coat-pocket, and join with my 
 mother in wishing his attack prosperous. 
 
 ** I could like, said my mother, " to look through the keyhole out 
 of curiosity." 
 
 ** Call it by its right name, my dear," quoth my father — 
 
 " And look through the keyhole as long as you will.' 
 
VOLUME IX. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 I CALL all the powers of time and chance, which severally check us 
 in our careers in this world, to bear me witness that I could never yet 
 get fairly to my Uncle Toby's amours till this very moment ; that my 
 mother's curiosity, as she stated the affair — or a different impulse in her, 
 as my father would have it — wished her to take a peep at them through 
 the keyhole. 
 
 *' Call it, my dear, by its right name," quoth my father, " and look 
 through the keyhole as long as you will." 
 
 Nothing but the fermentation of that little subacid humour, which 
 I have often spoken of in my father's habit, could have vented such an 
 insinuation. He was, however, frank and generous in his nature, and 
 at all times open to conviction ; so that he had scarce got to the 
 last word of this ungracious retort, w^hen his conscience smote him. 
 
 My mother was then conjugally swinging with her left arm twisted 
 under his right in such wise that the inside of her hand rested upon 
 the back of his. She raised her fingers and let them fall, it could 
 scarce be called a tap ; or if it was a tap 'twould have puzzled a casuist 
 to say whether 'twas a tap of remonstrance or a tap of confession. 
 My father, who was all sensibilities from head to foot, classed it right. 
 Conscience redoubled her blow. He turned his face suddenly the 
 other way, and my mother supposing his body was about to turn with 
 it in order to move homewards, by a cross movement of her right leg, 
 keeping her left as its centre, brought herself so far in front that as he 
 turned his head he met her eye. Confusion again ! He saw a 
 thousand reasons to wipe out the reproach, and as many to reproach 
 himself. A thin, blue, chill, pellucid crystal with all its humours so 
 at rest, the least mote or speck of desire might have been seen at the 
 bottom of it had it existed — it did not. 
 
 A temperate current of blood ran orderly through her veins in all 
 months of the year, and in all critical moments both of the day and 
 night alike ; nor did she superinduce the least heat into her humours 
 from the manual effervescences of devotional tracts, which having little 
 or no meaning in them. Nature is oft-times obliged to find one. And 
 as for my father's example, 'twas so far from being either aiding or 
 sibettiug thereunto, that 'twas the whole business of his life to keep all 
 
302 TRISTRAM SHANDY, [vol. IX. 
 
 fancies of that kind out of her head. Nature had done her part to 
 have spared him this trouble ; and what was not a little inconsistent, 
 my father knew it. And here am I sitting, this 12th day of August, 
 1766, in a purple jerkin and yellow pair of slippers, without either wig 
 or cap on, a most tragi-comical completion of his prediction, ** That I 
 should neither think nor act like any other man's child, upon that 
 very account." 
 
 The mistake of my father, was in attacking my mother's motive, 
 instead of the act itself ; for certainly keyholes were made for other 
 purposes ; and considering the act as an act which interfered with a 
 true proposition, and denied a keyhole to be what it was, it became 
 a violation of Nature, and was so far, you see, criminal. 
 
 " It is for this reason, an' please your reverence, that keyholes are the 
 occasions of more sin and wickedness than all other holes in this 
 world put together. '* 
 
 "Which leads me to my Uncle Toby^s amours. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Though the Corporal had been as good as his word in putting my 
 Uncle Toby's great ramallie-wig into pipes, yet the time was too short 
 to produce any great effects from it; it had lain many years squeezed 
 up in the corner of his old campaign trunk, and as bad forms are not so 
 easy to be got the better of, and the use of candle-ends not so well 
 understood, it was not so pliable a business as one would have wished. 
 The Corporal with cheery eye and both arms extended had fallen back 
 perpendicular from it a score times, to inspire it, if possible, with 
 a better air. Had Spleen given a look at it, 'twould have cost her lady- 
 ship a smile. It curled everywhere but where the Corporal would have 
 it ; and where a buckle or two, in his opinion, would have done it 
 honour, he could as soon have raised the dead. 
 
 Such it was — or rather such would it have seemed upon any other 
 brow ; but the sweet look of goodness which sat upon my Uncle 
 Toby's, assimilated everything around it so sovereignly to itself, and 
 Nature had moreover wrote Gentleman with so fair a hand in every line 
 of his countenance, that even his tarnished gold -laced hat and huge 
 cockade of flimsy taffeta became him ; and though not worth a button 
 in themselves, yet the moment my Uncle Toby put them on, they 
 became serious objects, and altogether seemed to have been picked up by 
 the hand of Science to set him off" to advantage. 
 
 Nothing in this world could have co-operated more powerfully to- 
 wards this than my Uncle Toby's blue and gold, had not quantity 
 in some measure been necessaiy to grace ; in a period of fifteen or 
 sixteen years since they had been made, by a total inactivity in my Uncle 
 Toby's life, for he seldom went further than the bowling-green, his blue 
 and gold had become so miserably too strait for him, that it was with 
 the utmost difficulty the Corporal was able to get him into them ; the 
 taking them up at the sleeves was of no advantage. They were laced, 
 however, down the back, and at the seams of the sides, &c., in the mode 
 
\t)U iX.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 303 
 
 of King William's reign ; and to shorten all description, they shone so 
 bright against the sun that morning, and had so metallic and doughty an 
 air with them, that had my Uncle Toby thought of attacking in armour, 
 nothing could have so well imposed upon his imagination. 
 
 As for the thin scarlet breeches they had been unripped by the tailor, 
 and as there was no alternative^ in my Uncle Toby's wardrobe, he 
 sallied forth in the red plush. 
 
 The Corporal had arrayed himself in poor Le Fevre's regimental 
 coat ; and with his hair tucked up under his Montero cap, which he had 
 furbished up for the occasion, marched three paces distant from his 
 master; a whiff of military pride had puffed out his shirt at the wrist ; 
 and upon that, in a black leather thong clipped into a tassel beyond the 
 knot, hung the Corporal's stick. My Uncle Toby carried his cane like 
 a pike. 
 
 " It looks well at least," quoth my father to himself. 
 
 CHAPTER IIL 
 
 My Uncle Toby turned his head more than once behind him to see how 
 he was supported by the Corporal ; and the Corporal as oft as he did it 
 gave a slight flourish with his stick, but not vapouringly ; and with the 
 sweetest accent of most respectful encouragement, bid his honour 
 "never fear." 
 
 Now my Uncle Toby did fear, and grievously too ; he knew not (as 
 my father had reproached him) so much as the right end of a woman 
 from tlie wrong, and therefore was never altogether at his ease near any 
 one of them, unless in sorrow or distress ; then infinite was his pity ; 
 nor would the most courteous knight of romance have gone further, at 
 least upon one leg, to have wiped away a tear from a woman's eye ; and 
 yet excepting once that he was beguiled into it by Mrs. Wadman, he had 
 never looked steadfastly into one. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ** She cannot,*' quoth my Uncle Toby, halting, when they had marched 
 up to within twenty paces of Mrs. Wadman's door — "she cannot. 
 Corporal, take it amiss." 
 
 **She will take it, an' please your honour," said the Corporal, **just 
 as the Jew's widow at Lisbon took it of my brother Tom." 
 
