vii

INTRODUCTION

It can hardly be said that Sterne was an unfortunate person during his lifetime, though he seems to have thought himself so. His childhood was indeed a little necessitous, and he died early, and in debt, after some years of very bad health. But from the time when he went to Cambridge, things went on the whole very fairly well with him in respect of fortune; his ill-health does not seem to have caused him much disquiet; his last ten years gave him fame, flirting, wandering, and other pleasures and diversions to his heart’s content; and his debts only troubled those he left behind him. He delighted in his daughter; he was able to get rid of his wife, when he was more than usually fatigatus et aegrotus of her, with singular ease. During the unknown, or almost unknown, middle of his life he had friends of the kind most congenial to him; and both in his time of preparation and his time of production in literature, he was able to indulge his genius in a way by no means common with men of letters. If his wish to die in a certain manner and circumstance was only bravado—and borrowed bravado—still it was granted; and it is quite certain that to him an old age of real illness would have been unmitigated torture. Even if we admit the ghastly stories of the fate of his remains, there was very little reason why any one should not have anticipated Mr. Swinburne’s words on the morrow of Sterne’s death and said, “Oh! brother, the gods were good to you,” though even then he might have said it with a sort of mental reservation on the question whether Sterne had been very good to the gods.

Nemesis, for the purpose of adjusting things, played him the exceptionally savage trick of using the intervention of his idolised daughter. Little or nothing seems to be known of “Lydia Sterne de Medalle,” as she was pleased to sign herself; “Mrs. Medalle,” as her bluff British contemporaries call her. But that she must have been either a very silly, a very stupid, or an excessively callous person, appears certain. It would seem, indeed, to require a combination of the flightiness and lack of taste which her father too often displayed, with the viii stolidity which (from rather unfair inference through Mrs. Shandy) is sometimes supposed to have characterised her mother, to prompt or permit a daughter to publish such a collection of letters as those which were first given to the world in 1775. Charity, not unsupported by probability, has trusted that Madame de Medalle could not read Latin, but she certainly could read English; and only an utterly corrupted heart, or an incurably dense or feather-brained head, could hide from her the fact that not a few of the English letters she published were damaging to her father’s character. Her alleged excuse—that her mother, who was then dead, had desired her, if any letters should be published under her father’s name, to publish these, and that the “Yorick and Eliza” correspondence had appeared—is utterly insufficient. For Mrs. Sterne, of whose conduct we know nothing unfavourable, and one or two things decidedly to her credit, could only have meant “such of these as will put your father in a favourable light,” else she would have published them herself. Yet though Lydia could, while taking no editorial trouble whatever, go out of her way to make a silly missish apology for publishing a passage in which her charms and merits are celebrated, she seems never to have given a thought to what she was doing in other ways. Nor were Sterne’s misfortunes in this way over with the publication of these things; for the subsequently discovered Fourmentelle correspondence sunk him, with precise judges, a little deeper. No doubt Tristram Shandy, the Sentimental Journey, and the curious stories or traditions about their author, were not exactly calculated to give Sterne a very high reputation with grave authorities. But it is these unlucky letters which put him almost hopelessly out of court. Even the slight relenting of fortune which gave him at last, in Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, a biographer very good-natured, very indefatigable, and with a natural genius for detecting undiscovered facts and documents, only made matters worse in some ways. And the consequence is, that it has become a commonplace and almost a necessity to make up for praising Sterne’s genius by damning his character. Johnson, while declining to deny him ability, seems to have been too much disgusted to talk freely about him; Scott’s natural kindliness, warm admiration for my Uncle Toby, and total freedom from squeamish prudery, seem yet to have left him ill at ease and tongue-tied in discussing Sterne; Thackeray, as is well known, exceeded all measure in denouncing him; and his chief recent ix critical biographer, Mr. Traill, who is probably as free from cant, Britannic or other, as any man who ever wrote in English, speaks his mind in the most unsparing fashion.

For my own part, I do not hesitate to say that I do not think letters of this kind ought to be published at all; and though it may seem paradoxical or foolish, I am by no means sure that, if they are published, they ought to be admitted as evidence.That which is not written for the public, is no business of the public’s; and I never read letters of this kind, published for the first time, without feeling like an eavesdropper.1 Unluckily, the evidence furnished by the letters fits in only too well with that furnished by the published works, by his favourite cronies and companions, and by his general reputation, so that “what the prisoner says” must, no doubt, “be used against him.”

It may be doubted whether it was accident or his usual deliberate fantasticality that made Sterne, in the well-known summary of his life which (very late in it) he drew up for his daughter, devote almost the whole space to his childhood. Perhaps it may be accounted for, reasonably enough, by supposing that of his later years he thought his daughter knew quite as much as he wished her to know, while of the middle period he had little or nothing to tell. In fact, of the two earlier divisions we still know very little but what he has chosen to tell us in one of the most characteristic and not the least charming excursions of his pen. Laurence Sterne was, with two sisters, the only “permanent child” (to borrow a pleasant phrase of Mr. Traill’s) out of a very plentiful but most impermanent family, borne in the most inconvenient circumstances possible by Agnes Nuttle or Herbert or Sterne, a widow, and daughter or stepdaughter of a sutler of our army in Flanders, to Roger, second son of Simon Sterne of Elvington, in Yorkshire, who was the third son of Dr. Richard Sterne, Archbishop of York. The Sternes were of a gentle if not very distinguished family, which, after being seated in Suffolk, migrated to Nottinghamshire. After the promotion of the archbishop (who had been a stout cavalier, as Master of Jesus at Cambridge, in the bad times), they obtained, as was fitting, divers establishments by marriage or benefice in x Yorkshire itself. Very little endowment of any kind, however, fell to the lot of Roger Sterne, who was an ensign in what ranked later as the 34th regiment. Laurence, his eldest son, was born at Clonmel, in Ireland, where his mother’s relations lived, and just after his father’s regiment had been disbanded. It was shortly re-established, however, and became the most “marching” of all marching corps; for though its headquarters were generally in Ireland, it was constantly being ordered elsewhere, and Roger Sterne saw active service both at Vigo and Gibraltar. In this latter station he fought a duel of an extremely Shandean character “about a goose.” He was run through the body and pinned to the wall; whereupon, it is said, he requested his antagonist to be so kind as to wipe the plaster off the sword before pulling it out of his body. In despite of this thoughtfulness, however, and of an immediate recovery, the wound so weakened him that, being ordered to Jamaica, he took fever and died there in March 1731. As Lawrence had been born on November 24, 1713, he was nearly eighteen; and the family had meanwhile been increased by four other children who all died, and a youngest daughter, Catherine, who, like the eldest, Mary, lived. Till he was about nine or ten the boy followed the exceedingly fluctuating fortunes of his family, which he diversified further on by falling through, not a millrace, but a going mill. Then he was sent to school at Halifax, in Yorkshire, and soon after practically adopted by his cousin Sterne of Elvington, who, when the time came, sent him to Jesus College at Cambridge, the family connection with which had begun with his great-grandfather. He was admitted there on July 6, 1733, being then nearly twenty, and took his degree of B. A. in 1736, and that of M. A. in 1740. The only tradition of his school career is his own story that, having written his name on the school ceiling, he was whipped by the usher, but complimented as a “boy of genius” by the master, who said the name should never be effaced. This anecdote, as might be expected, has not escaped the aqua fortis of criticism.

We know practically nothing of Sterne’s Cambridge career except the dates above mentioned, the fact of his being elected first to a sizarship and then as founder’s kin to a scholarship endowed by Archbishop Sterne, and the incident told by himself that he there contracted his lifelong friendship with a distant relative and fellow Jesus man, John Hall, or John xi Hall Stevenson, of whom more presently. But Sterne had further reason to acknowledge that his family stood together. He had no sooner taken his degree, than he was taken up by a brother of his father’s, Jaques Sterne, a great pluralist in the diocese of York, a very busy and masterful person, and a strong Whig and Hanoverian. Under his care, Sterne took deacon’s orders in March 1736 at the hands of the Bishop of Lincoln; and as soon as, two years later, he had been ordained priest, he was appointed to the living of Sutton-on-the-Forest, eight miles from York. The uncle and nephew some years later quarrelled bitterly—according to the latter’s account, because he would not write “dirty paragraphs in the newspapers,” being “no party man.” That Sterne would have been particularly squeamish about what he wrote may be doubted; but it is certain that he shows no partisan spirit anywhere, and very little interest in politics as such. However, for some years his uncle was certainly his active patron, and obtained for him two prebends and some other special preferments in connection with the diocese and chapter of York, so that he became, as Tristram shows, intimately acquainted with cathedral society there.

It has been a steady rule in the Anglican Church (if not, as in the Greek, a sine quâ non) that when a man has been provided with a living, he should, if he has not done so before, provide himself with a wife; and Sterne was a very unlikely man to break good custom in this respect. Very soon at least after his ordination he fell in love with Elizabeth Lumley, a young lady of a good Yorkshire family, and of some little fortune, which, however, for a time she thought “not enough” to share with him, but which, as she told him during a fit of illness, she left to him in her will. On the strength of two quite unauthenticated and, I believe, not now traceable portraits seen by this or that person in printshops or elsewhere, she is said to have been plain. Certain expressions in Sterne’s letters seem to imply that she had a rather exasperatingly steady and not too intelligent will of her own; and some twenty or five and twenty years after the marriage, M. Tollot, a gossiping Frenchman, with French ideas on the duty of husbands and wives going separate ways, said that she wished to have a finger in every pie, and pestered “the good and agreeable Tristram” with her presence. But Sterne, despite his reckless confessions of conjugal indifference, and worse, says nothing serious or even ill-natured of her; and one or two xii traits and sayings of hers, especially her refusal to listen to a meddlesome person who wished to tell her tales about “Eliza,” seem to argue sense and dignity. That in the latter years she cared little to be with a husband who had long been “tired and sick” of her is not to her discredit. Their daughter, with the almost invariable ill-luck or ill-judgment which seems to have attended her, printed certain letters of this courtship time, though she gave nothing for many years afterwards. The use made of these Strephon or Damon blandishments, in contrast with the expressions used by the writer of his wife, and of other women, long afterwards, is perhaps a little unfair; but it must be admitted that though far too characteristic and amusing to be omitted, they are anything but brilliant specimens of their kind. In particular, Thackeray’s bitter fun on the ineffably lackadaisical passage, “My L. has seen a polyanthus blow in December,” is pretty fully justified.

