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ginning, That if ever the army of mar- tyrs was to be augmented, -- or a new one raised, -- I would have no hand in it, one way or t'other. ---- BUT to return to my mother. My uncle Toby's opinion, Madam, `` that there could be no harm in Corne- `` lius Gallus, the Roman prætor'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 instantly concluded herself the subject of the conversation, and with that prepossession upon her fancy, you will readily conceive every word |
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word my father said, was accommo- dated 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 irresistable : ---- 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 * 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. 3 fear, |
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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 so swelling a tide of heroic loftiness upon the occasion, as my father was. Not a period in Socrates's 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 Elea- zer's oration, as recorded by Josephus (de Bell. Judaic.) ---- Eleazer owns he had it from the philosophers of India ; in all likelihood Alexander the Great, in his irruption into India, after he had over- |
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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 maroders, 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 un- known) might be carried with other drugs and spices up the Red Sea to Jod- dah, |
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dah, the port of Mekka, or else to Tor or Sues, towns at the bottom of the gulf ; and from thence by karrawans 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 stair-case of the Alexandrian library, --- and from that store-house it would be fetched. ------ Bless me ! what a trade was driven by the learned in those days ! ---- 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 bye, because your learned men find some difficulty in fix- ing |
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ing the precise æra in which so great a man lived ; -- whether, for instance, be- fore or after 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 could have distin- guished him from Socrates himself. ---- Every word would breathe the senti- ments of a soul disdaining life, and careless about all its issues ; for which reason, though my mother was a wo- man of no deep reading, yet the abstract VOL. V. F of |
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of Socrates's oration, which my father was giving my uncle Toby, was not altogether new to her. -- She listened to it with com- posed intelligence, and would have done so to the end of the chapter, had not my father plunged (which he had no occa- sion to have done) into that part of the pleading where the great philosopher rec- kons up his connections, his alliances, and children ; but renounces a security to be so won by working upon the pas- sions of his judges. -- `` I have friends -- `` I have relations, -- I have three deso- `` late 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, -- said my father, getting up and walking out of the room. C H A P. |
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---- They are Socrates's 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 deli- berately upon the table, and rising up, and taking my mother most kindly by the hand, without saying another word, either good or bad, to her, he led her out after my father, that he might finish the ecclaircissment himself. 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 reason to sup- pose -- the last chapter, Sir, had finished F 2 the |
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the first act of it, and then this chapter must have set off thus. Ptr..r..r..ing -- twing -- twang -- prut -- trut ---- 'tis a cursed bad fiddle. -- Do you 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. -- S'death ! not the gentleman with the sword on. -- Sir, I had rather play a Caprichio to Calliope herself, than draw my bow across my fiddle before that very man ; and yet, I'll stake my Cremona to a Jew's trump, which is the greatest musical odds that ever |
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every were laid, that I will this moment stop three hundred and fifty leagues out of tune upon my fiddle, without punish- ing one single nerve that belongs to him. -- Twaddle diddle, tweddle diddle, -- twiddle diddle, ---- twoddle diddle, -- twuddle diddle, ---- prut-trut -- krish -- krash -- krush. -- 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 musick -- and God has made you all with good ears -- and some of you play delightfully yourselves ---- trut-prut, -- prut-trut. O! there is -- whom I could sit and hear whole days, -- whose talents lie in making what he fiddles to be felt, -- who inspires F 3 me |
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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 tune. 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 sattin night-gown, -- was to sit down coolly, after the example of Xenophon, and write a TRISTRA-pædia, 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 ado- lescence. |
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lescence. 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 projectils. -- The difference between them was, that my uncle Toby drew his whole knowledge of projectils from Nicholas Tartaglia -- My father spun his, every thread of it, out of his own brain, -- or reeled and cross-twisted what all other spinners and spinsters had spun before him, that 'twas pretty near the same tor- ture to him. In about three years, or something more, my father had got advanced al- most into the middle of his work. -- Like all other writers, he met with disappoint- F 4 ments. |
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ments. -- 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. -- Mat- ter grows under our hands. -- Let no man say, -- `` Come -- I'll write a duodecimo.'' My father gave himself up to it, how- ever, with the most painful diligence, proceeding step by step in every line, with the same kind of caution and cir- cumspection (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 Benevento 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 mana- ged the affair, unless he spent the great- est part of his time in combing his whis- kers, |
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kers, or playing at primero with his chap- lain, -- 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 arch- bishop of Benevento, for whose memory (notwithstanding his Galatea) 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 Methusalah for me, -- the phænomenon 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 |
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have pricked him forwards with his Ga- latea, he lay under an impuissance at the same time of advancing above a line and an half in the compass of a whole sum- mer'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 bonâ fide, to print and publish it to the world, his first thoughts were always the temp- tations of the evil one. -- This was the state of ordinary writers : but when a personage of venerable character and high station, either in church or state, once turned author, -- he maintained, that from the very moment he took 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 spe- cious |
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cious and good soever, -- 'twas all one ; -- in whatever form or colour it present- ed 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 writer, 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, archbi- shop of Benevento ; and (had it not cramped him a little in his creed) I be- lieve would have given ten of the best acres in the Shandy estate, to have been the broacher of it. -- How far my father actually believed in the devil, will be seen, when I come to speak of my fa- ther's |
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ther'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 mystick record of antiquity. -- Preju- dice 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 lucu- brations 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 vengeance, -- nothing but a farrago of the clack of 8 nurses |
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nurses, and of the nonsense of the old women (of both sexes) throughout the kingdom. This is the best account I am deter- mined to give of the slow progress my father made in his Tristra-pædia ; at which (as I said) he was three years and some- thing more, indefatigably at work, and at last, had scarce compleated, by his own reckoning, one half of his under- taking : the misfortune was, that I was all that time totally neglected and aban- doned to my mother ; and what was al- most as bad, by the very delay, the first part of the work, upon which my father had spent the most of his pains, was ren- dered entirely useless, ---- every day a page or two became of no conse- quence. ---- ---- Certainly it was ordained as a scourge upon the pride of human wis- dom, |
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dom, That the wisest of us all, should thus outwit ourselves, and eternally fore- go 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 for- wards 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. C H A P. |
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---- 'TWAS nothing, -- I did not lose two drops of blood by it ---- 'twas not worth calling in a sur- geon, had he lived next door to us ---- thousands suffer by choice, what I did by accident. ---- Dr. Slop made ten times more of it, than there was occa- sion : ---- some men rise, by the art of hanging great weights upon small wires, -- and I am this day (August the 10th, 1761) paying part of the price of this man's reputation. ---- O 'twould pro- voke a stone, to see how things are car- ried on in this world ! ---- The chamber- maid had left no ******* *** under the bed : ---- Cannot you contrive, ma- ster, quoth Susannah, lifting up the sash with one hand, as she spoke, and help- ing me up into the window seat with the other, -- cannot you manage, my dear, for |