 '* And how was that ?" quoth my Uncle Toby, facing quite about to 
 the Corporal. 
 
 ** Your honour,** replied the Corporal, '* knows of Tom's misfortunes ; 
 but this affair has nothing to do with them any further than this, that 
 if Tom had not married the widow, or had it pleased God after their 
 marriage, that they had but put pork into their sausages, the honest 
 soul had never been taken out of his warm bed, and dragged to the In- 
 
304 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. I5£. 
 
 quisition. *Tis a cursed place," added the Corporal, shaking his head, 
 **when once a poor creature is in, he is in, an' please your honour, for 
 ever." 
 
 **'Tis very true," said my Uncle Toby, looking gravely at Mrs. 
 Wadman's house as he spoke. 
 
 "Nothing," continued the Corporal, "can be so sad as confinement 
 for life, or so sweet, an' please your honour, as liberty. 
 
 ** Nothing, Trim," said my Uncle Toby, musing. 
 
 ** Whilst a man is free," cried the Corporal, giving a flourish with his 
 stick thus : 
 
 [Here follows a flourish of printer's ink.] 
 
 A thousand of my father's most subtle syllogisms could not have said 
 more for celibacy. 
 
 My Uncle Toby looked earnestly towards his cottage and his bowling 
 green. 
 
 The Corporal had unwarily conjured up the spirit of calculation with 
 his wand ; and he had nothing to do but to conjure him down again 
 with his story, and in this form of exorcism most unecclesiastically did 
 the Corporal do it. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 ** As Tom's place, an' please your honour, was easy, and the weather 
 warm, it put him upon thinking seriously of settling himself in the 
 world ; and as it fell out about that time, that a Jew, who kept a sausage 
 shop in the same street, had the ill luck to die of a strangury, and leave 
 his widow in possession of a rousing trade, Tom thought (as everybody 
 in Lisbon was doing the best he could devise for himself), there could 
 be no harm in offering her his service to carry it on. So without any 
 introduction to the widow, except that of buying a pound of sausages at 
 her shop, Tom set out, counting the matter thus within himself, as he 
 walked along, that, let the worst come of it that could, he should at 
 least get a pound of sausages for their worth, but if things went well, he 
 should be set up ; inasmuch as he should get not only a pound of 
 sausages, but a wife and a sausage- shop, an* please your honour, into the 
 bargain. 
 
 *' Every servant in the family, from high to low, wished Tom success ; 
 and I can fancy, an' please your honour, I see him this moment with 
 his white dimity waistcoat and breeches, and hat a little o' one side, 
 passing jollily along the street, swinging his stick, with a smile and a 
 1 cheerful word for everybody he met. But, alas ! Tom ! thou smilest 
 no more," cried the Corporal, looking on one side of him upon the 
 giound, as if he apostrophized him in his dungeon. 
 
 " Poor fellow ! " said my Uncle Toby feelingly. 
 
 ** He was an honest, light-hearted lad, an' please your honour, as ever 
 blood warmed." 
 
 " Then he resembled thee, Trim," said my Uncle Toby, rapidly. 
 
 The Corporal blushed down to his fingers' ends, a tear of seniimental 
 bashfulness, another of gratitude to my Uncle Toby, and a tear of sorrow 
 
VOL. IX.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 305 
 
 for his brother's misfortunes, started into his eye, and ran sweetly down 
 his cheek together. My Uncle Toby's kindled, as one lamp does at 
 another, and taking hold of the breast of Trim's coat (which had been 
 that of Le Fevre's), as if to ease his lame leg, but in reality to gratify a 
 finer feeling, he stood silent for a minute-and-a-half, at the end of which 
 he took his hand away, and the Corporal making a bow, went on with 
 his story of his brother and the Jew's widow. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 " When Tom, an' please your honour, got to the shop, there was no- 
 body in it but a poor negro girl, with a bunch of white feathers slightly 
 tied to the end of a long cane, flapping away flies, not killing them. " — 
 *' 'Tis a pretty picture, " said my Uncle Toby, "she had suffered perse- 
 cution, Trim, and learned mercy." 
 
 " She was good, an' please your honour, from nature as well as from 
 hardships ; and there are circumstances in the story of that poor friend- 
 less slut that would melt a heart of stone," said Trim, "and some dis- 
 mal winter's evening, when your honour is in the humour, they shall be 
 told you with the rest of Tom's story, for it makes a part of it. " 
 
 *'Then do not forget, Trim," said my Uncle Toby. 
 
 *' A negro has a soul? an' please your honour," said the Corporal 
 (doubtingly.) 
 
 *'Iam not much versed, Corporal," quoth my Uncle Toby, "in 
 things of that kind ; but I suppose, God would not leave him without 
 one, any more than thee or me. " 
 
 *' It would be putting one sadly over the head of another," quolh the 
 Corporal. 
 
 " It would be so, "said my Uncle Toby. — *' Why then, an' please your 
 honour, is a black wench to be used worse than a white one ? " 
 
 ** I can give no reason," said my Uncle Toby. 
 
 "Only," cried the Corporal, shaking his head, ** because she has no 
 one to stand up for her." 
 
 "'Tis that very thing. Trim," quoth my Uncle Toby, " which recom- 
 mends her to protection, and her brethren with her. 'Tis the fortune of 
 war which has put the whip into her hands now, where it may be here- 
 after, Heaven knows. But be it where it will, the brave. Trim, will not 
 use it unkindly." 
 
 '* God forbid," said the corporal. 
 
 ** Amen," responded my Uncle Toby, laying his hand upon his heart. 
 
 The Corporal returned to his story and went on, but with an embar- 
 rassment in doing it which here and there a reader in this world will 
 not be able to comprehend ; for by the many sudden transitions all 
 along, from one kind and cordial passion to another, in getting thus far 
 on his way, he had lost the sportable key of his voice which gave sense 
 and spirit to his tale. He attempted twice to resume it, but could not 
 please himself ; so giving a stout hem to rally back the retreating 
 spirits, and aiding Nature at the same time with his left arm akimbo on 
 one side, and with his right a little extended, supporting her on the 
 
3o6 TRIS TRAM SHAND K [vou ix. 
 
 other, the Corporal got as near the note as he could, atid in that attitude 
 continued his story. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 *' As Tom, an' please your honour, had no business at that time with 
 the Moorish girl, he passed on into the room beyond to talk to the Jew's 
 widow about love and his pound of sausages ; and being, as I had told 
 your honour, an open, cheery-hearted lad, with his character wrote in 
 his looks and carriage, he took a chair, and without much apology, but 
 wiih great civility at the same time, placed it close to her at the table, 
 and sat down. 
 
 ** There is nothing so awkward as courting a woman, an' please your 
 honour, whilst she is making sausages. So Tom began a discourse 
 upon them : first gravely, as *How they were made, with what meat, 
 herbs, and spices ; ' then a little gaily, as ' With what skins, and if they 
 never burst, whether the largest were not the best,' and so on ; taking 
 care only as he went along to season what he had to say upon sausages 
 rather under than over, that he might have room to act in." 
 
 ** It was owing to the neglect of that very precaution," said my 
 Uncle Toby, laying his hand upon Trim's shoulder, " that Count de la 
 Motte lost the battle of Wynendale ; he pressed too speedily into 
 the wood ; which if he had not done. Lisle had not fallen into our 
 hands, nor Ghent and Bruges, which both followed her example. It 
 was so late in the year," continued my Uncle, Toby, " and so terrible a 
 season came on, that if things had not fallen out as they did, our troops 
 must have perished in the open field." 
 