If, however, the marriage, which, difficulties being removed, took place on Easter Monday, March 30, 1741, did not bring lasting happiness to Sterne, it probably brought him some at the time, and it certainly brought him an accession of fortune; for in addition to what little money Miss Lumley had, a friend of hers bestowed the additional living of Stillington on her husband. These various sources of income must have made a tolerable revenue, which, after the publication of Tristram, was further supplemented by yet another benefice given him by Lord Falconbridge at Coxwold, a living of no great value, but a pleasant place of residence.Add to this the profits of his books in the last eight years of his life, which were for that day considerable, and it will be seen that, as has been said above, Sterne might have been much worse off in this world’s goods than he was.He seems, like other people, to have made some rather costly experiments in farming; and his way of life latterly, what with his own journeys and sojourns in London, and the long separate residence of his wife and daughter in France, was expensive.But he complains little of poverty; and though he died in debt, much of that debt was due to no fault of his, but to the burning of the parsonage of Sutton.

It is all the more remarkable in one way, though the absence of any pressure of want may explain it in another, that Sterne’s great literary gifts should have remained so long without finding any kind of literary expression, unless it was in the newspaper way, in respect to which he first obliged and xiii afterwards disobliged his uncle. There is, I believe, no dispute about the fact that he distances, and that by many years, every other man of letters of anything like his rank—except Cowper, whose affliction puts him out of comparison—in the lateness of his fruiting time. All but a quarter of a century had passed since he took his degree when Tristram Shandy appeared; and, putting sermons aside, the very earliest thing of his known, The History of a Good Watch Coat, only antedated Tristram by two years or rather less. He was no doubt “making himself all this time;” but the making must have been an uncommonly slow process. Nor did he, like a good many writers, occupy the time in preparing what he was afterwards to publish, unless in the case of a few of his sermons. It is positively known that Tristram was written merely as it was published, and the Journey likewise. Nor is even the first by any means a long book. It is as nearly as possible the same length as Fielding’s Amelia when printed straight on; and even then more allowance has to be made, not merely for its free and audacious plagiarisms, but for its constantly broken paragraphs, stars, dashes, and other trickeries. If it were possible to squeeze it up, as one squeezes a sponge, into the solid texture of an ordinary book, I doubt whether it would be very much longer than Joseph Andrews

It will probably be admitted, however, that the idiosyncrasy of the writings of Sterne’s last and incomplete decade, even if it be in part only an idiosyncrasy of mannerism, is almost great enough to justify the nearly three decades of Lehrjahre (starting from his entrance at Cambridge) which preceded it. It is true that of the actual occupations of these years we know extremely little—indeed, what we know as distinguished from what is guesswork and inference is mostly summed up by Sterne’s own current and curvetting pen thus: “I remained near twenty years at Sutton, doing duty at both places [i.e., Sutton and Stillington]. I had then very good health. Books, painting, fiddling, and shooting were my amusements;” to which he adds only that he and the squire of Sutton were not very good friends, but that at Stillington the Croft family were extremely kind and amiable. From other sources, including, it is true, his own letters—though the dates and allusions of these are so uncertain that they are very doubtful guides—we find that his chief crony during this period, as during his life, was the already-mentioned John Hall, who had xiv taken to the name of Stevenson, and was master of Skelton Castle, a very old and curious house on the border of the Cleveland moors, not far from the town of Guisborough. The master of “Crazy” Castle—he liked to give his house this name, which he afterwards used in entitling his book of Crazy Tales—his ways and his library, have usually been charged with debauching Sterne’s innocent mind, which I should imagine lent itself to that process in a most docile and morigerant fashion; but whether this was the case or not, it is clear that Stevenson bore no very good reputation. It is not certain, but was asserted, that he had been a monk of Medmenham. He gathered about him at Skelton a society which, though no such imputations were made on it as on that of Wilkes and Dashwood, was of a pretty loose kind; he was a humourist, both in the old and the modern sense; and his Crazy Tales were, if not very mad, rather sad and bad exercises of the imagination.

Amid all this dream- and guess-work, almost the only solid facts in Sterne’s life are the births of two daughters, one in 1745, and the other two years later.Both were christened Lydia; the first died soon after she was born, the second lived to be the darling of both her parents, the object of the most respectable emotions of Sterne’s life, the wife of an unknown Frenchman, M.de Medalle, and, as has been said, the probably unwitting destroyer of her father’s last chance of reputation.

Our exuberant nescience in matters Sternian extends up to the very publication of Tristram, as far as the determining causes of its production are concerned. It is true that in passages of the letters Sterne seems to say that his experiment with the pen was prompted by a desire to make good some losses in farming, and elsewhere that he was tired of employing his brains for other people’s advantage, as he had done for some years for an ungrateful person, that is to say, his uncle. This last passage was written just before Tristram came out; but at no time was Sterne a very trustworthy reporter of his own motives, and it would seem that the quarrel with his uncle must have been a good deal earlier. At any rate, the year 1759 seems to have been spent in writing the first two volumes of the book, and The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent., published by John Hinxham, Stonegate, York, but obtainable also from divers London booksellers, appeared on the 1st of January 1760. I wish Sterne had thought of xv keeping it till the 1st of April, which he would probably then have done.

The comparatively short last scenes of his life were as busy and varied as his long middle course had been outwardly monotonous. Although his book was nominally published at York, he had gone up to London to superintend arrangements for its sale there, perhaps not without a hope of triumph. If so, Fortune chose not to play him her usual tricks. In York, the extreme personality of the book excited interest of a twofold and dubious kind; but, to play on some words of Dryden’s, “London liked grossly” and swallowed Tristram Shandy whole with singular avidity. Its author came to town just in time to enjoy the results of this, and was one of the chief lions of the season of 1760, a position which he enjoyed with a childish frankness that is not the least pleasant thing in his history. One, probably of the least important, though by accident one of the best known of his innumerable flirtations, with a Miss Fourmentelle, was apparently quenched by this distraction when it was on the point of going such lengths that the lady had actually come up alone to London to meet Sterne there. He was introduced to persons as different as Garrick and Warburton, from the latter of whom he received, in rather mysterious circumstances, a present of money. He haunted Ministers and Knights of the Garter; he was overwhelmed with invitations and callers; and, as has been said, he received one very solid present in the shape of the living of Coxwold. Tristram went into a second edition rapidly; its author was enabled to announce a collection of “Sermons by Mr. Yorick” in April; and he went to his new living in the early summer, determined to set to work vigorously on more of the work that had been so fortunate. By the end of the year he was ready with two more volumes, again came up to town, and again, when vols. iii. and iv. had appeared, at the end of January 1761, was besieged by admirers. For these two he received £380 from Dodsley, who had fought shy of the book earlier. They were quite as successful as the first pair; and again Sterne stayed all the spring and earlier summer in London, returning to Yorkshire to make more Shandy in the autumn. He was still quicker over the third batch, and it was published in December 1761, when he was again in town, but he now meditated a longer flight. His health had been really declining, and he obtained leave from the archbishop for a year certain, and perhaps two, that he might go to the xvi south of France. He was warmly received in Paris, where his work had obtained a popularity which it has never wholly lost, and the framework of fact (including the passport difficulties) for the Sentimental Journey, as well as for the seventh volume of Tristram, was laid during the spring.His plans were now changed, it being determined that his wife and daughter (who had inherited his constitution) should join him.They did so after some difficulties, and the consumptive novelist, having spent all the winter in one of the worst climates in Europe, that of the French capital, started with his family in the torrid heats of July for Toulouse, where at last they were established about the middle of August.

Toulouse became Sterne’s abode for nearly a year, his headquarters for a somewhat longer period, and the home of his wife and daughter, with migrations to Bagnères, Montpellier, and a great many other places in France, for about five years. He himself—he had been ill at Toulouse, and worse at Montpellier—reached England again (after a short stay in Paris) during the early summer of 1764. Nor was it till January 1765 that the seventh and eighth volumes of Tristram appeared. As usual Sterne went to town to receive the congratulations of the public, which seem to have been fairly hearty; for though the instalment immediately preceding had not been an entire success, the longer interval had now had its effect not merely on the art and materials of the caterer, but on the appetite of his guests. He followed this up with two more volumes of Sermons, of a much more characteristic kind than his earlier venture in this way, and published partly by subscription. These, however, were not actually issued till 1766. Meanwhile, in October 1765, Sterne had set out for his second attempt in travel on the Continent, which was to supply the remaining material for the Sentimental Journey, and to be prolonged as far as Naples.Little is known of his winter stay at that city and in Rome.On his way homeward he met his wife and daughter in Franche-Comté, but at Mrs. Sterne’s request left them there, and went on alone to Coxwold.

He reached England in extremely bad health, and never left it again; but he had still nearly two years of fairly well filled life to run. The ninth, or last volume of Tristram occupied him during the autumn of 1766, and was produced with the invariable accompaniment of its author’s appearance in London during January 1767. This visit, which lasted till May, saw the flirtation with “Eliza” Draper, the young wife xvii of an Indian official, who was at home for her health, an affair which exalted Sterne in the eyes of eighteenth-century sensibility, especially in France, about as much as it has depressed him in the eyes not merely of the propriety, not merely of the common sense, but of the romance of later times. He was very ill when he got back to Coxwold, but recovered, and in October was joined by his wife and daughter. Even then, however, the community was a very temporary and divided one, for he took a house for them at York, and they were not to stay in England beyond the spring. He himself finished what we have of the Sentimental Journey, and went to London with it, where it was published rather later than usual, on the 27th February 1768.Three weeks later its author, at his lodgings at 41 New Bond Street, in the presence only of a hired nurse and a footman, who had been sent by some of his friends to inquire after him, took a journey other than sentimental, and so far unreported.Some odd but not very well authenticated stories gathered round his death, which occurred on Friday the 18th March.It was said, and it is probable enough, that his gold sleeve-links were stolen by his landlady.After his funeral, scantily attended, at the burying-ground of St.George’s, Hanover Square, opposite Hyde Park (which used to be known by the squalid brown of its unrestored, and afterwards made more hideous by the bedizened red of its restored chapel), his body is said to have been snatched by resurrection men.And the myth is rounded off by the addition that the remains, having been sold to the professor of anatomy at Cambridge, were dissected there in public, one of the spectators, a friend of Sterne’s, recognising the face too late, and fainting.

His affairs, which had never been managed in a very business-like manner, were in considerable disorder. Some years before, the carelessness of his curate had caused or allowed the parsonage at Sutton to be burnt to the ground; and Sterne, besides losing valuable effects of his own, was of course liable for the rebuilding. He managed to put this off till his death, after which his widow and administratrix was sued for dilapidations. These, as she was in very poor circumstances, had to be compounded for sixty pounds only, but they probably ranked for a much larger sum in the £1100 at which Sterne’s indebtedness was reckoned. His widow had a little money of her own: £800 was collected for her and her daughter at York races; there must have been profits from xviii the copyrights; and a fresh collection of Sermons was issued by subscription. But though very little is known about the pair, they are said to have been ill off. They applied first to Wilkes and then to Stevenson to write a life of Sterne to prefix to his Works, but neither complied. Mr. Fitzgerald, who seldom deserves the curse laid on those who use harsh judgment, is very severe on both for this. Yet surely each, considering his own reputation, must have felt that he was the last person to set Sterne right with the stricter part of society, and that to write a “Crazy” or “Shandean” life of him would be a cruel crime. It is not known exactly when Lydia married, or when either she or her mother died. Mrs. Sterne must have been dead by 1775, the date of the publication of the letters; Lydia is said to have perished in the French Revolution.