 " Why therefore may not battles, an' please your honour, as well 
 as marriages, be made in heaven ?" My Uncle Toby mused. 
 
 Religion inclined him to say one thing, and his high idea of military 
 skill tempted him to say another ; so not being able to frame a reply 
 exactly to his mind, my Uncle Toby said nothing at all ; and the Cor- 
 poral finished his story. 
 
 ** As Tom perceived, an' please your honour, that he gained ground, 
 and that all he had said upon the subject of sausages was kindly taken, 
 he went on to help her a little in making them. First, by taking hold 
 of the ring of the sausage, whilst she stroked the forced meat down 
 with her hand, then by cutting the strings into proper lengths and hold- 
 ing them in his hand, whilst she took them out one by one ; then by 
 putting them across her mouth, that she might take them out as she 
 wanted them ; and so on from little to more, till at last he adventured to 
 tie the sausage himself whilst she held the snout. 
 
 " Now a widow, an' please your honour, always chooses a second 
 husband as unlike the first as she can; so the affair was more than 
 half settled in her mind before Tom mentioned it. 
 
 " She made a feint, however, of defending herself by snatching up a 
 sausage. Tom instantly laid hold of another. 
 
 " She signed the capitulation, and Tom sealed it, and there was an 
 end of the matter." 
 
VOL. ixO TRISTRAM SHANDY. 307 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 ** All womankind," continued Trim, commenting upon his story, " from 
 the highest to the lowest, an' please your honour, love jokes; the 
 difficulty is to know how they choose to have them cut, and there is no 
 knowing that but by trying, as we do with our artillery in the field." 
 
 ** I like the comparison," said my Uncle Toby, "better than the 
 thing itself.'* 
 
 ** Because your honour,'* quoth the Corporal, ** loves glory more than 
 pleasure." 
 
 ** I hope, Trim," answered my Uncle Toby, ** I love mankind more 
 than either, and as the knowledge of arms tends so apparently to the 
 good and quiet of the world, and particularly that branch of it which we 
 have practised together in our bowling-green, has no object but to 
 shorten the strides of ambition, and entrench the lives and fortunes of the 
 few from the plunderings of the many, whenever that drum beats in our 
 ears, I trust, Corporal, we shall neither of us want so much humanity 
 and fellow-feeling as to face about and march." 
 
 In pronouncing this, my Uncle Toby faced about and marched 
 firmly, as at the head of his company ; and the faithful Corporal, 
 shouldering his stick, and striking his hand upon his coat-skirt as he 
 took his first step, marched close behind him down the avenue. 
 
 ** Now what can their two noddles be about ? " cried my father to my 
 mother ; " by all that's strange, they are besieging Mrs. Wadman in 
 form, and are marching round her house to mark out the lines of cir- 
 cumvallation." 
 
 ** I dare say," quoth my mother. But stop, dear sir, for what my 
 mother dared to say upon the occasion, and what my father did say 
 upon it, with her replies and his rejoinders, shall be read, perused, 
 paraphrased, commented, and descanted upon — or, to say it all in a 
 word, shall be thumbed over — by posterity in a chapter apart : I say by 
 posterity, and care not if I repeat the word again, for what has this 
 book done more than the " Legation of Moses " or the ** Tale of a 
 Tub " that it may not swim down the gutter of time along with 
 them? 
 
 I will not argue the matter — time wastes too fast ; every letter I trace 
 tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen ; the days and hours of 
 it, more precious, my dear Jenny, than the rubies about thy neck, are 
 flying over our heads, like light clouds of a windy day, never to return 
 more ; everything presses on, whilst thou are twisting that lock. See, 
 it grows grey ; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every 
 absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which 
 we are shortly to make. 
 ^ Heaven have mercy upon us both 
 
3o8 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. ix. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Now, for what the world thinks of that ejaculation I would not give a 
 groat. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 My mother had gone with her left arm twisted in my father*s right, till 
 they had got to the fatal angle of the old garden wall where Dr. Slop 
 was overthrown by Obadiah on the coach-horse ; as this was directly 
 opposite to the front of Mrs. Wadman's house, when my father came to 
 it he gave a look across, and seeing my Uncle Toby and the Corporal 
 within ten paces of the door he turned about. ** Let us just stop a 
 moment," quoth my father, ** and see with what ceremonies my brother 
 Toby and his man Trim make their first entry ; it will not detain us," 
 added my father, " a single minute." — " No matter if it be ten minutes," 
 quoth my mother. 
 
 " It will not detain us half a one," said my father. 
 
 The Corporal was just then setting in with the story of his brotlier 
 Tom and the Jew's widow ; the story went on and on ; it had episodes 
 in it — it came back, and went on, and on again ; there was no end of it ; 
 the reader found it very long. 
 
 God help my father ! He pish'd fifty times at every new attitude, and 
 gave the Corporal's stick, with all its flourishings and danglings, to as 
 many devils as chose to accept of them. 
 
 When issues of events like these my father is waiting for are hanging 
 in the scales of fate the mind has the advantage of changing the prin- 
 ciple of expectation three times, without which it would not have power 
 to see it out. 
 
 Curiosity governs the first moment, and the second moment is all 
 economy, to justify the expense of the first ; and for the tliird, fourth, 
 fifth, and sixth moments, and so on to the day of judgment — 'tis a point 
 of honour. 
 
 I need not be told that the eitiiic writers have assigned this all to 
 Patience; but that virtue, methinks, has extent of dominion sufficient 
 of her own, and enough to do in it, without invading the few dismantled 
 castles which Honour has left him upon the earth. 
 
 My father stood it out as well as he could with these three auxiliaries 
 to the end of Trim's story, and from thence to the end of my Uncle 
 Toby's panegyric upon arms in the chapter following it ; when seeing 
 that, instead of marching up to Mrs. Wadman's door, they both faced 
 about and marched down the airenue, diametrically opposite to his 
 expectation, he broke out at once with that little subacid sourness of 
 humour which in certain situations distinguished his character from 
 that of all other men. 
 
/OL. ixj TRISTRAM SHANDY. y^ 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 ** Now, what can their two noodles be about? " cried my father, &c. 
 
 "I daresay,*' said my mother, " they are making fortifications. '* 
 
 "Not on Mrs. Wadman's premises!'* cried my father, stepping 
 back. 
 
 " I suppose not," quoth my mother. 
 
 *'I wish,'* said my father, raising his voice, ** the whole science of 
 fortification at the devil, with all its trumpery of saps, mines, blinds, 
 gabions, sausse-brays, and cuvettes." 
 
 ** They are foolish things," said my mother. 
 
 Now, she had a way which, by-the-by, I would this moment give 
 away my purple jerkin, and my yellow slippers into the bargain, if 
 some of your reverences would imitate — and that was, ijever to refuse 
 her assent and consent to any proposition my father laid before her 
 merely because she did not understand it, or had no ideas to the prin- 
 cipal word or term of art upon which the tenet or proposition rolled. 
 She contented herself with doing all that her godfathers and godmothers 
 promised for her, but no more ; and so would go on using a hard word 
 twenty years together, and replying to it too, if it was a verb, in all 
 its moods and tenses, without giving herself any trouble to inquire 
 about it. 
 
 This was an eternal source of misery to my father, and broke the 
 neck, at the first setting out, of more good dialogues between them 
 than could have done the most petulant contradiction ; the few which 
 survived were the better for the cuvettes. 
 
 " They are foolish things," said my mother. 
 
 ** Particularly the cuvettes," replied my father. 
 
 'Twas enough ; he tasted the sweet of triumph, and went on. 
 
 ** Not that they are, properly speaking, Mrs. Wadman's premises," 
 said my father, partly correcting himself, *' because she is but tenant 
 for life." 
 
 " That makes a great difference,'* said my mother. 
 
 " In a fool's head," replied my father. 
 
 ** Unless she should happen to have a child,'* said my mother. 
 
 *' But she must persuade my brother Toby first." 
 
 ** To be sure, Mr. Shandy," quoth my mother. 
 
 ** Though if it comes to persuasion," said my father, "Lord have 
 mercy upon them." 
 
 ** Amen,'* said my mother, piano. 
 
 ** Amen,*' cried my isiih^Vy fortissimo, 
 
 *' Amen,*' said my mother again, but with such a sighing cadence of 
 personal pity at the end of it as discomfited every fibre about my 
 father. He instantly took out his almanac ; but before he could untie 
 it, Yorick's congregation coming out of church became a full answer to 
 one-half of his business with it ; and my mother telling him it was a 
 sacrament day, left him as little in doubt as to the other part. He put 
 his almanac into his pocket. 
 
3 to TRISTRAM SHANDY. [VOL. ix, 
 
 The First Lord of the Treasury, thinking of ways and means, could 
 not have returned home with a more embarrassed look. 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 Uf ON looking back from the end of the last chapter, and surveying the 
 texture of what has been wrote, it is necessary that upon this page and 
 the five following a good quantity of heterogeneous matter be inserted, 
 to keep up that just balance betwixt wisdom and folly without which 
 a book would not hold together a single year : nor is it a poor creeping 
 digression (which, but for the name of, a man might continue as well 
 going on in the king's highway) which will do the business ; no, if it 
 is to be a digression, it must be a good frisky one, and upon a frisky 
 subject too, where neither the horse nor his rider are to be caught but 
 by rebound. 
 
 The only difficulty is raising powers suitable to the nature of the 
 service. Fancy is capricious ; Wit must not be searched for ; and 
 Pleasantry (good-natured slut as she is) will not come in at a call, was 
 an empire to be laid at her feet. 
 
 The best way for a man is to say his prayers. 
 
 Only if it puts him in mind of his infirmities and defects, as well 
 ghostly as bodily for that purpose, he will find himself rather worse 
 after he has said them than before — for other purposes better. 
 
 For my own part, there is not a way, either moral or mechanical, 
 under heaven, that I could think of which I have not taken with 
 myself in this case; sometimes by addressing myself directly to the 
 soul herself, and arguing the point over and over again with her, upon 
 the extent of her own faculties. 
 
 I never could make them an inch the wider. 
 
 Then, by changing my system, and trying what could be made of it 
 upon the body, by temperance, soberness, and chastity: ■* These are 
 good," quoth I : "in themselves they are good absolutely, they are good 
 relatively, they are good for health, they are good for happiness in this 
 world, they are good for happiness in the next. " 
 
 In short, they were good for everything but the thing wanted ; and 
 there they were good for nothing but to leave the soul just as heaven 
 made it ; as for the theological virtues of faith and hope, they give it 
 courage ; but then that snivelling virtue cf meekness (as my iather 
 would always call it) takes it quite away again ; so you are exactly where 
 you started. 
 
 Now, in all common and ordinary cases there is nothing which I have 
 found to answer so well as this. 
 
 Certainly, if there is any dependence upon logic, and that I am not 
 blinded bv.-s^J^J'ave, there must be something of true genius about me, 
 merely i^ion, he ^symptom of it, that I do not know wh^ envy is ; for 
 never do^Av.h\qlt upon any invention or device which tendeth to the 
 furtherance of good writing but I instantly make it public, walling 
 that all mankind should write as well as myself. 
 
 Which they certainly will when they think as little. 
 
VOL. IX.] TRISTRAM SHANDY, 3tl 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 Now, in ordinary cases — that is, when I am only stupid, and the 
 thoughts rise heavily and pass gummous through my pen : 
 
 Or that I am got, I know not how, into a cold unmetaphorical vein 
 of infamous writing, and cannot take a plumb-lift out of it for my soul ; 
 so must be obliged lo go on writing like a Dutch commentator to the 
 end of the chapter, unless something be done : 
 
 I never stand conferring with pen and ink one moment ; for if a 
 pinch of snuflf or a stride or two across the room will not do the 
 business for me, I take a razor at once, and having tried the edge of it 
 upon the palm of my hand, without further ceremony, except that of 
 first lathering my beard, I shave it off ; taking care only, if I do leave a 
 hair, that it be not a gray one : this done, I change my shirt — put on a 
 better coat —send for my last wig — put my topaz ring upon my finger ; 
 and, in a word, dress myself from one end to the other of me after my 
 best fashion. 
 
 Now the devil in hell must be in it if this does not do ; for consider, 
 sir, as every man chooses to be present at the shaving of his own beard 
 (though there is no rule without an exception), and unavoidably sits 
 over against himself the whole time it is doing, in case he has a hand in 
 it, the situation, like all others, has notions of her own to put into the 
 brain. 
 
 I maintain it, the conceits of a rough-bearded man are seven years 
 more terse and juvenile for one single operation ; and if they did not 
 run a risk of being quite shaved away, might be carried up by continual 
 shavings to the highest pitch of sublimity. How Homer could write 
 with so long a beard I don't know, and as it makes against my hypo- 
 thesis, I as little care. But let us return to the toilet. 
 
 Ludovicus Sorbonensis makes this entirely an affair of the body 
 {e^(oT€pLKrj irpa^Ls) as he calls it, but he is deceived ; the soul and body 
 are joint-sharers in everything they get. A man cannot dress but his 
 ideas get clothed at the same time ; and if he dresses like a gentle- 
 man, every one of them stands presented to his imagination gen- 
 teelized along with him, so that he has nothing to do but take his 
 pen and write like himself. 
 
 For this cause, when your honours and reverences would know 
 whether I write clean and fit to be read, you will be able to judge full 
 as well by looking into my laundress's bill as my book : there was otie 
 single month in which I can make it appear that I dirtied one-and- 
 thirty shirts with clean writing ; and, after all, was more abused, cursed, 
 criticized, and confounded, and had more mystic heads shaken at me, 
 for what I had wrote in that one month, than in all the other months of 
 that year put together. 
 
 But their honours and reverences had not seen my bills. 
 
312 TRlSTkAM SHAND. [voL IX. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 As I never had any intention of beginning the digression I am making 
 all this preparation for till I come to the fifteenth chapter, I have 
 this chapter to put to whatever use I think proper. I have twenty this 
 moment ready for it. I could write my chapter of Button-holes in it — 
 
 Or my chapter of Pishes, which should follow them — 
 
 Or my chapter of Knots, in case their reverences have done with 
 them — they might lead me into mischief. The safest way is to follow the 
 tract of the learned, and raise objections against what I have been 
 writing, though I declare beforehand I know no more than my heels 
 how to answer them. 
 