Beginning authorship very late in life, having schooled himself to an intensely artificial method, both in style and in construction, and not allowed by Fate more than a few years in which to write at all, Sterne, as is natural, displays a great uniformity throughout his work. Indeed, it might be said that he has written but one book, Tristram Shandy. The Sentimental Journey (as to the relative merits of which, compared with the earlier and larger work, there is a polemos aspondos between the Big-endians and the Little-endians of Sternism) is after all only an expansion of the seventh book of Tristram, with fioriture, variations, and new divertisements. The sermon which occurs so early is an actual sermon of “Yorick’s,” and a sufficient specimen of his more serious concionatory vein; many, if not most of his letters might have been twined into Tristram without being in the least degree more out of place than most of its actual contents. And so there is more propriety than depends upon the mere fact that Tristram Shandy is the earliest and the largest part of its author’s work, in making no extremely scholastic distinction between the specially Shandean and the generally Sternian characteristics; for, indeed, all Sterne is in it more or less eminently.

No less a critic than M. Scherer has given his sanction to the idea that in Sterne we have a special, if not even the special, type of the humourist; and probably few people who have given no particular thought or attention to the matter, would refuse to agree with him. I am myself inclined rather to a demur, or, at any rate, to a distinction, though few better xix things have been written about humour itself than a passage in M. Scherer’s essay on our author. Sterne has no doubt in a very eminent degree the sense of contrast, which all the best critics admit to be the root of humour—the note of the humourist. But he has it partially, occasionally, and, I should even go as far as to say, not greatly. The great English humourists, I take it, are Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Thackeray, and Carlyle. All these—even Fielding, whose eighteenth-century manner, the contemporary and counterpart of Sterne’s, cannot hide the truth—apply the humourist contrast, the humourist sense of the irony of existence, to the great things, the prima et novissima. They see, and feel, and show the simultaneous sense of Death and Life, of Love and Loss, of the Finite and the Infinite. Sterne stops a long way short of this; les grands sujets lui sont défendus in another sense than La Bruyère’s. It is scarcely too much to say that his ostentatious preference for the bagatelle was a real, and not in the least affected fact. Nowhere, not in the true pathos of the famous deathbed letter to Mrs. James, not in the, as it seems to me, by no means wholly true pathos of the Le Fever episode, does he pierce to “the accepted hells beneath.” He has an unmatched command of the lesser and lower varieties of the humorous contrast—over the odd, the petty, the queer, above all, over what the French untranslatably call the saugrenu. His forte is the foible; his cheval de bataille, the hobby-horse. If you want to soar into the heights, or plunge into the depths of humour, Sterne is not for you. But if you want what his own generation called a frisk on middle, very middle-earth, a hunt in curiosity-shops (especially of the technically “curious” description), a peep into all manner of coulisses and behind-scenes of human nature, a ride on a sort of intellectual switchback, a view of moral, mental, religious, sentimental dancing of all the kinds that have delighted man, from the rope to the skirt, then have with Sterne in any direction he pleases. He may sometimes a very little disgust you, but you will seldom have just cause to complain that he disappoints and deceives.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. (which, as it has been excellently observed, is in reality based on the life of the gent’s uncle, and the opinions of the gent’s father), is the largest and in every way the chief field for these diversions. The apparatus, and, so far as there can be said to have been one, the object with which Sterne marked it out xx and filled it up, are clear, and even the former must have been clear enough to anybody of some reading and some intelligence long before the excellent Dr. Ferriar, in the spirit of a reverent iconoclast, set himself to work to point out Sterne’s exact indebtedness to Rabelais, Burton, Beroalde (if Beroalde wrote the Moyen de Parvenir), Bruscambille, and the rest. Of this particular part of the matter I do not think it necessary to say much. The charge of plagiarism is usually an excessively idle one; for when a man of genius steals, he always makes the thefts his own; and when a man steals without genius, the thefts are mere fairy gold which turns to leaves and pebbles under his hand. No doubt Sterne “lifted” in Tristram, and still more in the Sermons, with rather more freedom and audacity than most men of genius; but when we remember that he took Burton’s denunciation of the practice and reproduced it (all but in Burton’s very words) as his own, it must be clear to any one who is not very dull indeed that he was playing an audacious practical joke.Where he is best, he does not steal at all, and that is the only point of real importance.

It is somewhat more, I think, the business of the critic (who is here more especially bound not to look only at the stop-watch) to note the far more striking way in which Sterne borrowed, not actual passages and words, but manner and style. Here, perhaps, we shall find him accountant for a greater debt; and here also we may think that though his genius is indisputable, he gives more reason to those who should deny him the highest kind of genius. Beyond doubt not merely his reading, but his temper and his characteristics of all kinds, inclined him to the style to which the French fifteenth and sixteenth centuries gave the name of fatrasie, or pillar-to-post divagation, with more or less of a covert satiric aim. But if we compare the dealing of Swift with Cyrano de Bergerac, the dealing of Fielding with the romance and novel as it existed before his time, nay, the dealing of Shakespeare with the Marlowe drama, we shall note a marked difference in Sterne’s procedure. Nobody, even in his own day, who knew Rabelais at all could fail to detect the almost servile following of manner in great things and in small which Tristram displays. No one—a much smaller designation—who knows the strange, unedifying, but very far from commonplace book of which, as I have hinted, I never can quite believe that Beroalde de Verville was the author, can fail to detect an even closer, xxi though a somewhat less obvious and, so to speak, less verifiable following here.

In another region—the purgatory of all Sterne’s commentators—we can trace this corrupt following as distinctly at least, though it has, I think, been less often definitely attributed. Sterne’s too celebrated indecency, is, with one exception, sui generis. No doubt much nonsense has been and is talked about “indecency” in general literature. When it is indulged, as it has been, for instance, in French of late, it becomes a nuisance of the most loathsome kind. It is always perhaps better left alone. But if it be a sin to laugh now and then frankly at what were once called “gentlemen’s stories,” then not merely many a gallant, noble, and not unwise gentleman, but I fear not a few ladies, both fair and fine, are damned, with Shakespeare and Scott and Southey, with Margaret of Navarre and Marie de Sévigné, to keep them in countenance. Yet to merit indulgence, this questionable quality, in addition to being treated as genius treats, must have certain sub-qualities, or freedoms from quality, of its own. It must not be brutal and inhuman, since the quality of humanity is the main thing that saves it. It must not be underhand and sniggering. It must be frank and jovial, or frank and passionate. Perhaps, in some cases, it may be saved, as Swift’s is to a great extent, by the overmastering pessimism of despair, which enforces its contempt of man and man’s fate by bringing forward these evidences of his weakness. But Sterne can plead none of these exemptions. He has neither the frank laughter of Aristophanes and Rabelais, nor the frank passion of Catullus and Donne. He was incapable of feeling any sæva indignatio whatever. The attraction of the thing for him was, I fear, merely the attraction of the improper, because it is improper; because it shocks people, or makes them blush, or gives them an unholy little quiver of sordid shamefaced delectation. His famous apology of the child playing on the floor and showing in innocence what is not usually shown, was desperately unlucky. For his displays are those of educated and economic un-innocency. And he took this manner, I am nearly sure, wholly and directly from Voltaire, who enjoys the unenviable copyright and patent of it.

The third characteristic which Sterne took from others, which dyed his work deeply, and which injured more than it helped it, was his famous, his unrivalled, Sensibility or Sentimentalism. xxii A great deal has been written about this admired eighteenth-century device, and there is no space here for discussing it. Suffice it to say, that although Sterne certainly did not invent it—it had been inculcated by two whole generations of French novelists before him, and had been familiar in England for half a century—he has the glory, such as it is, of carrying it to the farthest possible. The dead donkey and the live donkey, the latter (as I humbly but proudly join myself to Mr. Thackeray and Mr. Traill in thinking) far the finer animal; Le Fever and La Fleur; Maria and Eliza; Uncle Toby’s fly, and poor Mrs. Sterne’s antenuptial polyanthus; the stoics that Mr. Sterne (with a generous sense that he was in no danger of that lash) wished to be whipped, and the critics from whom he would have fled from Dan to Beersheba to be delivered;—all the celebrated persons and passages of his works, all the decorations and fireworks thereof, are directed mainly to the exhibition of Sensibility, once so charming, now, alas!hooted and contemned of the people!

And now it will be possible to have done with his foibles, all the rest in Sterne being for praise, with hardly any mixture of blame. We have seen what he borrowed from others, mostly to his hurt; let us now see what he contributed of his own, almost wholly to his credit and advantage. He had, in the first place, what most writers when they begin almost invariably and almost inevitably lack, a long and carefully amassed store, not merely of reading, but of observation of mankind. Although his nearly fifty years of life had been in the ordinary sense uneventful, they had given him opportunities which he had amply taken. A “son of the regiment,” he had evidently studied with the greatest and most loving care the ways of an army which still included a large proportion of Marlborough’s veterans; and it has been constantly and reasonably held that his chief study had been his father, whom he evidently adored in a way. Roger Sterne is the admitted model of my Uncle Toby; and I at least have no doubt that he was the original of Mr. Shandy also, for some of the qualities which appear in his son’s character of him are Walter’s, not Toby’s. It would have required, perhaps, even greater genius than Sterne possessed, and an environment less saturated with the delusive theory of the “ruling passion,” to have given us the mixed and blended temperament instead of separating it into two gentlemen at once, and xxiii making Walter Shandy all wayward intellect, and Tobias all gentle goodness. But if it had been done—as Shakespeare perhaps alone could have done it—we should have had a greater and more human figure than either. Mr. Shandy would then never have come near, as he does sometimes, to being a bore; and my Uncle Toby (if I may say so without taking the wings of the morning to flee from the wrath of the extreme Tobyolaters) would have been saved from the occasional appearance of being something like a fool.