 And first, it may be said there is a pelting kind of thersitical satire, 
 as black as the very ink it is wrote with (and, by-the-by, whoever says 
 so is indebted to the muster-master-general of the Grecian army, for 
 suffering the name of so ugly and foul-mouthed a man as Thcrsiles to 
 continue upon liis roll, for it has furnished him with an epithet). 
 In these productions, he will urge, all the personal washings and 
 scrubbings upon earth do a sinking genius no sort of good, but just 
 the contrary, inasmuch as the dirtier the fellow is, the better generally 
 he succeeds in it. 
 
 To this I have no other answer— at least ready — but that the Arch- 
 bishop of Benevento wrote his nasty romance of the " Galatea," as all 
 the world knows, in a purple coat, waistcoat, and purple pair of 
 breeches ; and that the penance set him of writing a commentary upon 
 the book of the Revelations, as severe as it was looked upon by one part 
 of the world, was far from being deemed so by the other, upon the 
 single account of that investment. 
 
 Another objection to all this remedy is its want of universality ; for- 
 asmuch as the shaving part of it, upon which so much stress is laid, 
 by an unalterable law of nature, excludes one half of the species 
 entirely from its use, all I can say is, that female writers, whether of 
 England or of France, must even go without it. 
 
 As for the Spanish ladies, I am in no sort of distress. 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 The fifteenth chapter is come at- last, and brings nothing with it but a 
 sad signature of " How our pleasures slip from under us in this world !'* 
 
 For in talking of my digression, I declare before heaven I have made 
 it ! '* What a strange creature is mortal man ! " said she. 
 
 " 'Tis very true," said I ; but 'twere better to get all these things out 
 of our heads and return to my Uncle Toby. 
 
VOL.IXJ TRISTRAM SHANDY. 313 
 
 CHAPTER XVL 
 
 "^flEN my Uncle Toby and the Corporal had marched down to the 
 bottom of the avenue, they recollected their business lay the other 
 way ; so they faced about, and marched up straight to Mrs. Wadman's 
 door. 
 
 *' I warrant your honour," said the Corporal, touching his Montero 
 cap with his hand, as he passed him in order to give a knock at the 
 door. My Uncle Toby, contrary to his invariable way of treating his 
 faithful servant, said nothing good or bad ; the truth was, he had not 
 altogether marshalled his ideas ; he wished for another conference ; and 
 as the Corporal was mounting up the three steps before the door, he 
 hemmed twice — a portion of my Uncle Toby's most modest spirits 
 fled at each expulsion towards the Corporal ; be stood with the 
 rapper of the door suspended for a full minute in his hand, he scarce 
 knew why. Bridget stood perdue within, with her finger and her thumb 
 upon the latch, benumbed with expectation ; and Mrs. Wadman sat 
 breathless behind the window-curtain of her bed-chamber watching 
 their approach. 
 
 *'Trim," said my Uncle Toby ; but as he articulated the word the 
 minute expired, and Trim let fall the rapper. 
 
 My Uncle Toby, perceiving that all hopes of a conference wero 
 knocked on the head by it, whistled ** LillabuUero." 
 
 CHAPTER XVn. 
 
 As Mrs. Bridget's finger and thumb were upon the latch, the Corporal 
 did not knock as oft as perchance your honour's tailor. I might have 
 taken my example something nearer home, for I owe mine some five- 
 and-twenly pounds at least, and wonder at the man's patience. 
 
 But this is nothing at all to the world, only 'tis a cursed thing to be 
 •n debt ; and there seems to be a fatality in the exchequers of some 
 poor princes, particularly those of our house, which no economy can 
 bind down in irons ; for my own part, I am persuaded there is not any 
 one prince, prelate, or potentate, great or small, upon earth, more 
 desirous in his heart of keeping straight with the world than I am, or 
 who takes more likely means for it. I never give above half-a-guinea, 
 or walk with boots, or cheapen toothpicks, or lay out a shilling upon 
 a band-box, the year round ; and for the six months I am in the 
 country I am upon so small a scale, that with all the good temper in 
 the world, I outdo Rousseau a bar length ; for 1 keep neither man, nor 
 boy, nor horse, nor cow, nor dog, nor cat, nor anything that can eat or 
 drink, except a thin poor piece of a vestal (to keep my fire in), and who 
 has generally as bad an appetite as myself ; but if you think this makes 
 a philosopher of me, I would not, my good people, give a rush for your 
 judgments. 
 
314 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. IX. 
 
 True philosophy. But there is no treating the subject whikt my 
 uncle is whistling " Lillabullero." 
 Let us go into the house. 
 
 CHAPTERS XVIII. and XIX. 
 [Left a blank leaf.] 
 
 CHAPTER XXIL 
 
 We live in a world beset on all sides with mysteries and riddles, and so 
 'tis no matter, else it seems strange that Nature, who makes everything 
 so well to answer its destination, and seldom or never errs, unless for 
 pastime, in giving such forms and aptitudes to whatever passes through 
 her hands, that whether she designs for the plough, the caravan, the 
 cart, or whatever other cr^tures she models, be it but an ass's foal, you 
 are sure to have the thing you wanted ; and yet at the same time should 
 so eternally bungle it as she does in making so simple a thing as a 
 married man. 
 
 Whether it is in the choice of the clay, or that it is frequently spoiled 
 in the baking, by an excess of which a husband may turn out too crusty 
 (you know) on one hand, or not enough so through defect of heat on the 
 other ; or whether this great artificer is not so attentive to the little 
 Platonic exigencies of that part of the species for whose use she is 
 fabricating this, or that her ladyship sometimes scarce knows what sort 
 of a husband will do, I know not : we will discourse about it after 
 supper. 
 
 It is enough that neither the observation itself nor the reasoning upon 
 it are at all to the purpose, but rather against it, since, with regard to 
 my Uncle Toby's fitness for the marriage state, nothing was ever better : 
 she had formed him of the best and kindliest clay, had tempered it with 
 her own milk, and breathed into it the sweetest spirit ; she had made 
 him all gentle, generous, and humane ; she had filled his heart with 
 trust and confidence, and disposed every passage which led to it for the 
 communication of the tenderest offices. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIIL 
 
 Mrs. Bridget had pawned all the little stock of honour a poor chamber- 
 maid was worth in the world that she would get to the bottom of the 
 affair in ten days, and it was built upon one of the most concessible 
 postulata in nature — namely, that whilst my Uncle Toby was making 
 love to her mistress, the Corporal could find nothing better to do thai> 
 
V6L. ixj TRISTRAM SHANDY, JiJ 
 
 make love to her, " And I'll let him as much as he will," said Bridget, 
 ** to get it out of him." 
 
 Friendship has two garments — an outer and an under one. Bridget 
 was serving her mistress's interests in the one, and doing the thing 
 which most pleased herself in the other, so had as many stakes depend- 
 ing upon my Uncle Toby's wound as the devil himself ; Mrs. Wadman 
 had but one, and as it possibly might be her last (without discouraging 
 Mrs. Bridget or discrediting her talents), was determined to play her 
 cards herself. 
 