Still, these two are delightful even in their present dichotomy; and Sterne was amply provided by his genius, working on his experience, with company for them. His fancy portrait of himself as “Yorick” (his unfeigned Shakespearianism is one of his best traits) is a little vague and fantastic; and that of Eugenius, which is supposed to represent John Hall Stevenson, is almost as slight as it is flattering. But Dr. Slop, who is known to have been drawn (with somewhat unmerciful fidelity in externals, but not at all unkindly when we look deeper) from Dr. Burton, a well-known Jacobite practitioner who had suffered from the Hanoverian zeal of Yorick’s uncle Jaques in the ’45, is a masterpiece. The York dignitaries are veritable etchings in outline, more instinct with life and individuality than a thousand elaborately painted pictures; all the servants, Obadiah, Susannah, Bridget, and the rest, are the equals of Fielding’s, or of Thackeray’s domestics; and though Tristram himself is the shadow of a shade, I confess that I seem to see a vivid portrait in the three or four strokes which alone give us “my dear, dear Jenny.” Mr. Fitzgerald, succumbing to a not unnatural temptation, considering the close juxtaposition in time, approximates this to the “dear, dear Kitty” of the letters to Miss Catherine de Fourmentelle. But this, taking all things together, would be a rather serious scandalum damigellarum; and I do not think it necessary to identify, though the traits seem to me to suit not ill with the few genuine ones in the letters about Mrs. Sterne herself. That the “dear, dear” should be ironical more or less is quite Shandean. All these, if not drawn directly from individuals (the lower exercise), are first generalised and then precipitated into individuality from a large observation (which is the infinitely higher and better). I fear I must except Widow Wadman, save in the sentry-box scene, from this encomium. But then Widow Wadman is not really a real person. She is partly an instrument to put my Uncle Toby through some xxiv new motions, and partly a cue to enable Sterne to indulge in his worst foible. As for Trim, quis vituperavit Trim? The lover of the “popish clergywoman” is simply perfect, with a not much less good heart and a much better head than his master’s, and in his own degree hardly less of a gentleman.

The manner in which these delightful persons (I observe with shame that I had omitted the modest worth of Mrs. Shandy, nearly the most delightful of them all) are introduced to the reader, may have suffered a little from that corrupt following of which enough has been said. I can only say, that I would compound for a good deal more corruption of the same kind, allied with a good deal less genius. It can scarcely be doubted that there was a real pre-established harmony between Sterne’s gifts and the fatrasie manner; certainly this manner, if it sometimes exhibited his weaknesses, gave rare opportunities to his strength. And the same may be said of his style. He might certainly have given us less of the typographical tricks with which he chose to bedizen and bedaub it, and sometimes in his ultra-Rabelaisian moods—I do not mean of gauloiserie but of sheer fooling—we feel the falsetto rather disastrously. It is constantly forgotten by unfavourable critics of Rabelais that his extravagances were to a great extent, at any rate, quite natural outbursts of animal spirits. The Middle Ages, though it has become the fashion with those who know nothing about them to represent them as ages of gloom, were probably the merriest time of this world’s history; and the Reformation and the Renaissance, with their pedantry and their puritanism, and worst of all their physical science, had not quite killed the merriment when Rabelais wrote. But though animal spirits still survived in Sterne’s day, it cannot be said that in England, any more than elsewhere, there was much genuine merriment of the honest, childish, mediæval kind, and thus his manner perpetually jars. Still the style, independently of the tricks, was excellently suited for the work. It is a moot point how far the extremely loose and ungirt character of this style, which sometimes, and indeed often, reaches sheer slovenliness and solecism, was intentional. I think myself that it was nearly as deliberate as the asterisks, and the black and marble pages. We know from the Sermons that Sterne could write carefully enough when he chose, and we know from the MS. of the Journey that he corrected sedulously. Nor is it likely that he had the excuse of hurry. The shortest time that he ever took over one xxv of his two-volume batches was more than six months; and looking at the practice, not of miracles of industry and facility like Scott, but of rather dilatory writers like Thackeray, one would think that the quantity (which is not more than a couple of hundred pages of one of these present volumes) might be written in little more than six weeks. At any rate, the style, conversational, unpretentious, too easy to be jerky, and yet too broken to be sustained, suits subject and scheme as few others could.

But there is perhaps little need to say more about a book which, though some say that few read it through nowadays, is thoroughly well known in outline and in its salient passages, and which will pretty certainly lay hold of all fit readers as soon as they take to it. Of its writer a very little more may perhaps be said, all the more so because those who, not understanding critical admiration, think that biographers and editors ought not only to be just and a little kind, but extravagantly partial to their subjects, may conceive that I have been a little unjust, or, at any rate, a little unkind to Sterne. If so, they have not read his own extremely ingenious, and in general, if not in particular, very sound attack on the adage de mortuis. But if not nil nisi, there is yet very much bonum to be said of Sterne. He was not merely endowed with a singular and essential genius; he was not merely the representative and mouthpiece, in a way hardly surpassed by any one, of a certain way of thought and feeling more or less peculiar to his time. These were his merits, his very great merits as a writer. But he had others, and great, if not very great ones, as a man. Though never rich, he seems to have been free from the fault of parsimony; and albeit he died in debt, not deeply tainted with that of extravagance in money matters. For most of his later expenditure was on others, and he might justly calculate on his pen paying, and more than paying, his shot. Little love as there was lost between him and his wife, he always took the greatest care to provide for her wants in the rather costly severance of their establishments, and never even in his most indiscreet moments hints a grumble at her expenditure, a vice of which some people of much higher general reputation have been known to be guilty. Though he was certainly pleased at the attentions of “the great,” I do not know that there is any just cause for accusing him of truckling to, or fawning on them beyond the custom and xxvi courtesy of the time. For all his reckless humour, there was no ill-nature in him. His worst enemies have admitted that his affection for his daughter was very pretty and quite unaffected; and his letters to and of Mrs. James show that he could think of a woman nobly and wholesomely as a friend, for all his ignoble and unwholesome ways of thought in regard to the sex. If it had not been for the cruel indiscretion of his Lydia (which, however, has something of the old virtue of conveying the balm as well as the sting), he would probably have been much better thought of than he is. And considering the delightful books here once more presented, I think we may consent to forgive the faults which, after all, were mainly his own business, for the merits by which we so largely benefit and for which he reaped no over-bounteous guerdon.

GEORGE SAINTSBURY.

 

Works.—The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Vols.I.and II., 1759; III.and IV., 1761; V.and VI., 1762; VII.and VIII., 1765; IX., 1767; first collected edition, 1767; numerous later editions, chiefly of recent date.Sermons of Mr. Yorick, Vols.I.and II., 1760; III.and IV., 1766; V., VI., and VII., 1769.A Sentimental Journey, 1768; many later editions; Letters from Yorick to Eliza, 1775; Sterne’s Letters to his Friends on Various Occasions, 1775; Letters of Laurence Sterne to his most intimate friends, 1775; Original Letters never before published, 1788; Letters of Yorick and Eliza, 1807; Seven Letters written by Sterne and his Friends, hitherto unpublished, 1844; Unpublished Letters of Laurence Sterne, edited by J.Murray, 1856.

Collected editions of the works of Laurence Sterne appeared in 1779, 1780; edited by G. Saintsbury, 1894; by Wilbur L. Cross, 1906.

Life.—An account of the life and writings of the author is prefixed to the edition of his Works, 1779; a life of the author written by himself in edition of works, 1780; by Sir W.Scott in edition of Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, 1867; by H.D.Traill, 1878; by P.H.Fitzgerald, 1896; Laurence Sterne in Germany, by H.W.Thayer, 1905; Life and Times, by Wilbur L.Cross, 1909; A Study, by Walter S.Sichel, 1910; Life and Letters, by Lewis Melville, 1911.

1. It is perhaps barely necessary to observe that the parallel does not extend to a further parallel between republication and tale-bearing. Once published, the thing is public.

xxviii

CONTENTS

	PAGE
Book I.	3
Book II.	59
Book III.	113
Book IV.	176
Book V.	251
Book VI.	300
Book VII.	349
Book VIII.	395
Book IX.	441

3

THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF
TRISTRAM SHANDY, GENT.

BOOK I

CHAPTER I

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;——Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,——I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world from that in which the reader is likely to see me. —Believe me, good folks, this is not so inconsiderable a thing as many of you may think it;—you have all, I dare say, heard of the animal spirits, as how they are transfused from father to son, &c. , &c. —and a great deal to that purpose:—Well, you may take my word, that nine parts in ten of a man’s sense or his nonsense, his successes and miscarriages in this world depend upon their motions and activity, and the different tracts and trains you put them into, so that when they are once set a-going, whether right or wrong, ’tis not a halfpenny matter,—away they go cluttering like hey-go mad; and by treading the same steps over and over again, they presently make a road of it, as plain and as smooth as a garden-walk, which, when they are once used to, the Devil himself sometimes shall not be able to drive them off it.

Pray, my Dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind 4 up the clock? ———Good G—! cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to moderate his voice at the same time,——Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question? Pray, what was your father saying? ———Nothing.

CHAPTER II

———Then, positively, there is nothing in the question that I can see, either good or bad. ——Then, let me tell you, Sir, it was a very unseasonable question at least,—because it scattered and dispersed the animal spirits, whose business it was to have escorted and gone hand in hand with the HOMUNCULUS, and conducted him safe to the place destined for his reception.

The Homunculus, Sir, in however low and ludicrous a light he may appear, in this age of levity, to the eye of folly or prejudice;—to the eye of reason in scientifick research, he stands confess’d—a Being guarded and circumscribed with rights. ——The minutest philosophers, who, by the bye, have the most enlarged understandings (their souls being inversely as their enquiries), shew us incontestably, that the Homunculus is created by the same hand,—engender’d in the same course of nature,—endow’d with the same locomotive powers and faculties with us:—That he consists as we do, of skin, hair, fat, flesh, veins, arteries, ligaments, nerves, cartilages, bones, marrow, brains, glands, genitals, humours, and articulations;—is a Being of as much activity,—and, in all senses of the word, as much and as truly our fellow-creature as my Lord Chancellor of England. —He may be benefited,—he may be injured,—he may obtain redress;—in a word, he has all the claims and rights of humanity, which Tully, Puffendorf, or the best ethick writers allow to arise out of that state and relation.

Now, dear Sir, what if any accident had befallen him in his way alone! —or that, through terror of it, natural to so young a traveller, my little Gentleman had got to his journey’s end miserably spent;—his muscular strength and virility worn down to a thread;—his own animal spirits ruffled beyond description,—and that in this sad disordered state of nerves, he had lain down a prey to sudden starts, or a series of melancholy dreams and fancies, for nine long, long months together. —I 5 tremble to think what a foundation had been laid for a thousand weaknesses both of body and mind, which no skill of the physician or the philosopher could ever afterwards have set thoroughly to rights.

CHAPTER III

To my uncle Mr. Toby Shandy do I stand indebted for the preceding anecdote, to whom my father, who was an excellent natural philosopher, and much given to close reasoning upon the smallest matters, had oft, and heavily complained of the injury; but once more particularly, as my uncle Toby well remember’d, upon his observing a most unaccountable obliquity (as he call’d it) in my manner of setting up my top, and justifying the principles upon which I had done it,—the old gentleman shook his head, and in a tone more expressive by half of sorrow than reproach,—he said his heart all along foreboded, and he saw it verified in this, and from a thousand other observations he had made upon me, That I should neither think nor act like any other man’s child:—But alas! continued he, shaking his head a second time, and wiping away a tear which was trickling down his cheeks, My Tristram’s misfortunes began nine months before ever he came into the world

—My mother, who was sitting by, look’d up,—but she knew no more than her backside what my father meant,—but my uncle, Mr. Toby Shandy, who had been often informed of the affair,—understood him very well.

CHAPTER IV

I know there are readers in the world, as well as many other good people in it, who are no readers at all, who find themselves ill at ease, unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last, of everything which concerns you.

It is in pure compliance with this humour of theirs, and from a backwardness in my nature to disappoint any one soul living, that I have been so very particular already. As my life and opinions are likely to make some noise in the world, and, if I 6 conjecture right, will take in all ranks, professions, and denominations of men whatever,—be no less read than the Pilgrim’s Progress itself—and in the end, prove the very thing which Montaigne dreaded his Essays should turn out, that is, a book for a parlour-window;—I find it necessary to consult every one a little in his turn; and therefore must beg pardon for going on a little farther in the same way: For which cause, right glad I am, that I have begun the history of myself in the way I have done; and that I am able to go on, tracing everything in it, as Horace says, ab Ovo

Horace, I know, does not recommend this fashion altogether: But that gentleman is speaking only of an epic poem or a tragedy;—(I forget which),—besides, if it was not so, I should beg Mr. Horace’s pardon;—for in writing what I have set about, I shall confine myself neither to his rules, nor to any man’s rules that ever lived.

To such, however, as do not choose to go so far back into these things, I can give no better advice, than that they skip over the remaining part of this chapter; for I declare before-hand, ’tis wrote only for the curious and inquisitive.

——————Shut the door. ——————————————————— I was begot in the night, betwixt the first Sunday and the first Monday in the month of March, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighteen.I am positive I was.—But how I came to be so very particular in my account of a thing which happened before I was born, is owing to another small anecdote known only in our own family, but now made publick for the better clearing up this point.

My father, you must know, who was originally a Turkey merchant, but had left off business for some years, in order to retire to, and die upon, his paternal estate in the county of ———, was, I believe, one of the most regular men in everything he did, whether ’twas matter of business, or matter of amusement, that ever lived. As a small specimen of this extreme exactness of his, to which he was in truth a slave,—he had made it a rule for many years of his life,—on the first Sunday-night of every month throughout the whole year,—as certain as ever the Sunday-night came,——to wind up a large house-clock, which we had standing on the back-stairs head, with his own hands:—And being somewhere between fifty and sixty years of age at the time I have been speaking of,—he had likewise gradually brought some other little family concernments to the same period, in order, as he would often say to my uncle Toby, to get 7 them all out of the way at one time, and be no more plagued and pestered with them the rest of the month.

It was attended but with one misfortune, which, in a great measure, fell upon myself, and the effects of which I fear I shall carry with me to my grave; namely, that from an unhappy association of ideas, which have no connection in nature, it so fell out at length, that my poor mother could never hear the said clock wound up,——but the thoughts of some other things unavoidably popped into her head—and vice versâ:——Which strange combination of ideas, the sagacious Locke, who certainly understood the nature of these things better than most men, affirms to have produced more wry actions than all other sources of prejudice whatsoever.

But this by the bye.

Now it appears by a memorandum in my father’s pocket-book, which now lies upon the table, “That on Lady-day, which was on the 25th of the same month in which I date my geniture,——my father set out upon his journey to London, with my eldest brother Bobby, to fix him at Westminster school;” and, as it appears from the same authority, “That he did not get down to his wife and family till the second week in May following,”—it brings the thing almost to a certainty. However, what follows in the beginning of the next chapter, puts it beyond all possibility of doubt.

———But pray, Sir, What was your father doing all December, January, and February?——Why, Madam,—he was all that time afflicted with a Sciatica.

CHAPTER V

On the fifth day of November, 1718, which to the æra fixed on, was as near nine calendar months as any husband could in reason have expected,—was I Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, brought forth into this scurvy and disasterous world of ours. ——I wish I had been born 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, o’ 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, 8 provided a man could be born in it to a great title or to a great estate; or could any how contrive to be called up to publick charges, and employments of dignity or power;——but that is not my case;——and therefore 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 scating 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 or 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 corner where she could get fairly at me, the 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 all 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 farther with me, the slight acquaintance, which is now beginning betwixt us, will grow into familiarity; and that, unless one of us is in fault, will terminate in friendship.—O diem præclarum!—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 9 give me credit for a little more wisdom than appears upon my outside;—and as we jog on, either laugh with me, or at me, or in short, do anything,—only keep your temper.

CHAPTER VII

In the same village where my father and my 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 widow in great distress, with three or four small children, in her forty-seventh year; and as she was at that 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 touched with pity; and having often lamented an inconvenience, 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 seven said long miles 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 difficulty in effecting it to the utmost of her wishes. In truth, the parson join’d his interest with his wife’s in the whole affair; and 10 in order to do things as they should be, and give the poor soul as good a title by law to practise, as his wife had given by institution,—he chearfully paid the fees for the ordinary’s licence himself, amounting in the whole, to the sum of eighteen shillings and four pence; so that betwixt them both, the good woman was fully invested in the real and corporal possession of her office, together with all its rights, members, and appurtenances whatsoever

These last words, you must know, were not according to the old form in which such licences, faculties, and powers usually ran, which in like cases had heretofore been granted to the sisterhood. But it was according to a neat Formula of Didius his own devising, who having a particular turn for taking to pieces, and new framing over again, all kind of instruments in that way, not only hit upon this dainty amendment, but coaxed many of the old licensed matrons in the neighbourhood, to open their faculties afresh, in order to have this wham-wham of his inserted.

I own I never could envy Didius in these kinds of fancies of his:—But every man to his own taste. —Did not Dr. Kunastrokius, that great man, at his leisure hours, take the greatest delight imaginable in combing of asses tails, and plucking the dead hairs out with his teeth, though he had tweezers always in his pocket? Nay, if you come to that, Sir, have not the wisest of men in all ages, not excepting Solomon himself,—have they not had their Hobby-Horses;—their running horses,—their coins and their cockle-shells, their drums and their trumpets, their fiddles, their pallets,—their maggots and their butterflies? —and so long as a man rides his Hobby-Horse peaceably and quietly along the King’s highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him,—pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?

CHAPTER VIII

—De gustibus non est disputandum;—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 both fidler 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 11 knows it) I frequently ride out and take the air;—though sometimes, to my shame be it spoken, I take somewhat longer journies 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 consequence in the world, it is not much matter what I do: so I seldom fret or fume at all about it: Nor does it much disturb my rest, when I see such great Lords and tall Personages as hereafter follow;—such, for instance, 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 contrary, tucked up to their very chins, with whips across their mouths, scouring and scampering it away like so many little party-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 will make a shift to do excellently well without them; and for the rest,——why——God speed them——e’en let them ride on without 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 one 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 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 Hobby-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 12 you can be when you please;—and that is, my Lord, whenever there is occasion for it, and I will add, to the best purposes too. I have the honour to be,

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 bye, unless it suits in some degree, I will not part with it)——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 13 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 20,—I think it cannot well fall short of 19. Besides all this,—there is keeping in it, and the dark strokes in the Hobby-Horse, (which is a secondary figure, and a kind of back-ground 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 gustibus 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 bye, 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 Cunegund’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 full half of whatever honour was due to it.

The world at that time was pleased to determine the matter otherwise.

14

Lay down the book, and I will allow you half a day to give a probable guess at the grounds of this procedure.

Be it known then, that, for about five years before the date of the midwife’s licence, 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, jack-ass 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 make him; for he answered his description to a hair-breadth in every thing,—except that I do not remember ’tis 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 deportment, which may have given grounds for the contrary opinion: But it is as certain at the same time, that Rosinante’s continency (as may be demonstrated from the adventure of the Yanguesian carriers) proceeded from no bodily defect or cause whatsoever, but from the temperance and orderly current of his blood. —And let me tell you, Madam, there is a great 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 extra 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 in the parson’s power to have helped the figure of this horse of his,—for he was master of a very handsome demi-peak’d 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, poudré d’or,—all which he had purchased in the pride and prime of his life, together with a grand embossed bridle, 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 15 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 lived around him,—you will easily comprehend, that the parson, so appointed, would both hear and see enough to keep his philosophy from rusting.To speak the truth, he never could enter a village, but he caught the attention of both old and young.——Labour stood still as he pass’d——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 movement 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 tranquillity.—His character was,—he loved a jest in his heart—and as he saw himself in the true point of ridicule, he would say he could not be angry with others for seeing him in a light, in which he so strongly saw himself: So that 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 would give fifty humorous and apposite reasons for riding a meek-spirited jade of a broken-winded horse, preferably to one of mettle;—for on such a one he could sit mechanically, and meditate as delightfully de vanitate mundi et fugâ sæculi, as with the advantage of a death’s-head before him;—that, in all 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 16 trotting and slow argumentation, like wit and judgment, were two incompatible movements. —But that upon his steed—he could unite and reconcile every thing,—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 with-held the true one, 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 county 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 clapp’d, or spavin’d, or greaz’d;—or he was twitter-bon’d, or broken-winded, or something, in short, or other had befallen him, which would let him carry 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 on such a balance might amount to, communibus annis, I would leave to a special jury of sufferers in the same traffick, to determine;—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 expences, 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, and where, as he fancied, it was the least 17 wanted, namely, to the child-bearing and child-getting part of his parish; reserving 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 expence; 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 be content to ride the last poor devil, such as they had made him, with all his aches and infirmities, to the very end of the chapter.

As he dreaded his own constancy in the first—he very chearfully 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 panegyrick 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 bye, 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 shew 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 expences of the ordinary’s licence 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 wild-fire—“The parson had a returning fit of pride which had just seized him; and he was going to be well mounted once again in his life; and if it was so, ’twas plain as the sun at noon-day, he would pocket the expence of the licence, ten times told, the very first year:—So that every body 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 18 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 actions of some men: Order them as they will, they pass thro’ a certain medium, which so twists and refracts them from their true directions——that, with all the titles 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 with the midwife.

CHAPTER XI

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 vellum, and now in perfect preservation) it had been exactly 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 transposition 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 the respective proprietors? —In 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 19 and confound us altogether, that no one shall be able to stand up 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’s family, and their religious preservation of these records I quote, which do farther 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 of 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 the 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 thro’ 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 was all, to prove the truth of an observation made by a long sojourner in that country;——namely, “That nature was neither very lavish, nor was she very stingy in her gifts of genius and capacity to its inhabitants;—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 you will meet with few instances in that kingdom of refined parts; but a great deal of good plain household understanding amongst all ranks of people, of which everybody has a share;” which is, I think, very right.