 She wanted not encouragement ; a child might have looked into his 
 hand, there was such a plainness and simplicity in his playing out what 
 trumps he had, with such an unmistrusting ignorance of the ten-ace, and 
 so naked and defenceless did he sit upon the same sofa with Widow 
 Wadman that a generous heart would have wept to have won the game 
 of him. 
 , Let us drop the metaphor. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 And the story too, if you please ; for though I have all along been 
 hastening towards this part of it with so much earnest desire, as well 
 knowing it to be the choicest morsel of what I had to offer to the world, 
 yet now that I am got to it, any one is welcome to take my pen and go 
 on with the story for me that will : I see the difficulties of the descripti<Mis 
 I am going to give, and feel my want of powers. 
 
 It is one comfort at least to me that I lost some fourscore ounces of 
 blood this week in a most uncritical fever which attacked me at the 
 beginning of this chapter, so that I have still some hopes remaining it 
 may be more in the serous or globular parts of the blood than in the 
 subtle auia of the brain ; be it which it will, an invocation can do no 
 hurt, and I leave the affair entirely to the invoked to inspire or to inject 
 me accordingly as he sees good. 
 
 The Invocation. 
 
 Gentle spirit of sweetest humour, who erst didst sit upon the easy pen 
 of my beloved Cervantes ; thou who glidest daily through his lattice and 
 tumedst the twilight of his prison into noonday brightness by thy 
 presence, tinged his little urn of water with heaven-sent nectar, and all 
 the time he wrote of Sancho and his master didst cast thy mystic mantle 
 over his withered stump,* and wide extended it to all the evils of his 
 life- 
 Turn in hither, I beseech thee. Behold these breeches. They are all I 
 have in the world : that piteous rent was given them at Lyons. 
 
 My shirts : see what a deadly schism has happened amongst them, 
 for the laps are in Lombardy, and the rest of them here. I never had but 
 six. 
 
 * He lost his hand at the battle of Lepanto. 
 
3i6 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. IX. 
 
 And yet, notwithstanding all this, and a pistol tinder-box, which was, 
 moreover, filched from me at Sienna, and twice that I paid five pauk 
 for two hard eggs, once at Raddicoffini and a second time at Capua, I 
 do not think a journey through France and Italy, provided a man keeps 
 his temper all the way, so bad a thing as some people would make you 
 believe ; there must be ups and downs, or how the deuce should we get 
 i/ito valleys where nature spreads so many tables of entertainment. 
 'Tis nonsense to imagine they will lend you their voitures to be shaken to 
 pieces for nothing, and unless you pay twelve sous for greasing your 
 wheels, how should the poor peasant get butter to his bread? We 
 roally expect too much ; and for the livre or two above par for your 
 suppers and bed — at the most they are but one shilling and ninepence 
 halfpenny — who would embroil their philosophy for it ? For heaven's and 
 for your own sake pay it — pay it with both hands open, rather than leave 
 disappointment sitting drooping upon the eye of your fair hostess and 
 her damsels in the gateway at your departure ; and besides, my dear 
 sir, you get a sisterly kiss of each of them worth a pound — at least I 
 did. 
 
 For my Uncle Toby's amours running all the way in my head, they had 
 the same effect upon me as if tliey had been my own ; I was in the most 
 perfect state of bounty and goodwill, and felt the kindliest harmony 
 -vibrating within me with every oscillation of the chaise alike, so that 
 whether roads were rough or smooth, it made no difference ; everything 
 I saw or had to do wilh touched upon some secret spring either of 
 sentiment or rapture. 
 
 They were the sweetest notes I had ever heard ; and I instantly let 
 down the fore-glass to hear them more distinctly. *' 'Tis Maria," said 
 the postillion, observing I was listening. " Poor Maria," continued he, 
 (leaning his body on one side to let me see her, for he was in a line 
 betwixt us), *'is sitting upon a bank, playing her vespers upon her 
 pipe, with her little goat beside her." 
 
 The young fellow uttered this with an accent and a look so perfectly 
 in tune to a feeling heart, that I instantly made a vow I would give 
 him a four-and-twenty sous piece when I got to Moulins. 
 * ' And who is poor Maria ? " said I. 
 
 **The love and pity of all the villages around us," said the postillion. 
 "It is but three years ago that the sun did not shine upon so fair, so 
 quick-witted and amiable a maid ; and better fate did Maria deserve 
 than to have her banns forbid by the intrigues of the curate of the 
 parish who published them." 
 
 He was going on, when Maria, who had made a short pause, put the 
 pipe to her mouth and began the air again, 'i'liey were the same 
 notes, yet were ten times sweeter. **It is the evening service to the 
 Virgin," said the young man, "but who has taught her to piny it, or 
 how she came by her pipe, no one knows. We think that Heaven 
 has assisted her in both ; for ever since she has been unsettled in her 
 mind it seems her only consolation — she has never once had the pipe 
 out of her hand, but plays that service upon ^it almost night and day." 
 The postillion delivered this with sd much discretion and natural 
 eloquence, that I could not help deciphering something in his face 
 above his condition, and should have sifted out his history had not 
 poor Maria's taken such full possession of me. 
 
VOL. IX.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 317 
 
 We had got up by this time almost to the bank where Maria was 
 sitting. She was in a ihin white jacket, with her hair, all but two 
 tresses, drawn up into a silk net, with a few olive leaves twisted a little 
 fantastically on one side. She was beautiful ; and if ever I felt the full 
 force of an honest heartache, it was the moment I saw her. 
 
 *' God help her, poor damsel ! Above a hundred masses," said the 
 postillion, *' have been said in the several parishes and convents around 
 for her, but without effect. We have still hopes, as she is sensible for 
 short intervals, that the Virgin at last will restore her to herself ; but 
 her parents, who know her best, are hopeless upon that score, and think 
 her senses are lost for ever." 
 
 As the postillion spoke this, Maria made a cadence so melancholy, 
 so tender and querulous, that I sprang out of the chaise to help her, 
 and found myself sitting betwixt her and the goat before I relapsed 
 from my enthusiasm. 
 
 Maria looked wistfully for some time at me, and then at her goat, 
 and then at me and then at her goat again ; and so on, alternately. 
 
 " Well, Maria," said I softly, ** what resemblance do you find?" 
 
 I do entreat the candid reader to believe me that it was from the 
 humblest conviction of what a beast man is that I asked the question ; 
 and that I would not have let fallen an unseasonable pleasantry in the 
 venerable presence of misery, to be entitled to all the wit that ever 
 Rabelais scattered ; and yet I own my heart smote me, and that I so 
 smarted at the very idea of it, that I swore I would set up for wisdom, 
 and utter grave sentences the rest of my days, and never, never attempt 
 again to commit mirth with man, woman, or child, the longest day I had 
 to live. 
 
 As for writing nonsense to them, I believe there was a reserve ; but 
 that I leave to the world. 
 
 Adieu, Maria ! Adieu, poor hapless damsel ! Some time, but 
 not now, I may hear thy sorrows from thy own lips. But I was 
 deceived ; for that moment she took her pipe, and told me such a tale 
 of woe with it, that I rose up, and with broken and irregular steps 
 walked softly to my chaise. 
 
 What an excellent inn at Moulins ! 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 When we have got to the end of this chapter (but not before) we must 
 all turn back to the two blank chapters on the account of which 
 my honour has lain bleeding this half-hour. I stop it by pulling off one 
 of my yellow slippers, and throwing it with all my violence to the 
 opfKJsite side of my room, with a declaration at the heel of it — 
 
 That whatever resemblance it may bear to half the chapters which are 
 written in the world, or, for aught I know, may be now writing in it, 
 that it was as casual as the foam of Zeuxis his horse ; besides, I look 
 upon a chapter which has only nothmg in it with respect, and con- 
 sidering what worse things there are in the world, that it is no way 
 a proper subject for satire. 
 
 Why, then, wa-s it left so ? And here, without staying for my reply. 
 
3i8 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. ix. 
 
 shall I be called as many blockheads, numsculls, doddypoles, dunder- 
 heads, ninnyhammers, goosecaps, joltheads, nincompoops, and other 
 unsavoury appellations, as ever the cake- bakers of Lerne cast in the 
 teeth of King Garagantua's shepherds. And I'll let them do it (as 
 Bridget said) as much as they please, for how was it possible they 
 should foresee the necessity I was under of writing the twenty-fifth 
 chapter of my book before the eighteenth, &c. 
 
 So I don't take it amiss. All I wish is, that it may be a lesson to the 
 world to let people tell their stories their own way. 
 
 The Eighteenth Chapter. 
 
 As Mrs Bridget opened the door before the Corporal had well given the 
 rap, the interval betwixt that and my Uncle Toby's introduction into the 
 parlour was so short that Mrs Wadman had but just time to get from 
 behind the curtain, lay a Bible upon the table, and advance a step or two 
 towards the door to receive him. 
 
 My Uncle Toby saluted Mrs Wadman after the manner in which 
 women were saluted by men in the year of our Lord God one thousand 
 seven hundred and thirteen, then facing about, he marched up abreast 
 with her to the sofa, and in three plain words, though not before 
 he was sat down, nor after he was sat down, but as he was sitting down, 
 told her he was in love ; so that my Uncle Toby strained himself 
 more in the declaration than he needed. 
 
 Mrs Wadman naturally looked down, in expectation every moment 
 that my Uncle Toby would go on, but having no talents for amplifica- 
 tion, and love, moreover, of all others being a subject of whcih he was 
 the least a master, when he had told Mrs Wadman once that he loved 
 her, he let it alone, and left the matter to work after its own way. 
 
 My father was always in raptures with this system of my Uncle 
 Toby's, as he falsely called it, and would often say, that could his 
 brother Toby to his process have added but a pipe of tobacco, he had 
 wherewithal to have found his way, if there was faith in a Spanish 
 proverb, towards the hearts of half the women upon the globe. 
 
 My Uncle Toby never understood what my father meant, nor will I 
 presume to extract more from it than a condemnation of an error which 
 the bulk of the world lie under, but the French, every one of *em to a 
 man, believe in it, almost as much as the real presence — '*That talking 
 of love is making it.'* 
 
 I would as soon set about making a black-pudding by the same 
 receipt. 
 
 Let us go on. Mrs Wadman sat in expectation my Uncle Toby would 
 do so, to almost the first pulsation of that minute wherein silence, on 
 one side or the other, generally becomes unfit ; so edging herself a little 
 more towards him, and raising up her eyes, sub-blushing as she did it, 
 she took up the gauntlet, or the discourse (if you like it better), and 
 communed with my Uncle Toby thus. 
 
 **The cares and disquietudes of the marriage state," quoth Mrs. 
 Wadman, "are very great." — ** I suppose so," said my Uncle Toby. — 
 **And therefore, when a person," continued Mrs. Wadman, **is so 
 much at his ease as you are — so happy, Captain Shandy, in yourself^ 
 
VOL. IX.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. 319 
 
 your friends, and your amusements — I wonder what reasons can incline 
 you to the state " 
 
 "They are written," quoth my Uncle Toby, "in the Common 
 Prayer- Book," 
 
 Thus far my Uncle Toby went on warily, and kept within his depth, 
 leaving Mrs. Wadman to sail upon the gulf as she pleased. 
 
 **As for children," said Mrs. Wadman, ** though a principal end 
 perhaps of the institution, and the natural wish, I suppose, of every 
 parent, yet do not we find they are certain sorrows and very uncertain 
 comforts ? And what is there, dear sir, to pay one for the heartaches, 
 what compensation for the many tender and disquieting apprehensions 
 of a suffering and defenceless mother who brings them into life ? " — 
 **I declare," said my Uncle Toby, smit with pity, ** I know of none, 
 unless it be the pleasure which it has pleased God " 
 
 ** A fiddlestick ! " quoth she. 
 
 Chapter the Nineteenth, 
 
 Now there are such an infinitude of notes, tunes, cants, chants, airs, 
 looks, and accents with which the word ** fiddlestick " may be pro- 
 nounced in all such cases as this, every one of them impressing a sense 
 and meaning as different from the other as dirt from cleanliness, that 
 casuists (for it is an affair of conscience on that score) reckon up no less 
 than fourteen thousand in which you may do either right or wrong- 
 Mrs. Wadman hit upon the " fiddlestick" which summoned up all my 
 Uncle Toby's modest blood into his cheeks. So feeling within himself 
 that he had somehow or other got beyond his depth, he stopped short ; 
 and without entering further either into the pains or pleasures of matri- 
 mony, he laid his hand upon his heart, and made an offer to take them 
 as they were and share them along with her. 
 
 When my Uncle Toby had said this, he did not care to say it again ; 
 so casting his eye upon the Bible which Mrs. Wadman had laid upon 
 the table, he took it up, and popping, dear soul, upon a passage in it 
 of all others the most interesting to him — which was the siege of 
 Jericho — he set himself to read it over, leaving his proposal of mar- 
 riage, as he had done his declaration of love, to work with her after 
 its own way. Now, it wrought neither as an astringent nor a loosener ; 
 nor like opium, or hark, or mercury, or buckthorn, or any one drug 
 which Nature had bestowed upon the world. In short, it worked 
 not at all in her ; and the cause of that was that there was some- 
 thing working there before. Babbler that I am ! I have anticipated 
 what it was a dozen times. But there is fire still in the subject, 
 Allans ! 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 It is natural for a perfect stranger who is going from London to 
 Edinburgh to inquire, before he sets out, how many miles to York, 
 which is about the half-way ; nor does anybody wojxier if he goes on 
 and asks about the corporation, &c. 
 
320 TRISTRAM SHANDY. [vol. IX. 
 
 It was just as natural for Mrs. Wadman, whose first husband was 
 all his time afflicted with a sciatica, to wish to know how far from the 
 hip to the groin, and how far she was likely to suffer more or less in 
 her feelings in the one case than in the other. 
 
 When Mrs. Wadman went round about by Namur to get at my Uncle 
 Toby's groin, and engaged him to attack the point of the advanced 
 counterscarp, and pele mHe with the Dutch to take the counterguard of 
 St. Roch sword in hand, and then, with tender notes playing upon his 
 ear, led him, all bleeding, by the hand out of the trench, wiping her eye 
 as he was carried to his tent, — heaven, earth, sea, all was lifted up ; 
 the springs of nature rose above their levels ; an angel of mercy sat 
 beside him on the sofa ; his heart glowed with fire ; and had he been 
 worth a thousand, he had lost every heart of them to Mrs. Wadman. 
 