With us, you see, the case is quite different:—we are all ups and downs in this matter;—you are a great genius;—or ’tis fifty to one, Sir, you are a great dunce and a blockhead;—not that there is a total want of intermediate steps,—no,—we are not so irregular as that comes to;—but the two extremes are 20 more common, and in a greater degree in this unsettled island, where nature, in her gifts and dispositions of this kind, is most whimsical and capricious; fortune herself not being more so in the bequest of her goods and chattels than she.

This is all that ever staggered my faith in regard 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 declensions;—with as much life and whim, and gaité de cœur 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 setting 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 slow-paced were oftenest in his way,——you may likewise imagine, ’twas with such he had generally the ill luck to get the most entangled. For aught I 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, he would be the most grave or serious of mortal men for days and weeks together;—but he was an enemy to the affectation of it, and declared open war against it, only as it appeared a cloak for ignorance, or for folly: and then, whenever it fell in his way, however sheltered and protected, he seldom gave it much quarter.

Sometimes, in his wild way of talking, he would say that Gravity was an errant scoundrel, and he would add,—of the most dangerous kind 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 twelve-month, 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 21 design, and consequently deceit;—’twas a taught trick to gain credit of the world for more sense and knowledge than a man was worth; and 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 body 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 was 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 English without any periphrasis;—and too oft without much distinction of either person, time, or place;—so that when mention was 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 humour of expression, it gave wings to Yorick’s indiscretion. In a word, tho’ 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 Mortgagée differ the one from the other, not more in length of purse, than the Jester and Jestée do, in that of memory. But in this the comparison between them runs, as the scholiasts call it, upon all-four; which, by the bye, is upon one or two legs more than some of the best of Homer’s can pretend to;—namely, That the one raises a sum, and the other a laugh at your expence, and thinks no more about it. Interest, however, still runs on in both cases;—the periodical or accidental 22 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 thro’ any malignancy;—but, on the contrary, from an honesty of mind, and a mere jocundity of humour, they would all of them be cross’d out in course.

Eugenius would never admit this; and would often tell him, that one day or other he would certainly be reckoned with; and he would often add, in an accent of sorrowful apprehension,—to the uttermost mite. To 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 in the social chimney-corner, where the culprit was barricado’d in, with a table and a couple of armchairs, 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.

Trust me, dear Yorick, this unwary pleasantry of thine will sooner or later bring thee into scrapes and difficulties, which no after-wit can extricate thee out of.——In these sallies, too oft, I see, it happens, that a 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 reckons up his friends, his family, his kindred and allies,——and musters up with them the many recruits which will list under him from a sense of common danger;——’tis no extravagant arithmetick to say, that for every ten jokes,—thou hast got an hundred enemies; and till thou hast gone on, and raised a swarm of wasps about thine ears, and art half stung to death by them, thou wilt never be convinced it is so.

I cannot suspect it in the 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 23 sportive:—But consider, my dear lad, that fools cannot distinguish this,—and that knaves will not: and thou knowest 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 corner 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:——The best of us, 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 fear 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 little 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 o’ 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 stept in with an intent to take his last sight and last farewell of him. 24 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 tokens of his friendship to him, for which, he said, if it 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 wants them;——who knows 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, chearing 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 Eugenius,——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 bruised and mis-shapened with the blows which ***** and *****, and some others have so unhandsomely given me, in the dark, that I might say with Sancho Pança, that should I 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 hanging upon his trembling lips ready to depart as he uttered this:——yet still it was uttered with something of a Cervantick 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 table in a roar!

Eugenius was convinced from this, that the heart of his friend was broke: he squeezed 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.

25

26

He lies buried in the 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.

Ten times a day has Yorick’s ghost the consolation to hear his monumental inscription read over with 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 YORICK!

27

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 meantime;—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 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 explain’d in a map, now in the hands of the engraver, which, with many other pieces and developements of this work, will be added to the end of the twentieth volume,—not to swell the work,—I detest the thought of such a thing;—but by way of commentary, scholium, illustration, and key to such passages, incidents, or innuendos as shall be thought to be either of private interpretation, or of dark or doubtful meaning, after my life and my opinions shall have been read over (now don’t forget the meaning of the word) by all the 28 world;——which, betwixt you and me, and in spite of all the gentlemen-reviewers in Great Britain, and of all that their worships shall undertake to write or say to the contrary,—I am determined shall be the case.—I need not tell 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 shews plainly, that when a man sits down to write a history,—tho’ it be but the 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 a 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:

Panegyricks to paste up at this door;

Pasquinades at that:——All which both the man and his mule are quite exempt from. To sum up all; there are archives at every stage to be look’d 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 29 my own part, I declare I had been at it these six weeks, making all the speed I possibly could,—and am not yet born:—I have just been able, and that’s all, to tell you when it happen’d, 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 first 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 the 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 express’d in the deed itself, than ever I can pretend to do it, that it would 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, merchant, in consideration of the said intended marriage to be had, and, by God’s blessing, to be well and truly solemnised and consummated between the said Walter Shandy and Elizabeth Mollineux aforesaid, and divers other good and valuable causes and considerations him thereunto specially moving,—doth grant, covenant, condescend, consent, conclude, bargain, and fully agree to and with John Dixon, and James Turner, Esqrs. 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, according to the course of nature, or otherwise, have left off bearing and bringing forth children;—and that, in consequence of the said Walter Shandy having so left off business, he shall in despight, 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 estate at Shandy Hall, in the county of ——, or at any other country-seat, castle, hall, mansion-house, messuage or 30 grainge-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 enceint with child or children severally and lawfully begot, or to be begotten, upon the body of the said Elizabeth Mollineux, during her said coverture,—he the said Walter Shandy shall, at his own proper cost and charges, and out of his own proper monies, upon good and reasonable notice, which is hereby agreed to be within six weeks of her the said Elizabeth Mollineux’s full reckoning, or time of supposed and computed delivery,—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, Esqrs. or assigns,—upon TRUST and confidence, and for and unto the use and uses, intent, end, and purpose 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 which she shall be then and there enceint and pregnant with,—unto the city of London; and for the further paying and defraying of all other incidental costs, charges, and expences 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 meaning of these presents, without any let, suit, trouble, disturbance, molestation, discharge, hindrance, forfeiture, eviction, vexation, interruption, or incumbrance whatsoever. —And that it shall moreover be lawful to and for the said Elizabeth Mollineux, from time to time, and as oft or often as she shall well and truly be advanced in her said pregnancy, to the time heretofore stipulated and agreed upon,—to live and reside in such place 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 a 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, 31 merchant, doth hereby grant, bargain, sell, release, and confirm unto the said John Dixon, and James Turner, Esqrs. 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 Dickson, and James Turner, Esqrs. 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 presents, and by force and virtue of the statute for transferring of uses into 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, feedings, pastures, marshes, commons, woods, underwoods, drains, fisheries, waters, and water-courses;—together with all rents, reversions, services, annuities, fee-farms, knights fees, views of frankpledge, 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 seigniories, rights and jurisdictions, privileges and hereditaments whatsoever. ——And also the advowson, donation, presentation, and free disposition of the rectory or parsonage of Shandy aforesaid, and all and every the tenths, tythes, glebe-lands.” ——In three words,——“My mother was to lay 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 manifestly 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:—“That in case my mother hereafter should, at any time, put my father to the trouble and expence of a London journey, upon false cries and tokens;——that for every such instance, she should forfeit all the right and title which the covenant gave her to the next turn;——but to no more,—and so on, toties quoties, 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 myself.

But I was begot and born to misfortunes:—for my poor mother, whether it was wind or water—or a compound of both,—or neither;—or whether it was simply the mere swell of imagination and fancy in her;—or how far a strong wish and 32 desire to have it so, might mislead her judgment:—in short, whether she was deceived or deceiving in this matter, it no way becomes me to decide. The fact was this, That in the latter end of September 1717, which was the year before I was born, my mother having carried my father up to town much against the grain,—he peremptorily insisted upon the clause;—so that I was doom’d, by marriage-articles, to have my nose squeez’d 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 disappointments, 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 anybody 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 teaze himself, and indeed my mother too, about the cursed expence, 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 green gages 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.”

For the next two whole stages, no subject would go down, but the heavy blow he had sustain’d from the loss of a son, whom it seems he had fully reckon’d upon in his mind, and register’d down in his pocket-book, as a second staff for his old age, in case Bobby should fail him. The disappointment of this, he said, was ten times more to a wise man, than all the money which the journey, etc., had cost him, put together,—rot the hundred and twenty pounds,——he did not mind it 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 sharpen’d a little by vexation, he would give so many humorous and provoking descriptions,—and place his rib and 33 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 cross’d 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, play’d the duce 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 not, 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 journey 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 father travelled homewards, as I told you, in none of the best of 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; nor was it till the very night in which I was begot, which was thirteen months after, that she had the least intimation of his design: when my father, happening, as you remember, to be a little chagrin’d and out of temper,——took occasion as they lay chatting gravely in bed afterwards, talking over what was to come,——to let her know that she must accommodate herself as well as she could to the bargain made between them in their marriage-deeds; 34 which was to lye-in of her next child in the country, to balance the last year’s journey.

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 e’en resolved to sit down quietly, and make the most of it.

CHAPTER XVIII

As the point was that night agreed, or rather determined, that my mother should lye-in of me in the country, she took her measures accordingly; for which purpose, when she was three days, or thereabouts, gone with child, she began to cast her eyes upon the midwife, whom you have so often heard me mention; and before the week was well got round, as the famous Dr. Manningham was not to be had, she had come to a final determination in her mind,——notwithstanding there was a scientific operator within so near a call as eight miles of us, and who, moreover, had expressly wrote a five shillings book upon the subject of midwifery, in which he had exposed, not only the blunders of the sisterhood itself,——but had likewise superadded many curious improvements for the quicker extraction of the fœtus in cross births, and some other cases of danger, which belay us in getting into the world; notwithstanding all this, my mother, I say, was absolutely determined 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 best 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, somewhat, in my mother’s case, was, that she could not heroine it into so violent and hazardous an extreme, as one in her 35 situation might have wished, because the old widwife 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 slip or accident which could fairly be laid to her account.

These facts, tho’ 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 accumulated sorrow he lay open to, should any evil betide his wife and child in lying-in at Shandy-Hall. ——He knew the world judged by events, and would add to his afflictions in such a misfortune, by loading him with the whole blame of it. ——“Alas, o’day;—had Mrs. Shandy, poor gentlewoman! had but her wish in going up to town just to lye-in 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 them have been alive at this hour.”

This exclamation, my father knew, was unanswerable;—and yet, it was not merely to shelter himself,—nor was it altogether for the 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 the publick 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 his 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 to our civil rights,—though, by the bye,——a current was not the image he took most delight in,—a distemper was here his favourite metaphor, and he would run it down into a perfect allegory, by maintaining it was identically the same in the body national as in the body natural where the blood and spirits were driven up into the head faster than they could find their ways 36 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 politicks 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 from his arm-chair, “I would appoint able judges, at every avenue of my metropolis, who should take cognizance 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, farmer’s sons, &c., &c., at his backside, they should be all sent back, from constable to constable, like vagrants as they were, to the place of their legal settlements.By this means I shall take care, that my metropolis totter’d not thro’ its own weight;—that the head be no longer too big for the body;—that the extremes, now wasted and pinn’d 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 chear 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 French man lives or dies.”

Another political reason which prompted my father so strongly 37 to guard against the least evil accident in my mother’s lying-in 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 domestick 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 said, and more, had gradually been degenerating away into a mix’d government;——the form of which, however desirable in great combinations of the species,——was very troublesome in small ones,—and seldom produced anything, that he saw, but sorrow and confusion.

For all these reasons, private and publick, put together,—my father was for having the man-midwife by all means,—my mother by no means. My father begg’d and intreated she would for once recede from her prerogative in this matter, and suffer him to choose for her;—my mother, on the 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 arguments 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 chagrin 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 Deum. In a word, my mother was to have the old woman,—and the operator was to have licence 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 granted, from an unguarded word or two which 38 I have dropp’d 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, interspersed 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 born 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 intreat 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 expressions this delicious sentiment, which I have the honour to speak of, is dress’d out.

CHAPTER XIX

I would sooner 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,—wise 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 I come to mention it to him, if he is the least of a cholerick 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, 39 he will, at first sight, absolutely condemn as fanciful and extravagant; and that 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 magick bias, which good or bad names, as he called them, irresistibly 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 powers 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 Cæsars and 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 characters and spirits been totally depressed and Nicomedus’d 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 hazard little in stating a case to you,—not as a party 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 farther 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 argumentum ad hominem absolutely requires,—Would you, Sir, if a Jew of a godfather had proposed the name for your child, and offered you his purse along with it, would you have consented to such a desecration of him? ——O my God! he would say, looking up, if I know your temper right, Sir,—you are incapable of it;——you would have trampled 40 upon the offer;—you would have thrown the temptation at the tempter’s head with abhorrence.

Your greatness of mind in this action, which I admire, with that generous contempt of money, which you shew me in the whole transaction, is really noble;—and what renders it more so, is the principle of it;—the workings of a parent’s love upon the truth and conviction of this very hypothesis, namely, That was your son called Judas,—the sordid and treacherous idea, so inseparable from the name, would have accompanied him through life like his shadow, and, in the end, made a miser and a rascal of him, in spite, Sir, of your example.

I never knew a man able to answer this argument.——But, indeed, to speak of my father as he was;—he was certainly irresistible;—both in his orations and disputations;—he was born an orator;—Θεοδίδακτος. —Persuasion hung upon his lips, and the elements of Logick and Rhetorick were so blended up in him,—and, withal, he had so shrewd a guess at the weaknesses and passions of his respondent,——that Nature might have stood up and said,—“This man is eloquent.” —In short, whether he was on the weak or the strong side of the question, ’twas hazardous in either case to attack him. —And yet, ’tis strange, he had never read Cicero, nor Quintilian de Oratore, nor Isocrates, nor Aristotle, nor Longinus amongst the antients;—nor Vossius, nor Skioppius, nor Ramus, nor Farnaby amongst the moderns;—and what is more astonishing, he had never in his whole life the least light or spark of subtilty struck into his mind, by one single lecture upon Crackenthorp or Burgersdicius, or any Dutch logician or commentator;—he knew not so much as in what the difference of an argument ad ignorantiam, and an argument ad hominem consisted; so that I well remember, when he went up along with me to enter my name at Jesus College in ****,—it was a matter of just wonder with my worthy tutor, and two or three fellows of that learned society,—that a man who knew not so much as the names of his tools, should be able to work after that fashion with them.

To work with them in the best manner he could, was what my father was, however, perpetually forced upon;——for he had a thousand little sceptical notions of the comick kind to defend——most of which notions, I verily believe, at first entered upon the footing of mere whims, and of a vive la Bagatelle; and as such he would make merry with them for half an hour or so, and having sharpened his wit upon them, dismiss them till another day.

41

I mention this, not only as matter of hypothesis or conjecture upon the progress and establishment of my father’s many odd opinions,—but as a warning to the learned reader against the indiscreet reception of such guests, who, after a free and undisturbed entrance, for some years, into our brains,—at length claim a kind of settlement there,——working sometimes like yeast;—but more generally after the manner of the gentle passion, beginning in jest,—but ending in downright earnest.

Whether this was the case of the singularity of my father’s notions—or that his judgment, at length, became the dupe of his wit;—or how far, in many of his notions, he might, though odd, be absolutely right;——the reader, as he comes at them, shall decide. All that I maintain here, is, that in this one, of the influence of christian names, however it gained footing, he was serious;—he was all uniformity;—he was systematical, and, like all systematick reasoners, he would move both heaven and earth, and twist and torture everything in nature, to support his hypothesis. In a word, I repeat it over again;—he was serious;—and, in consequence of it, he would lose all kind of patience whenever he saw people, especially of condition, who should have known better,——as careless and as indifferent about the name they imposed upon their child,—or more so, than in the choice of Ponto or Cupid for their puppy-dog.

This, he would say, look’d ill;—and had, moreover, this particular aggravation in it, viz., That when once a vile name was wrongfully or injudiciously given, ’twas not like the case of a man’s character, which, when wrong’d, might hereafter be cleared;——and, possibly, some time or other, if not in the man’s life, at least after his death,—be, somehow or other, set to rights with the world: But the injury of this, he would say, could never be undone;—nay, he doubted even whether an act of parliament could reach it:——He knew as well as you, that the legislature assumed a power over surnames;—but for very strong reasons, which he could give, it had never yet adventured, he would say, to go a step farther.

It was observable, that tho’ my father, in consequence of this opinion, had, as I have told you, the strongest likings and dislikings towards certain names;—that there were still numbers of names which hung so equally in the balance before him, that they were absolutely indifferent to him. Jack, Dick, and Tom were of this class: These my father called neutral names;—affirming of them, without a satire, That there had been as many knaves and fools, at least, as wise and good men, since the 42 world began, who had indifferently borne them;—so that, like equal forces acting against each other in contrary directions, he thought they mutually destroyed each other’s effects; for which reason, he would often declare, He would not give a cherry-stone to choose amongst them. Bob, which was my brother’s name, was another of these neutral kinds of christian names, which operated very little either way; and as my father happen’d to be at Epsom, when it was given him,—he would oft-times thank Heaven it was no worse. Andrew was something like a negative quantity in Algebra with him;—’twas worse, he said, than nothing. —William stood pretty high:——Numps again was low with him:—and Nick, he said, was the Devil

But, of all the names in the universe, he had the most unconquerable aversion for Tristram;—he had the lowest and most contemptible opinion of it of anything in the world,—thinking it could possibly produce nothing in rerum naturâ, but what was extremely mean and pitiful: So that in the midst of a dispute on the subject, in which, by the bye, he was frequently involved,——he would sometimes break off in a sudden and spirited Epiphonema, or rather Erotesis, raised a third, and sometimes a full fifth above the key of the discourse,——and demand it categorically of his antagonist, Whether he would take upon him to say, he had ever remembered,——whether he had ever read,—or even whether he had ever heard tell of a man, called Tristram, performing anything great or worth recording?—No,—he would say,—Tristram!—The thing is impossible.

What could be wanting in my father but to have wrote a book to publish this notion of his to the world? Little boots it to the subtle speculatist to stand single in his opinions,—unless he gives them proper vent:—It was the identical thing which my father did:—for in the year sixteen, which was two years before I was born, he was at the pains of writing an express Dissertation simply upon the word Tristram,—shewing 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 tho’ 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 43 perpetually falling out against him, and in so critical and cruel a way, as if they had purposedly been plann’d and pointed 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 Nincompoop, 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 give 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 thing, 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 miss’d a page. —No, Madam,—you have not miss’d a word. ——Then I was asleep, Sir. —My pride, Madam, cannot allow you that refuge. ——Then, I declare, I know nothing 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 nor 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 affirm, “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.

44

———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 necessary I should be born before I was christen’d.” Had my mother, Madam, been a Papist, that consequence did not follow.1

It is a terrible misfortune for this same book of mine, but more so to the Republick of letters;—so that my own is quite swallowed up in the consideration of it,—that this selfsame vile pruriency for fresh adventures in all things, has got so strongly into our habit and humour,—and so wholly intent are we upon satisfying the impatience of our concupiscence that way,—that nothing but the gross and more carnal parts of a composition will go down:—The subtle hints and sly communications of science fly off, like spirits upwards,——the heavy moral escapes downwards; and both the one and the other are as much lost to the world, as if they were still left in the bottom of the ink-horn.

I wish the male-reader has not pass’d by many a one, as quaint and curious as this one, in which the female-reader has been detected.I wish it may have its effects;—and that all good people, both male and female, from her example, may be taught to think as well as read.

Memoire presenté à Messieurs les Docteurs de Sorbonne2

Un Chirurgien Accoucheur, represente à Messieurs les Docteurs de Sorbonne, qu’il y a des cas, quoique très rares, où une mere ne sçauroit accoucher, & même où l’enfant est tellement renfermé 45 dans le sein de sa mere, qu’il ne fait parôitre aucune partie de son corps, ce qui seroit un cas, suivant les Rituels, de lui conférer, du moins sous condition, le baptême. Le Chirurgien, qui consulte, prétend, par le moyen d’une petite canulle, de pouvoir baptiser immediatement l’enfant, sans faire aucun tort à la mere.——Il demand si ce moyen, qu’il vient de proposer, est permis & légitime, & s’il peut s’en servir dans les cas qu’il vient d’exposer.