 "And whereabouts, dear sir," quoth Mrs. Wadman, a little categori- 
 cally, **did you receive this sad blow?" In asking this question Mrs. 
 Wadman gave a slight glance towards the waistband of my Uncle 
 Toby's red plush breeches, expecting, naturally, as the shortest reply 
 to it, that my Uncle Toby would lay his forefinger upon the place. It 
 fell out otherwise ; for my Uncle Toby, having got his wound before the 
 gate of St. Nicolas, in one of the traverses of the trench opposite to 
 the salient angle of the demi-bastion of St. Roch, he could at any 
 time stick a pin upon the identical spot of ground where he was stand- 
 ing when the stone strack him ; this struck instantly upon my Uncle 
 Toby's sensorium, and with it struck his large map of the town and 
 citadel of Namur and its environs, which he had purchased, and pasted 
 down upon a board by the Corporal's aid, during his long illness. It 
 had lain with other military lumber in the garret ever since, and accord- 
 ingly the Corporal was detached into the garret to fetch it. 
 
 My Uncle Toby measured off thirty toises with Mis. Wadman 's 
 scissors from the returning angle before the gate of St. Nicolas, and 
 with such a virgin modesty laid her finger upon the place that the 
 goddess of decency, if then in being — if not, it was her shade — shook 
 her head, and with a finger wavering across her eyes, forbade her to 
 explain the mistake. 
 
 Unhappy Mrs. Wadman ! 
 
 For nothing can make this chapter go off with spirit but an apos- 
 trophe to thee ; but my heart tells me that, in such a crisis, an apos- 
 trophe is but an insult in disguise. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVII. 
 My Uncle Toby's map is carried down into the kitchen. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 It was like the momentary contest in the moist eyelids of an April 
 morning, whether Bridget should laugh or cry. 
 
VOL. ix.J TRISTRAM SHANDY. %n 
 
 She snatched up a rolling-pin— it was ten to one she had laughed. 
 
 She laid it down ; she cried ; and had one single tear of them but 
 tasted of bitterness, full sorrowful would the Corporal's heart have been 
 that he had used the argument ; but the Corporal understood the sex, a 
 quart major to a terce at least, better than my Uncle Toby, and accord- 
 ingly he assailed Mrs. Bridget after this manner. 
 
 *'I know, Mrs. Bridget," said the Corporal, giving her a most 
 respectful kiss, *'that thou art good and modest by nature, and art 
 withal so generous a girl in thyself, that, if 1 know thee rightly, thou 
 wouliist not wound an insect, much less the honour of so gallant and 
 worthy a soul as my master, wast thou sure to be made a countess 
 of; but thou hast been set on and deluded, dear Bridget, as is often 
 a woman's case, to please others more than themselves." 
 
 Bridget's eyes poured down at the sensations the Corporal excited. 
 
 '* Tell me, tell me, then, my dear Bridget," continued the Corporal, 
 taking hold of her hand, which hung down dead by her side, and giv- 
 ing a second kiss, ''whose suspicion has misled thee? " 
 
 Bridget sobbed a sob or two, then opened her eyes ; the Corporal 
 wiped them with the bottom of her apron ; she then opened her heart 
 and told him all. 
 
 CHAPTER XXX. 
 
 My Uncle Toby and the Corporal had gone on separately with their 
 operations the greatest part of the campaign, and as effectually cut off 
 from all communication of what either the one or the other had been 
 doing, as if they had been separated from each other by the Maes or 
 the Sambre. 
 
 My Uncle Toby, on his side, had presented himself every afternoon 
 in his red and silver, and blue and gold alternately, and sustained an 
 infinity of attacks in them without knowing them to be attacks, and so 
 had nothing to communicate. 
 
 The Corporal, on his side, in taking Bridget, by it had gained con- 
 siderable advantages, and consequently had much to communicate ; but 
 what were the advantages, as well as what was the manner by which he 
 had seized them, required so nice an historian that the Corporal durst 
 not venture upon it ; and as sensible as he was of glory, would rather 
 have been content to have gone bareheaded and without laurels for 
 ever, than torture his master's modesty for a single moment. 
 
 Best of honest and gallant servants ! But I have apostrophized thef , 
 Trim, once before, and could I apostrophize thee also (that is to say) with 
 good company, I would do it without ceremony in the very next page. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXL 
 
 Now my Uncle Toby had one evening laid down his pipe upon the 
 table, and was counting over to himself upon his finger ends (beginning 
 at his thumb) all Mrs. Wad>nan's perfections, one by one ; and happening 
 two or three times together, either by omitting some or counting others 
 
322 TRISTRAM SHANDV. [vol. ik. 
 
 twice oV'^>*, y before he could get beyond his 
 
 middle fi ' *•, ^^ 'i : . said he, taking up his pipe again, 
 
 ** bring mt iMt-.^' Trim «i ought paper also. 
 
 " Take a ii tit i m," said y Uncle Toby, making a sign with 
 his pipe at the same time to take a chair and sit down close by him at 
 the table. The Corpora^ obeyed, placed the paper directly before him, 
 took a pen and dipp' ' in the ink. 
 
 "She has a tho. 1 Trim," said my Uncle Toby. 
 
 **At:i I to set p ', an' please your honour?" quoth the 
 
 Corpcral. 
 
 *' 4iu. they must be tuk^n i . t'.eir ranks," replied my Uncle Toby ; 
 "for of them all. Trim, that which wins me most, and which is a 
 security for all the rest, is the compassionate turn and singular humanity 
 of her character. I protest," added my Uncle Toby, looking up, as he 
 protested it, towards the top of the ceiling, *' that was I her brother. 
 Trim, a thousandfold, she could not make more constant or more tender 
 inquiries after my sufferings, though now no more,** 
 
 The Corporal made no reply to my Uncle Toby's protestations but 
 by a short cough ; he dipped the second time into the ink-horn, and my 
 Uncle Toby, pointing with the end of his pipe as close to the top of 
 the sheet, at the left hand comer of it, as he could set it, the Corporal 
 wrote down the word Humanity — thus. 
 
 " Pr'ythee, Corporal,** said my Uncle Toby, as soon as Trim had 
 done it, ** how often does Mrs. Bridget inquire after the wound on the 
 cap of thy knee, which thou receivedst at the battle of Landen? '* 
 
 " She never, an* please your honour, inquires after it at all." 
 
 *'That, Corporal,** said my Uncle Toby, with all the triumph the 
 goodness of his nature would permit, ** that shows the difference in the 
 character of the mistress and maid. Had the fortune of war allotted 
 the same mischance to me, Mrs. Wadman would have inquired into 
 eveiy circumstance relating to it a hundred times." — "She would have 
 inquired, an* please your honour, ten times as often about your honour's 
 groin." — " The pain, Trim, is equally excruciating, and compassion has 
 as much to do with the one as the other.** 
 
 *' God bless your honour,** cried the Corporal, " what has a woman's 
 compassion to do with a wound upon the cap of a man*s knee ? Had 
 your honour's been shot into ten thousand splinters at the affair of 
 Landen, Mrs. Wadman would have troubled her head as little about it 
 as Bridget." 
 
 My Uncle Toby gave a long whistle, but in a note which could 
 scarce be heard across the table. 
 
 The Corporal had advanced too far to retire : i« three words he 
 told the rest. 
 
 My Uncle Toby laid down his pipe as gently upon the fender as 
 if it had been spun from the unravellings of a spider's web. 
 
 "Let us go to my brothor Shandy's," said he. 
 
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