REPONSE

Le Conseil estime, que la question proposée souffre de grandes difficultés. Les Théologiens posent d’un côté pour principe, que le baptême, qui est une naissance spirituelle, suppose une premiere naissance; il faut être né dans le monde, pour renaître en Jesus Christ, comme ils l’enseignent. S.Thomas, 3 part, quæst.88, artic.II, suit cette doctrine comme une verité constante; l’on ne peut, dit ce S. Docteur, baptiser les enfans qui sont renfermés dans le sein de leurs meres, & S.Thomas est fondé sur ce, que les enfans ne sont point nés, & ne peuvent être comptés parmi les autres hommes; d’où il conclud, qu’ils ne peuvent être l’objet d’une action extérieure, pour reçevoir par leur ministére, les sacremens nécessaires au salut: Pueri in maternis uteris existentes nondum prodierunt in lucem ut cum aliis hominibus vitam ducant; unde non possunt subjici actioni humanæ, ut per eorum ministerium sacramenta recipiant ad salutem. Les rituels ordonnent dans la pratique ce que les théologiens ont établi sur les mêmes matiéres, & ils deffendent tous d’une maniére uniforme, de baptiser les enfans qui sont renfermés dans le sein de leurs meres, s’ils ne font paroître quelque partie de leurs corps. Le concours des théologiens, & des rituels, qui sont les régles des diocéses, paroit former une autorité qui termine la question presente; cependant le conseil de conscience considerant d’un côté, que le raisonnement des théologiens est uniquement fondé sur une raison de convenance, & que la deffense des rituels suppose que l’on ne peut baptiser immediatement les enfans ainsi renfermés dans le sein de leurs meres, ce qui est contre la supposition presente; & d’un autre côté, considerant que les mêmes théologiens enseignent, que l’on peut risquer les sacremens que Jesus Christ a établis comme des moyens faciles, mais nécessaires pour sanctifier les hommes; & d’ailleurs estimant, que les enfans renfermés dans le sein de leurs meres, pourroient être capables de salut, parcequ’ils sont capables de damnation;—pour ces considerations, & en egard à l’exposé, suivant lequel on 46 assure avoir trouvé un moyen certain de baptiser ces enfans ainsi renfermés, sans faire aucun tort à la mere, le Conseil estime que l’on pourroit se servir du moyen proposé, dans la confiance qu’il a, que Dieu n’a point laissé ces sortes d’enfans sans aucuns secours, & supposant, comme il est exposé, que le moyen dont il s’agit est propre à leur procurer le baptême; cependant comme il s’agiroit, en autorisant la pratique proposée, de changer une regie universellement établie, le Conseil croit que celui qui consulte doit s’addresser à son evêque, & à qui il appartient de juger de l’utilité, & du danger du moyen proposé, & comme, sous le bon plaisir de l’evêque, le Conseil estime qu’il faudroit recourir au Pape, qui a le droit d’expliquer les régles de l’eglise, & d’y déroger dans le cas, ou la loi ne sçauroit obliger, quelque sage & quelque utile que paroisse la maniére de baptiser dont il s’agit, le Conseil ne pourroit l’approuver sans le concours de ces deux autorités. On conseile au moins à celui qui consulte, de s’addresser à son evêque, & de lui faire part de la presente décision, afin que, si le prelat entre dans les raisons sur lesquelles les docteurs soussignés s’appuyent, il puisse être autorisé dans le cas de nécessité, ou il risqueroit trop d’attendre que la permission fût demandée & accordée d’employer le moyen qu’il propose si avantageux au salut de l’enfant. Au reste, le Conseil, en estimant que l’on pourroit s’en servir, croit cependant, que si les enfans dont il s’agit, venoient au monde, contre l’esperance de ceux qui se seroient servis du même moyen, il seroit nécessaire de les baptiser sous condition; & en cela le Conseil se conforme à tous les rituels, qui en autorisant le baptême d’un enfant qui fait paroître quelque partie de son corps, enjoignent néantmoins, & ordonnent de le baptiser sous condition, s’il vient heureusement au monde.

Deliberé en Sorbonne, le 10 Avril, 1733.

A. Le Moyne.
L. De Romigny.
De Marcilly.

Mr. Tristram Shandy’s compliments to Messrs. Le Moyne, De Romigny, and De Marcilly; hopes they all rested well the night after so tiresome a consultation. —He begs to know, whether after the ceremony of marriage, and before that of consummation, the baptizing all the Homunculi at once, slapdash, by injection, would not be a shorter and safer cut still; on condition, as above, That if the Homunculi do well, and come safe into the world after this, that each and every of them shall be baptized again (sous condition)——And provided, in the second 47 place, That the thing can be done, which Mr. Shandy apprehends it may, par le moyen d’une petite canulle, and sans faire aucun tort au pere

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 his 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 first made the observation, “That there was great inconstancy in our air and climate?” Whoever he was, ’twas a just and good observation in him. —But the corollary drawn from it, namely, “That it is this which 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 store-house of original materials, is the true and natural cause that our Comedies are so much better than those of France, or any others that either have, or can be wrote upon the Continent:——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 toward 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 us amends, by giving us somewhat to make 48 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, physiological, polemical, nautical, mathematical, ænigmatical, technical, biographical, romantical, chemical, and obstetrical, with fifty other branches of it, (most of ’em ending as these do, in ical) have for these two last centuries and more, gradually been creeping upwards towards that Ἀκμὴ of their perfections, from which, if we may form a conjecture from the advances of these last seven years, we cannot possibly be far off.

When that happens, it is to be hoped, it will put an end to all kind of 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 æra of my begetting, as well as the mode and manner of it, had been a little alter’d,——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 productions of it, had not there appeared too many strong lines in it of a family-likeness, which shewed 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, oft-times wondered, that my father, tho’ 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 49 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, as set him upon guessing how it could come to pass, that an event of this kind, so many years after it had happened, should be reserved for the interruption 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 with 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 determine 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 cause of dissatisfaction between them, after it began to operate, is what I am able to explain with great exactness, and is as follows:

My uncle Toby Shandy, Madam, was a gentleman, who, with the virtues which usually constitute the character of a man of honour and rectitude,——possessed one in a very eminent degree, which is seldom or never put into the catalogue; and that was a most extreme and unparallel’d modesty of nature;——though I correct the word nature, for this reason, that I may not prejudge a point which must shortly come to a hearing, and that is, Whether this modesty of his was natural or acquir’d. ——Whichever way my uncle Toby came by it, ’twas 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 them,—but to things;——and this kind of modesty so possessed him, and it arose to such a height in him, as almost 50 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 from a stone, broke off 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 effect 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. ——’Tis for an episode hereafter; and every circumstance relating to it, in its proper place, shall be faithfully laid before you:—’Till then, it is not in my power to give farther light into this matter, or say more than what I have said already,——That my uncle Toby was a gentleman of unparallel’d modesty, which happening to be somewhat subtilized and rarified by the constant heat of a little family pride,——they both so wrought together within him, that he could never bear to hear the affair of my aunt Dinah touch’d 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 o’bleeding; and he would often take my father aside, in the greatest concern imaginable, to expostulate and tell him, he 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 any thing in nature, which one brother in reason could have desir’d 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 51 matter of as much consequence to him, as the retrogradation of the planets to Copernicus:—The backslidings of Venus in her orbit fortified the Copernican system, called so after his name; and the backslidings of my aunt Dinah in her orbit, did the same service in establishing my father’s system, which, I trust, will for ever hereafter be called the Shandean System, after this.

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 dare say, Copernicus, would have divulged the affair in either case, or have taken the least notice of 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 magis amica 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’s 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. ——Yes, the life,——my father would say, maintaining his point. How many thousands of ’em are there every year that come 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, in Foro Scientiæ 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 thro’ which his passions got vent, when any thing shocked or surprized him:——but especially when any thing, which he deem’d very absurd, was offered.

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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 Argumentum ad Verecundiam, ex Absurdo, 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 learn’d 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 Fistulatorium, and no other;—and that it rank hereafter with the Argumentum Baculinum and the Argumentum ad Crumenam, and for ever hereafter be treated of in the same chapter.

As for the Argumentum Tripodium, which is never used but by the woman against the man;—and the Argumentum ad Rem, which, contrarywise, 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 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 Decads, at the end of his divine art of meditation, imprinted at London, in the year 1610, 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 executed 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 it rotting in his head.

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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 masterstroke of digressive skill, the merit of which has all along, I fear, been overlooked by my reader,—not for want of penetration in him,—but because ’tis an excellence seldom looked for, or expected indeed, in a digression;—and it is this: That tho’ my digressions are all fair, as you observe,—and that I fly off 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: Notwithstanding 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 touch’d on, 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.

This, 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 elliptick orbit which brings about the year, and constitutes that variety and 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 such trifling hints.

Digressions, incontestably, 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 would 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, 54 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 digressive 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 nonsensically, 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-critick, had taken place,——first, This foolish consequence would certainly have followed,—That the very wisest and very gravest of us all, in one coin or other, must have paid window-money every day of our lives.

And, secondly, That had the said glass been there set up, nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man’s character, but to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a dioptrical beehive, and look’d in,—view’d the soul stark naked;—observed all 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 capricios; and after some notice of her more solemn deportment, consequent upon such frisks, etc.——then taken 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 think, long ago have vitrified the bodies of the inhabitants, (as the efficient cause) to suit them for the 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 shew to the contrary, but one fine transparent body of clear glass (bating the umbilical 55 knot)—so that, till the inhabitants grow old and tolerably wrinkled, whereby the rays of light, in passing through them, become so monstrously refracted,——or return reflected 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 ceremony, or the trifling advantage which the umbilical point gave her,—might, upon all other accounts, I say, as well play the fool out o’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 wrapt up here in a dark covering of uncrystalized 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 Æneas;—but it is as fallacious as the breath of fame;—and, moreover, bespeaks a narrow genius. I am not ignorant that the Italians pretend to a mathematical exactness in 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 instrument in this place;—’tis sufficient we have it amongst us,—but never think of making a drawing by it;—this is ænigmatical, 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, compound one good figure out of them both.

I should have no objection to this method, but that I think it must smell too strong of the lamp,—and be render’d 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, but from the various ways of doing it, which they have borrowed from the 56 honourable devices which the Pentagraphic Brethren3 of the brush have shewn 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 Camera;—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 every 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 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 pitch’d upon.

A man and his Hobby-Horse, tho’ 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 fill’d as full of Hobby-Horsical matter as it can 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 57 you might have travelled from York to Dover,—from Dover to Penzance in Cornwall, and from Penzance to York back again, and not have seen such another upon the road; or if you had seen such a one, whatever haste you had been in, you must infallibly have stopp’d 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 argument 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 with 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 he should return to England, in order, if possible, to be set to rights.

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, suffer’d unspeakable miseries,—owing to a succession of exfoliations from the os pubis, and the outward edge of that part of the coxendix called the os illium,——both which bones were dismally crush’d, as much by the irregularity of the stone, which I told you was broke off the parapet,—as by its size,—(tho’ it was pretty large) which inclined the surgeon 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.

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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 no where be so well nursed and taken care of as in his own house,——he assign’d 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 up stairs 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 thought so, and in their daily calls upon him, from the courtesy arising out of that belief, they would frequently turn the discourse to that subject,—and from that subject the discourse would generally roll on to the siege itself.

These conversations were infinitely kind; and my uncle Toby received great relief from them, and would 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 woman,—but I should blush as an author; inasmuch 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.